Honey, Michael Keith : University of Washington-Tacoma

Michael Keith Honey is Harry Bridges Chair of Labor Studies and Professor of African-American, Ethnic and Labor Studies, and American History at the University of Washington,Tacoma. He is the author of the prize-winning Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (1993).

"[An] eloquent history. . . Honey serves as a symphony conductor, skillfully blending the voices of black rubber workers, garbage men, domestics and other laborers into a powerful choir singing a song of freedom."--Dallas Morning News
"The interviews contained in this volume shine a harsh light on the nuts-and-bolts scaffolding of American workplace apartheid. Eyewitness testimony reveals not only the political economy that undergirded racial segregation on the job, but also the wide range of tactics on the part of African-American labor organizers who resisted it. . . . By linking economic well-being to citizenship, the workers interviewed in this volume give voice to the enduring ideal of a living wage as a right, not as a privilege. That ideal isn't history, but perhaps it's just way ahead of its time."

--American Prospect

"It's a gifted storyteller who can capture a reader's heart and mind with fiction. It's an even greater storyteller who can capture a reader's heart and mind with nonfiction, especially when they allow the voice of others to carry the tale. Michael Keith Honey has done that brilliantly with his latest book."

--Tacoma News-Tribune

"Black workers fighting for unions and for equal rights have not usually been identified as part of the Civil Rights movement; but anyone who reads [this] book will appreciate that they are. Poignant reading, Honey's interviews reflect his clear sympathy and admiration for his subjects and their achievements. No one can read these stories without sharing Honey's feelings."

--Gerald Friedman, Journal of Economic History

"By illuminating a crucial, yet insufficiently studied, aspect of the modern African American freedom struggle, Honey's probing interview remind us of the often painful sacrifices and surpassing achievements of black industrial workers as they transformed their workplaces and their lives."

--Clayborne Carson, editor of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Black Workers Remember dramatize[s] the toll exacted by segregation and the struggle for rights and recognition. And with quiet dignity, the storytellers help set the record straight because their tales are often at odds with the history that has been written."

--David Rouse, Booklist

"Honey's subjects tell their stories with remarkable eloquence. But Honey is much more than a medium through whom others speak; his is also an active and eloquent voice in this work."

--Bruce Nelson, Mississippi Quarterly

University of California Press Publisher Web Site, July, 2002.

The labor of black workers has been crucial to economic development in the United States. Yet because of racism and segregation, their contribution remains largely unknown. Spanning the 1930s to the present, Black Workers Remember tells the hidden history of African American workers in their own words. It provides striking firsthand accounts of the experiences of black southerners living under segregation in Memphis, Tennessee. Eloquent and personal, these oral histories comprise a unique primary source and provide a new way of understanding the black labor experience during the industrial era. Together, the stories demonstrate how black workers resisted racial apartheid in American industry and underscore the active role of black working people in history.

The individual stories are arranged thematically in chapters on labor organizing, Jim Crow in the workplace, police brutality, white union racism, and civil rights struggles. Taken together, the stories ask us to rethink the conventional understanding of the civil rights movement as one led by young people and preachers in the 1950s and 1960s. Instead, we see the freedom struggle as the product of generations of people, including workers who organized unions, resisted Jim Crow at work, and built up their families, churches, and communities. The collection also reveals the devastating impact that a globalizing capitalist economy has had on black communities and the importance of organizing the labor movement as an antidote to poverty.QQ Michael Honey gathered these oral histories for more than fifteen years. He weaves them together here into a rich collection reflecting many tragic dimensions of America's racial history while drawing new attention to the role of workers and poor people in African American and American history.