Spring in the South Carolina Lowcountry is always the most beautiful time of the year, and the sea islands off the shore of Charleston are some of the best places to enjoy the season. This was Mary Moultrie’s home – it had been her family’s home for generations -- and in the spring of 1969 she, along with the landscape she loved, bloomed.   Mary, who was 26, had recently returned to South Carolina from New York City, where she had gone to school to become a Licensed Practical Nurse.  But South Carolina didn’t recognize her new credentials, and so she had had to take an unskilled job as a nurses’ aide, reporting to white nurses and doing the chores white nurses didn’t want to do.

Mary caught a ride for the 10-mile trip to her job at the Medical College of South Carolina Hospital five or six days a week.  She didn’t have a car.  Her family didn’t have a car.  Few people on the island had cars.  She wished there was bus service to Charleston from her island home -- hell she‘d gladly ride in the back as long as it was reliable and got her to Medical on time – but there wasn’t.  So Mary, along with two other nurses’ aides got a ride from her cousin, Willie, who worked in the hospital kitchen. The three women pitched in and paid for the gas, which was 38 cents a gallon, but Willie had to take care of all the repairs on his own. Sometimes the car liked to overheat. They would pull over and add water, or maybe Prestone, and wait a bit. On those days, everyone would be late for work.  Although Mary and her friends were grown women, the nurse supervisors treated them like naughty children, especially when they showed up late.

The attitude of the nurses was something that riled Mary, but she didn’t speak up about it because they would just as soon see her fired as not. Nurses’ aides were easily replaceable, and there’d be some other colored woman to step in and take her job in a skinny minute. Some hotel maid, or even one of her coworker’s daughters could be performing the menial chores the next morning after Mary or any of her friends got booted out, and they knew it. Besides, the job paid $1.30 an hour, which was considered good for a colored woman; the pay was more than most of the other island folks made. For Mary, it was a disappointing step backward: moving back with mom and dad after living independently in New York; taking a job that required so much less than what she was trained to do.  Still, life was good after the workday was over.  

The little house Mary lived in with her family was the same house her family had occupied for more than 70 years. They didn’t have a deed, but no deed meant no taxes, and that was okay with them. As long as she could remember, her family had lived off the land.  There was shrimping and fishing, a vegetable garden most months of the year, and home canned food that kept them going through the short winters. The men in her family did day work, picking tomatoes in the summer, painting, and repairing white folks' houses all year round.  But her dad had just gotten a job at the port and had joined the union.  He was now making more money than anyone ever had in her family.