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I don't think you told me exactly when the strike began.

The strike started some time in March. It went through the whole summer. I don't think it ended until August.

It was 113 days. It's almost four months, right?

Then it would have to be. Yes. That night, Jack Bass took me back to the hotel to meet with a reporter from Charleston and I met with a guy named Ron Storrow, who then did a wonderful feature for the Washington Star on the strike, on what was going on. Then there was a bomb scare. Gene Eisner, the attorney, called me that the plane with the union people had to be held up because there was a bomb scare on the plane. By the way, there was a fire bombing of Nicholas' hotel room in Charleston. This was another thing. Behind the scenes, there was a lot of things going on like that.

When I got the report from Gene Eisner, he called me, and the press was still around. There was a press room. I went there and they were all drinking, and I remember they all said to me, “You're going to die in Charleston, all of you. You're never going to get out of there alive. You're going to crawl out. McNair's never going to move. He's too tough. They're rednecks.” They were afraid that things were going to get out of control, that it was a losing battle.

Carl Farris was the guy who was in charge of labor for the SCLC. He also, for a while, in the more recent period, worked with ACTU on the Stevens campaign.

This is another interesting story. After Coretta's second speech, when she spoke at the outdoor stadium, like many, many thousands of people, the SCLC had its regular board meeting scheduled and it was to take place in Charleston. Stanley said he was going to go down for it, and Davis said that he was going to come down for it, and I said, “Well, I'll be there.”

I had worked on a special issue of the 1199 News, it was a regular issue of the magazine, but I decided with Stanley Glaubach that we would devote most of the magazine to the Charleston strike. We put together a lot of photographs, very good photographs. The cover was in big type: “1199-B is Sere to Stay,” and it had two black women workers with 1199 hats, applauding, and looking straight up. Very nice cover. Inside were like sections, two-page spreads. I had gotten together and released a statement, the first time the civil rights leaders got together on an issue since the March on Washington. It had Whitney Young, it had all the top civil rights leaders agreeing to a