On March 17, 1969, a group of 300 African-American women healthcare workers at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston protested unequal pay and unsafe working conditions. Coretta Scott King, the widowed wife of Martin Luther King Jr., was among the protesting women, and this was the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's first major campaign since King's assassination. Several women took control of the hospital president's office while singing hymns and chanting. Most women returned to their jobs once Police Chief John Conroy threatened to arrest the protesters, but twelve women were fired for abandoning their patients. After the firing of the twelve women, many more employees, predominantly women, went on strike. The strike lasted over 100 days, and in late April, National Guard troops with tanks, gas masks, and bayonet-fixed rifles arrive to confront the healthcare workers. The strike ended, without violence, in June with a settlement.