THE CITY: ECHOES OF MEMPHIS

CHARLESTON, S.C., is a city of antebellum mansions with brass knockers, walled gardens and wrought-iron gates. In spring, the stately peninsula city with its long sense of history is a snug, unharried haven for tourists. Charleston's generally docile Negroes and unpugnacious labor unions have blended well into the Old South texture. But this spring the blacks and the unions have both begun to change, and with them, Charleston.

Disturbing the stagnant peace are more than 350 black hospital employees, most of them women, most of them of limited education and skill, who work as nurse's aides, practical nurses, orderlies, kitchen help, janitors and maids. The majority earn between $1.30 and $1.60 an hour. They are striking two hospitals, making the issues not wages and working conditions, but simply union recognition and the right to collective bargaining.

God-Given Rights. Medical College Hospital and Charleston County Hospital have remained open, but the community is cruelly split over the issue. Volunteers, both black and white, are helping to keep the hospitals going. The city's newspapers have editorialized against the strikers, accusing them of "playing the racism theme" and being "the victims of professional agitators"--an allusion to support from the New York-based Local 1199, Drug and Hospital Employees Union. Almost submerged is the far more relevant question of how to cope with stoppages by public employees in institutions affecting the public welfare. To Dr. William McCord, president of Medical College Complex, which includes the hospital, the answer is simple: "It is our intention to resist this union in its attempt to get in here with every legal means at our disposal. Make no mistake about that." McCord, who was brought up in Africa, where his parents were medical missionaries, prefers to deal with employees on an individual basis.

The strikers are equally adamant. Nurse's Aide Mary Moultrie, the strike leader, who was arrested last week during a demonstration and has remained in jail, promises "demonstrations, confrontations and more activity on the picket lines for as long as it takes." Aside from 1199's help, the workers were pleasantly surprised by support from predominantly white South Carolina labor groups, some of which have been traditionally standoffish toward Negro organizations. White clergymen have been active in a citizens' committee raising funds for the workers. Says Father William Joyce of St. Patrick's Roman Catholic Church: "We are promoting the humanitarian, God-given right of people to organize for their own protection and betterment."

S.C.L.C.'s involvement, the character and condition of the strikers, the authorities' reaction to the challenge--all sound macabre echoes of the sanitation strike last year that beckoned Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to his death in Memphis. As if to persist in the grim parallel, the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, King's successor at S.C.L.C., has promised to appear in Charleston this week and hints that the contest, generally nonviolent so far, will grow more intense. "I've been to jail 23 times," he says. "I'm just itching to make it 24." Coretta King, the civil rights leader's widow, acting as honorary chairman of the National Organizing Committee of Hospital and Nursing Home Employees, last week announced her support of the strikers.

Evolution in Customs. The strike started with the dismissal of twelve union members from the state-run 550-bed Medical College Hospital. They claim that they were fired because of their union activities, a charge denied by the hospital administration. Then the strike spread to the 150-bed County Hospital. There have been more than 160 arrests.

A settlement seems distant. The strike leaders cannot even find anyone with whom to bargain. They were advised that legally there was no one in the hospital management empowered to deal with a union; it just has not been done in Charleston. Then Governor Robert E. McNair told union representatives that the state cannot treat with them because their wages by law come under the jurisdiction of the state legislature. Later, when challenged by the union, the hospitals backed off, saying that there was no written statute prohibiting negotiation, merely a long-standing tradition against collective bargaining by state-connected agencies. But, as the strikers have shown, customs do evolve, even in Charleston.

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