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the night, calling up Davis and saying, “We've got to go visit the picket lines to talk to the workers and strikers,” and he did it.

How come he did it?

I think that there are two reasons for it. Number one, as I may have mentioned to you, the unity of the AFL-CIO, the merger, did not take place on a local level until many years after the '55 merger took place. By the time it came around to the local merger it had just begun to officially take place. About this time, Van Arsdale, on the one hand, I believe, saw that this strike could be a very important vehicle for unifying the AFL and the CIO unions around a common issue; and secondly, he was genuinely moved -- and a strong supporter of organizing poor people. I frankly think that he was also affected by what he saw, not only the conditions of the workers, but the arrogance of the management.

See, Brooklyn Jewish, for example -- I forget the name of the guy -- one of the heads of the board of trustees of Brooklyn Jewish, Abraham Levitan, was the head of Levitan Electrical Supplies, which was a Local 3 outfit. He tried to deal with him on that basis. Arthur Osman -- no, this was later at Beth'El at the time, and Congressman Emmanuel Celler was involved in it. That's a different thing; that's 62, a different story.

But we were going to political people, we were going to all the contacts to try to make them move, and we would check with different people whom we knew could influence them. In addition to the picket line, this was a perfect example of the way we worked on different levels. The base had to be the picket line, the workers, but, in addition to that, you had to work on every other level.

Here in '59, this is two years before the sit-ins in the south, we had already adopted a strategy of the civil rights movement, that this is a fight for union and human rights; that was the King statement. The hospital struggle was a struggle for union and human rights, it's against degradation, it's against poverty and misery, it's against drug addiction, it's against crime, it's against all the evils that afflict poor black people in the society, and to make that common link. That was a statement that we used over and over again from Dr. King. In that sense, it was historic. In another way, the press played a role.

I remember the Times' reporters would change. Of course, they would work six days. I remember Homer Bigart, who was one of the Times' Pulitzer Prize winners for foreign affairs reporting, a really brilliant reporter, he would usually be on weekends. Because, he liked to work