Maryland Freedom Union.

On February 9 1966, some twenty black, women, working as nurses' aides, housekeepers, and kitchen staff, walked off their jobs at Lincoln Nursing Home in Baltimore Maryland. They called the field secretaries from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) with whom they had met the previous week, and told them that Lincoln was "on strike," that the workers had named their union "Maryland Freedom Local No. 1," and that the CORE  organizers had better come down to Lincoln Nursing Home immediately to show the workers how to "run a proper picket line."The workers, who made as little as twenty-five cents an hour and worked up to seventy-two hours a week, became the nucleus of what they called a "new kind of union," the Maryland Freedom Union (MFU) The concept of a "freedom union" of poverty-wage workers had been advanced by CORE staff frustrated with failed efforts to assist black workers in struggles for union rights and benefits. Convinced that the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) unions were not interested in organizations (AFL-CIO) unions were not interested in organizing such workers, and exilarated by the success of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's (SNCC) 1965 Mississippi Freedom Labor Union project, CORE selected Baltimore as the site of its own freedom union experiment.Black women workers at two others nursing homes soon joined the Lincoln Nursing Home strikers.Meeting jointly, they elected Vivian Jones, a nurse' aide at Bolton Hill Nursing Home, as MFU president,and Ola Mae Johnson, an aide at Lincoln, as secretary.The union members,with no prior public speaking experience,spoke to church groups, students meetings, and outdoor rallies to explain the strike and to appeal for funds.Together with CORE members and supporters from local churches and schools, they picketed the suburban homes of nursing home owners and marched on city hall.By march 1966,they created a union study group on black and labor history,reading of black struggles, American Civilization on Trial (1963),and inviting its author, political philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya's to lecture at MFU's Freedom House. Raya suggestion that the workers view themselves as "self developing thinkers" made an impact.After completing a covert study of retail stores along the mall shopping streets of the Wesst and East Baltimore ghettos, the MFU opened an organizing drive among retail workers there. For the campaign, MFU President Vivian Jones designed a large button showing two black hands breaking a chain and the union slogan," Breaking Free at Last."Thousands of the buttons,distributed in the black community,helped garner support for and MFU plan that any store theypicketed was to be boycotted by black shoppers.The boycottss roved effective,and MFU strikers succeeded in winning union contracts at three of the largest of the largest retail chain stores in the ghettos by August 1966.The campaigns aroused opposition from both merchants' associations and AFL-CIO unions.The unions accused the MFU of organizing in direct competion with them. Walter Reuther, then head of the AFL-CIO'S Industrial Union Department, complained to Floyd Mckissick, national director of CORE about CORE becoming a union.Floyd,citing CORE's deep financial crisis, soon severed formal ties with the MFU.Later MFU campigns included food stores, hospitals, and a print shop, but its momentum slowed under the impact of tight finances and the ideological crises afflicting civil rights organizations in the 1960s. The inner-city stores and nursing homes organized by the MFU closed in the early 1970s, victims of economic decline or neighborhood gentriflication.