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Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights
Organizing Memphis Workers
Michael K. Honey
Paper978-0-252-06305-3
$23.00
| Pub Date: | 1993 |
| Pages: | 400 pages |
Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights chronicles the rarely studied southern industrial union movement from the Great Depression to the cold war, using the strategically located river city of Memphis as a case study. Michael Honey analyzes the economic basis of segregation and the denial of fundamental human rights and civil liberties it entailed.
Frequently telling his story through personal portraits of those directly involved, Honey documents the dramatic labor battles and sometimes heroic activities of organizers and ordinary workers that helped to set the stage for segregation's demise. His study of interracial industrial union organizing locates some of the roots of the 1960s civil rights struggles in this earlier era. Honey provides a new context for understanding Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 1968 campaign in support of poor people and black labor organizing in Memphis.
This detailed account provides a fresh perspective on African-American, labor, civil rights, and southern history. It clarifies the relationship between labor and civil rights struggles, deepens our understanding of the role of racism in blocking working-class advancement, and emphasizes the importance of southern interracial organizing to the history of social movements in the United States. Michael Honey chronicles the southern industrial union movement from the Great Depression to the Cold War, using the strategically located river city of Memphis as a case study, and frequently telling his story through personal portraits of those directly involved. He locates some of the roots of the1960s civil rights struggles in this earlier era, and provides a new context for understanding Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1968 campaign in support of poor people and black labor organizing in Memphis.
"Packs the emotive power of a zillion 'race' memoirs precisely because it is the story of what happened when black and white workers collectively challenged the powers-that-be in the meanest city in the South."--Robin D. G. Kelley, The Nation
"A vitally important contribution to the scholarly debate about the relationship between class and race in American history."--Bruce Nelson, Journal of American History
"A major contribution to the history of labor, race relations, and the twentieth-century South. . . .Honey vividly brings the labor movement to life and places Memphis in the wider context of southern and national history."--Pete Daniel, author of The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901-1969
"A major new study of how the Solid South restrained social reform and labor's strength in New Deal America."--David Montgomery, author of The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925
Michael K. Honey is the Fred T. and Dorothy G. Haley Professor of the Humanities at the University of Washington Tacoma. He is the author, most recently, of Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign. He is also the award-winning author of Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle.
Awards:
Winner of the Charles S. Sydnor Award, given by the Southern Historical Association, 1994. Winner of the James A. Rawley Prize given by the Organization of American Historians, 1994. Winner of the Herbert G. Gutman Award for an outstanding book in American social history.
Series:
The Working Class in American History
Subjects:
Southern History & Culture / History, Am.: 20th C. / Black Studies / Labor Studies / History, State & Local / Radical Studies
