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union with SCLC, community. We can't have a white person leading that thing, so Nick is there, but Nick had been there all along, but Nick is there. We consult all the time. I'm doing the PR, so it doesn't matter in that sense. I'm not up front with the workers. You also have in the Charleston situation -- and I find out more about it as time goes on -- you had a situation that had begun originally in Charleston, not as a union, but almost as a black movement by blacks who were black power people, who were working with some of the workers in the Charleston hospital to help build a black power base and decided that maybe it should be a union, and they weren't sure on it.

Bill Saunders, who worked in a mattress factory and was a black power activist and was the person who trained the people in Charleston much before we came, develops a relationship with Elliott, has great respect for Elliott, and is a behind-the-scenes leader of the black nationalist power people in the Charleston strike, a small group of leaders there that he's meeting with. We're meeting with the broad thing, and we're also into an RWDSU thing there, because the RWDSU had an organizer there who was a “eh-eh” kind of guy, but he was there from the tobacco local -- I forget what it was. But it was a largely unorganized thing. There's no union there.

So we're suddenly thrust in the heart of the South, in a city that the civil rights movement has bypassed historically, and we're thrust with the decision whether we ought to take a strike and go into Charleston at a time after we've had the '68 victory and Mrs. King had issued the statement, “I'm prepared to go with you,” and we're going to go to organize nationally in Philadelphia, all over the eastern seaboard. Suddenly out of a clear blue sky, Nick has been down there from time to time, we're suddenly confronted with the strike in Charleston in April of '69. And what are we going to do? There's a big discussion back in New York. What do we do? Should we get involved in this thing?

I don't want to get into that story. Maybe we should and maybe we shouldn't, but I think we should hold off on it.

Okay.

My third question about this period, the period when you've really built the solid foundations of the organization, and it comes a little bit out of what you said about how progressive people looked to 1199 and said, “Is 1199 involved? Then I'll be involved.” I wonder about your relationship to the organized left, or whatever is left of it.

That's an important aspect.