O. Jennifer Dixon-McKnight, "We Paved the Way: Black Women and the Charleston Hospital Workers' Campaign" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)

Jan 20, 2026

O. Jennifer Dixon-McKnight, an associate professor at Winthrop University, delves into the powerful activism of Black women during the Charleston hospital workers' campaign of 1969. She reveals how a wrongful termination sparked a significant strike, linking it to earlier labor actions in Charleston. Dixon-McKnight highlights influential figures like Mary Moultrie, and emphasizes the importance of oral histories in understanding these struggles. She challenges listeners to recognize the broader implications of working-class Black women's fight for dignity and equality.

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INSIGHT

Oral History Reframes The Story

The 1969 Charleston hospital strike surfaced because archival accounts omitted the women's lived experiences.
O. Jennifer Dixon-McKnight used oral history to center Black working-class women's perspectives and fill that gap.

ANECDOTE

Local Mentors Bridged Two Strikes

Lily Doster and Isaiah Bennett linked the 1945 cigar-factory strike to the 1969 hospital campaign by mentoring organizers.
Bennett even worked as a full-time organizer lent by Local 15A to support Local 1199's efforts in Charleston.

ANECDOTE

A Single Firing Sparked a Movement

Five Black women were terminated in 1967 after refusing to work without patient reports, triggering broader outrage.
Mary Moultrie learned of the firing and mobilized community leaders to demand their jobs and systemic change.

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In the spring of 1969, hundreds of workers, all Black and mostly female, went on strike at Medical College Hospital and Charleston County Hospital to protest racial discrimination, low wages, and the marginalization of their dignity. The movement began with an incident of wrongful termination in 1967 involving five Black women at Medical College Hospital that uncovered the pervasiveness of racial and economic discrimination at both hospitals. The termination sparked outrage among other hospital workers who, with support from local community leaders, organized a movement that galvanized the city, state, and nation.

We Paved the Way: Black Women and the Charleston Hospital Workers' Campaign (UP of Mississippi, 2025) explores this campaign in the context of a broader protest tradition, revealing it to be a full-scale movement that demonstrates the power and complexity of Black women's activism in the mid-twentieth century. O. Jennifer Dixon-McKnight argues that the experiences of the women at the center of this conflict offer a window into the plight of Southern Black working-class women and the ways in which they fought for equality, access, and well-being.

Though much of what has been written about the hospital workers' campaign focuses on the strike through an institutional lens, Dixon-McKnight uses extensive interviews and oral history to expand the scope of existing scholarship. Local leaders such as Septima Clark, Esau Jenkins, William Saunders, and Isaiah Bennett served as bridge builders for the Black community's involvement in protest, which helped shape and nurture the hospital workers' campaign. By discussing the grassroots organizing that sparked the strike and tracing the aftermath of the conflict, including what workers experienced in their return to work and their relationships with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Local 1199 Hospital and Nursing Home Employees Union, this volume situates the hospital workers' movement as a critical moment in the nation's long civil rights history.

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