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‘Going Down Jericho Road’ Receives RFK Book Award |
NOTE: Going Down Jericho Road is available from The Union Shop Online™ in hardcover and paperback.
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Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign, by labor historian Michael Honey, has been named the first-prize winner of the prestigious 2008 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award.
In the book, Honey, the Fred and Dorothy Haley Professor of Humanities at the University of Washington, recreates the explosive situation in which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stepped into after 1,300 sanitation workers, nearly all of them African American, went on strike in Memphis, Tenn., on Feb. 12, 1968. They didn’t ask for much: only recognition of their union (AFSCME), an agreement that the city would withhold union dues from workers’ paychecks, a small pay raise and improved safety standards. The strike became a powerful local movement that gained national attention and coalesced into the Poor People’s Campaign. It was for the sanitation workers that King gave his famous “I Have Been to the Mountaintop” speech, the night before he was assassinated in Memphis.
The book award is presented annually by the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial to the author whose work best reflects Robert Kennedy’s concern for the oppressed; his commitment to justice, democracy and human rights; and his belief in the power of individuals to affect social change. Past winners of the award include former Vice President Al Gore; Rep. John Lewis; Pulitzer Prize-winner Taylor Branch; Toni Morrison, Nobel Prize-winning author; and nonfiction writer Jonathon Kozol.
Going Down Jericho Road was chosen to receive the award from among five finalists, including John Bowe’s Nobodies, Jeffrey Toobin’s The Nine, Jonathan Cohn’s Sick and Susan Eaton’s The Children in Room E4.
Going Down Jericho Road is available from The Union Shop Online™ in hardcover and paperback. Read the Point of View article Honey wrote for the AFL-CIO here.
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And brother Honey is mean folk singer to boot! I say this as union punk rocker from AFSCME local 1488 at University of Washington, UW Bothell, UW Tacoma, HarbourView Med Center. UW Med Center, UW Libraries, UW Skilled Trades, Harbour View Public Safety, and UW Police Managment. Now ya wanna talk about a labor movement try herding them cats?