Still from Madeline Anderson's 1970 documentary I AM SOMEBODY.
Friday, February 9, 2018 -
In March 1969, 400 nurse’s aides, housekeepers, and cooks at the South Carolina Medical College Hospital went on strike. Almost all of them were black. Almost all of them were female.
For the next 100 days, these women marched through the streets of Charleston, South Carolina, singing civil rights songs, holding nighttime protests, and decrying the low wages, heavy workload, and vicious racial discrimination that had driven them from their workplace.
Before they went on strike, many of these women made as little as $1.30 an hour. The nurses called them “monkey grunts.”