Danny Glover Electrifies Caregivers’ Heart of Baltimore Rally
Dodging thunderstorms to get to Baltimore, actor Danny Glover arrived at the climax of the June 24th Rally for Better Care and Better Jobs and electrified the crowd with an impassioned speech about the Heart of Baltimore campaign.
More than 800 healthcare workers and supporters rallied in Mount Vernon Square Park to hear Glover, Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, 1199SEIU President George Gresham and rank-and-file healthcare workers talk about the need to win free and fair union elections for every healthcare worker.
Glover spoke about the injustice of caregivers struggling to get by on poverty pay, and he told the inspirational story of his own parents, postal workers who won a better life by joining the union.
The rally garnered intense media attention. TV coverage started out at 5:30 a.m. with WMAR’s live interview of 1199SEIU member Tara Johnson, a housekeeper at Rock Glen Nursing Home; and the Baltimore Sun wrote a powerful story the next day.
The rally kicked off with a concert by R&B singer Meli’sa Morgan and the GQ Band that fired up the crowd. Then co-MCs John Reid, 1199SEIU Executive Vice President for Maryland/DC, and Fran Fields, a cyto-technologist at the University of Maryland Medical Center started the rally in earnest.
Crystal Delamar, a respiratory therapist, and Tai Watts, a patient care tech, both from University Specialty Hospital, spoke passionately about the need to take better care of healthcare workers so that they can give the best possible care to their patients.
A powerful moment in the program came when two founding members of 1199 in Baltimore, Annie Henry and Joyce Dukes, took the stage. Henry, an instrument processor at Johns Hopkins Hospital, told how the union was born out of the civil rights struggle and drew strength from Coretta Scott King.
Dukes, a sterile processing tech at Maryland General Hospital, spoke about the change they made in 1969 when they founded the union—and about the change that healthcare workers are making now in the Heart of Baltimore campaign.
The GQ Band closed out the rally by playing “A Change Is Gonna Come.” Baltimore carefives in attendance took the title of that song to heart.