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of the black caucus of the leaders of 1199, the district leaders -- including Doris, Baltimore, Jersey, etcetera -- met on this thing, and they unanimously selected Nicholas before the union met on it.

Did Davis have influence and sway with the black caucus, for instance, in leading them to endorse his ideas about Nichols, or did it come up independently?

Well, Davis was for it but it was an independent thing, because it was generally agreed that -- see Nicholas had been doing organizing around the country -- and that Nicholas was familiar with that and had been a protege of Godoff, and that Doris would be the replacement in New York. Later when the problems arose, Doris was saying, “Listen, Davis was president of both. I want to be president of both.” Raising things that she knew would not go through, objections. But I think fundamentally it was the big fish in the small pond. She envisioned the possibility, that were very great, that the merger would be successful in terms of organizing, and that this big entity would get bigger, and that organizing in New York was limited. Most of New York was organized, see. As a matter of fact the homecare thing was something that Davis pushed originally. Davis was pushing Doris and Telbert King and everybody to organize homecare workers, with great opposition. Not opposition, but sitting on their hands. Later they said that “We are the only ones who organized” -- they didn't want to organize homecare workers.

So that's the way, in a nutshell, things were developing. Then there was the bombing.

Did Doris, do you think, have any legitimate basis for objecting to the merger?

I don't think so. If you ask David White, David White still insists that Doris was right. David White saw it as an attempt, that the blacks would play a smaller role in the union because the union would become so big around the country. There is a certain logic to it, in the sense that if you organize hospital workers around the country, most workers in America are not black. That is a given. If you're going to stay on the east coast, where the hospital workers are primarily black in the urban areas, you're going to have that kind of union. But if you're going to make real breakthroughs -- if you're going to organize nurses -- you're going to have to organize whites and blacks. Therefore you have to have an approach that way.

David holds to these views?