Nation: THE CITY: ECHOES OF MEMPHIS

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S.C.L.C.'s involvement, the character and condition of the strikers, the authorities' reaction to the challenge—all sound macabre echoes of the sanitation strike last year that beckoned Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to his death in Memphis. As if to persist in the grim parallel, the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, King's successor at S.C.L.C., has promised to appear in Charleston this week and hints that the contest, generally nonviolent so far, will grow more intense. "I've been to jail 23 times," he says. "I'm just itching to make it 24." Coretta King, the civil rights leader's widow, acting as honorary chairman of the National Organizing Committee of Hospital and Nursing Home Employees, last week announced her support of the strikers.

Evolution in Customs. The strike started with the dismissal of twelve union members from the state-run 550-bed Medical College Hospital. They claim that they were fired because of their union activities, a charge denied by the hospital administration. Then the strike spread to the 150-bed County Hospital. There have been more than 160 arrests.

A settlement seems distant. The strike leaders cannot even find anyone with whom to bargain. They were advised that legally there was no one in the hospital management empowered to deal with a union; it just has not been done in Charleston. Then Governor Robert E. McNair told union representatives that the state cannot treat with them because their wages by law come under the jurisdiction of the state legislature. Later, when challenged by the union, the hospitals backed off, saying that there was no written statute prohibiting negotiation, merely a long-standing tradition against collective bargaining by state-connected agencies. But, as the strikers have shown, customs do evolve, even in Charleston.