Eunice Barnacle

Born in Richmond, Virginia, into a deeply troubled family, Eunice Barnacle is “a lean, sharp-featured black woman in her middle twenties, with a straight nose, small teeth, wary eyes, and a straightforward manner.” A recent addition to the staff at the Booth-Tiessler Geriatric Center, she is responsible for the daily care of Mary McDonald, whom she questions intermittently about the history of the nurses’ union that Mary helped establish in the mid-1960s. One reason Eunice moved to New York, with her three-year-old daughter Coretta in tow, is to be nearer her mother, who is serving a life term for murder in Sing Sing Prison, located in nearby Ossining, New York.

Warren Booth

Chairman of the board of the Booth-Tiessler Community Hospital during the 1967 nurses’ strike, Warren Booth stands for the complexities of the politics and the civic spirit of Booth’s...