Danny Glover Electrifies Heart of Baltimore Rally

Friday

Jun252010

Dodging thunderstorms to get here, Danny Glover arrived at the climax of Thursday’s 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 healthcare workers themselves 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 kicked off at 5:30 in the morning 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 about the rally in Friday’s paper.

The rally kicked off at 3:30 p.m. with a concert by R&B singer Meli’sa Morgan and the GQ Band that fired up the crowd, and then co-MCs John Reid, the 1199SEIU executive vice president for Maryland and DC and Fran Fields, a cyto-technologist at the University of Maryland Medical Center got the rally started in earnest a little after 4:30.

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.

One of the most powerful moments 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, gave a fiery speech 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.

Not long after Henry and Dukes spoke, the GQ Band came back and played one final song, “A Change Is Gonna Come.” Anyone who attended the rally left knowing that healthcare workers are bringing change to Baltimore.

TV Coverage

TV coverage from The Heart of Baltimore Rally with Danny Glover on June 24th, 2010.