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know; people were falling behind on their bills. There were a lot of people in the hospitals who were on relief, who were getting supplemental assistance while they were working. So we had all of these problems. Through it all, we survived. The hospitals did not expect us to survive; they did not expect that we could hold out anywhere near that long. We survived for forty-six days.

Now I'm trying to think of some of the things that happened that would highlight the incidents. There were numerous picket line brawls with the cops, there were arrests by the dozens, and the scores, and the hundreds. I remember at Flower- Fifth Avenue Hospital there was a graduation of their medical school and we decided that we were going to join the graduation, and the strikers joined the line of graduates and tailed on the end. So that was good media coverage. Throughout we were emphasizing the line that we were involuntary philanthropists of the voluntary hospital, that the hospitals exist and are providing care on the backs of the workers least able to afford it, that it's easier to be on welfare than to work, that the workers are on supplementary relief, that they're black, they're Hispanic, etc., etc. And we appealed to the black and Hispanic organizations.

At this time I remember I went to Bayard Rustin, and Bayard agreed with A. Philip Randolph and A.J. Muste that Bayard should be assigned to work with us on the strike. Bayard brought with him people like Tom Kahn and Rochelle Horowitz and other young people, but Bayard was important because Bayard knew the black community. We did not. He knew the churches, he would help us in setting up citizens' committees. We had a Committee for Justice for the Hospital Workers that was headed by Randolph and Joseph Monserrat. Joseph was the leading Puerto Rican figure. We did get a lot of support from prominent leaders and there were a number of public meetings called to rally support for the strikers. There were constant meetings with strikers, very often at Manhattan Center on 34th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenue. It had been and was a very important meeting place. The major meeting place downstairs could hold 3,000 people and the upstairs meeting place 1,500 to 2,000. It was one of the large places that you could have access to for a relatively modest fee at that time. We also used the Hotel Diplomat. But the hospitals just wouldn't move on it no matter what we did, and we kept the pressure building, building, building. The hospitals had decided that they were going to stick this out forever and to go through court actions, etc., etc., to do that kind of things. Van Arsdale had originally said, “I cannot support a strike in the hospital,” was there out front leading the strike in the hospitals, always in person, in the middle of