National Nurses United

t was a summer evening in 1965 when 13-year-old Orsburn Stone saw the men in the familiar white sheets gather on the front lawn of his family's home in South Carolina. As the Ku Klux Klan members lit and burned a cross, Stone, furious, grabbed a shotgun and ran towards the front door. He wanted to do something, anything, to stop them. "My mother and grandmother grabbed me around the legs and said please, don't go out there," Stone, now 58 and a registered nurse, calmly recalls. "They probably saved my life that night." Instead, Stone went to the back door and fired a few shots in the air. The men left, he says… and never came back. The trials of the segregation-era South may seem like a long way from the corridors of MountainView Hospital in Las Vegas, Nevada, where Stone works as a criticalcare nurse. But Stone says experiences like that night prepared him to withstand the pressure of a contentious, year-and-a-half-long organizing campaign that led to the first unionization victory for the newly-formed National Nurses United in January. And Stone's colleagues say his quiet determination, coupled with kindness and respect for those around him—even when he disagreed with them—helped give nurses the moral high ground in the campaign. "Stone was relentless; he didn't let anything get in the way of what he knew was right," says Julia Gomez, a pre-operative nurse at MountainView, where Stone is known by his last name. "When he believes in something, he puts everything in." Tall and immaculately dressed, Stone is a familiar figure in the hospital, where he currently serves on the team negotiating MountainView RNs' first contract. He has worn many hats throughout his life, from military officer to Catholic deacon. Through it all, he says, he has been guided by the simple lessons his mother and grandmother passed down to him: "There's no one greater than you and no one worse than you. We're all human beings. And, make sure you get yourself an education, because once you do, no one can take that away from you." That sense of dignity got the teenage Stone in trouble that summer of 1965. He had worked odd jobs for a local white man by the name of Peebles, who always treated him fairly. But then Mr. Peebles referred Stone to a friend of his who ran the county fair and the local general store, and wasn't as goodnatured. "He rode me like a workhorse and degraded me," with racial slurs, Stone says. "By the end of the first day, I had had enough. I said 'Mr. Nash, I apologize because I know Mr. Peebles went to great lengths to get me this job. But I am quitting effective immediately. Whatever money you have set aside to pay me for today, you can keep it.' " It was that night that Stone's family received their visit from the men in white. Soon after, while still in junior high school, Stone marched in a civil rights protest called by Martin Luther King, Jr. He later joined the United States Air Force, working his way up to captain and attending nursing school in his off-duty time. He earned both a bachelor's of science in nursing and a master's degree in management, then left military service for nursing in 1991. At MountainView, he quickly became known as a source of support for his stressed-out coworkers. "We all have big workloads but yet he'll listen to somebody's problem with their patient and make a suggestion, when he's just as busy as we all are," says Jacque Weise, RN, who works with Stone in the hospital's float pool. Recently, one of Weise's patients, a large man, was having trouble breathing and kept trying to get out of bed. Stone came into the room and "just his presence seemed to help," she says. Even the toughest of obstacles couldn't keep Orsburn Stone, RN from standing up for nurses' rights at his Nevada hospital. He'd seen much worse. By Felicia Mello Rock Solid 20 N AT I O N A L N U R S E W W W. N A T I O N A L N U R S E S U N I T E D . O R G APRIL 2010

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