On Friday evening, November 22, 1983, Mary Moultrie, former president of Local 1199B of the Drug, Hospital, and Health Care Employees Union, said the hospital strike she led was unsuccessful. As a panelist at the South Carolina Voices of the Civil Rights Movement Conference, Moultrie recounted that the 1969 strike at Medical College Hospital and Charleston County Hospital centered around over four hundred Black workers. The vast majority were Black women. Three years after the strike, Local 1199B became defunct and never achieved formal union recognition from either hospital.

 

Others shared Moultrie’s sentiment on the strike’s long-term inefficacy.

 

A March 1971 case study in Southern Hospitals cited the strike as an “unnecessary” disturbance that hindered patients from receiving quality care. They referred to the strike as a “war” the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and other “civil-rightist” figures needed to maintain cache after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination.

 

Comments from Walter Earl Douglas, a Black conservative journalist hailed as “The Earl of Charleston,” were even more damning. “We [Black Charlestonians] let outsiders come in and put our Mothers, and Sisters and Daughters in a Trick.” He continues, “Yes…the Charleston Hospital Strike was a failure... because we are a failure.”

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Through a history of Black women-led labor movements in Charleston, South Carolina, this exhibit troubles the above assessments of the Charleston Hospital Strike as a “failed” strike. This exhibit highlights how the city’s Black working-class women pull from unique Christian and Africana religious traditions and ethical codes of respect and womanhood to pursue a constant dream: the right to work on their terms. This history of Black women’s labor ethics in Charleston begins with the 1933 Bagging Mill Strike and concludes with the immediate aftermath of the 1969 Charleston Hospital Strike.

 

Too often, histories of Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement make Black clergymen (such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy, and Malcolm X) the central heroes. Even when women are mentioned (such as Coretta Scott King, Rosa Parks, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Dianne Nash), they are positioned as tangential followers of male leaders. Such histories undermine the contribution of everyday Black people, especially women, in pursuing equitable treatment and pay. These accounts also suggest that ordinary people did not have their own theological or ethical understandings of their strivings toward social and economic equality. The Black women in this exhibit were poor, did not hold college degrees, faced disrespect from White employers, used physical force (when they found it necessary), and thought about their work as an economic and spiritual enterprise.

 

This exhibit begins with a 10-day strike in 1933 and concludes with the 1969 Charleston Hospital Strike, a 113-day demonstration imbued with spiritual and ethical meaning to Black working-class women in 1969. There are consequences to how one presents historical accounts, and, in contrast to narratives that marginalize Black women as religious, political, and economic actors, this exhibit offers a lineage of Charleston’s Black working-class women as spiritual (and ethical) strikers.