Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers / Edition 1

by Michael K. Honey

Overview

Widely praised upon publication and now considered a classic study, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights chronicles the southern industrial union movement from the Great Depression to the Cold War, a history that created the context for the sanitation workers' strike that brought Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to Memphis in April 1968. Michael K. Honey documents the dramatic labor battles and sometimes heroic activities of workers and organizers that helped to set the stage for segregation's demise.

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780252063053
Publisher:	University of Illinois Press
Publication date:	03/01/1993
Series:	Working Class in American History
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Michael K. Honey is the Fred T. and Dorothy G. Haley Professor of the Humanities at the University of Washington Tacoma. His books include Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign and the award-winning Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements xi
INTRODUCTION: Labor and Civil Rights 1
I: Southern Apartheid and the Labor Movement
ONE: Segregation and Southern Labor 13
TWO: No Bill of Rights in Memphis 44
II: Labor's Struggle for the Right to Organize
THREE: The Rise and Repression of Industrial Unionism 67
FOUR: Black and White Unite 93
FIVE: Race, Radicalism, and the CIO 117
SIX: Black Scares and Red Scares 145
III: Industrial Unionism and the Black Freedom Movement
SEVEN: War in the Factories 177
EIGHT: The CIO at the Crossroads 214
NINE: The Cold War against Labor and Civil Rights 245
CONCLUSION: Legacies 279
Abbreviations 293
Notes 295
Primary Sources Consulted 349
Index 353

 

Editorial Reviews

"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

"Among the best and most ambitious recent works on labor in the South. . . . Few readers of this book are likely to remain unmoved by Honey's account of the exceptional sacrifice, courage, and vision displayed by labor activists in Memphis."—Georgia Historical Quarterly

"Sheds considerable light on numerous themes of importance to historians of a multiplicity of specialties, from labor and African American history, to historians of the South and twentieth-century America."—Labor History

"A well-researched and carefully written book. . . . Anyone interested in the Southern labor movement must consult this work."—Mississippi Quarterly

"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

From the Publisher