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Moe FonerMoe Foner
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Session:         Page of 592

would love to have it published, and I got to some newspaper. It was some kind of weekly or monthly paper that put it out, so that we could have it, to distribute large quantities of copies.

One of the problems with Ralph was that since Ralph was the front person and Ralph would put his body on the line, Ralph spent a lot of time in jail. Davis would come down from time to time. Davis went to jail. He was in jail for ten days, with Ralph at the same time. Ralph would go in and out and stay on and that kind of thing. Everything was beginning to move in that direction of motion.

In Charleston, it was obviously a big deal. Nobody had ever seen anything like this in Charleston. Charleston was a city where the civil rights movement had bypassed, so there had never been a movement in Charleston. The thing was going well, but we sensed that there would be no movement on the part of the other side, because it was becoming the kind of confrontation thing. The governor moved in, the National Guard declared a curfew. The courts moved in, picketing injunctions, and you couldn't picket large distances away. The hospital hired Knox Haynesworth to represent them. Haynesworth was the attorney for J.B. Stevens. There was a strong feeling in among them that if we would make a breakthrough, it would mean a breakthrough by the labor movement in the South, and, therefore, it was something that was more important than just the strike of the hospital workers. The other complication was the fact that we were striking--

[BEGIN TAPE 12, SIDE 2]

Q:

You said you were striking with the state hospital.

Foner:

We were striking the state hospital. The smaller hospital that joined the strike was a county hospital, not a state hospital. The public employment law forbids unions in state employment, so that when you looked at the problem, you could see how much of a problem it was, that you could never really get bargaining rights without changing the law, and we knew that we couldn't get that. It was a sort of reverse twist of what we'd had in the past. There were a lot of parallels. People were making $1.30 an hour, so they were making the equivalent of what our members in New York had been making in '59, ten years earlier. In other words, we were a reprise, ten years later, Charleston is the same as New York.

The members in New York were fully aware of what was happening. We would report back to the members in New York, and we'd have collections. Members would give weekly contributions that totaled up into large amounts. Not huge amounts, but it was a substantial





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