We Paved the Way Black Women and the Charleston Hospital Workers' Campaign

"We Paved the Way is original, well researched, and clearly written. The volume has many strengths: an analysis of Gullah culture, a review of an earlier Charleston strike at a cigar manufacturing plant, the riveting story of female health care workers earning $1.30 per hour, intransigent officials like McNair and Medical College president Dr. William McCord, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's presence in the strike, the role played in 1969 by President Richard Nixon's Secretary of Labor George Schulz, and the plight of hospital employees 'emboldened by a greater sense of dignity, power, and purpose." - Joseph Edward Lee, professor of history at Winthrop University

"We Paved the Way makes a significant contribution to scholarship on women's activism and labor and civil rights history by narrating the events of a campaign that has received little attention yet was an important moment in the winding down of the 'classical phase' of the civil rights movement. Dixon-McKnight's focus on local Black women's initiation of and relationship to the movement that developed is especially valuable." - Jennifer L. Ritterhouse, professor of history at George Mason University