Award-Winning Author to Discuss King’s Quest for Economic Justice

by James Parks, Mar 16, 2009

Michael Honey

Michael Honey, award-winning author of Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign, will talk about the Memphis sanitation strike and King’s unfinished quest for economic justice and workers’ rights at the National Labor College in Silver Spring, Md., March 17 at 7 p.m.

Going Down Jericho Road (available from The Union Shop Online^TM in hardcover and paperback) won the prestigious 2008 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. In the book, Honey, a professor at the University of Washington-Tacoma and president of the Labor and Working-Class History Association, recounts the 1968 walkout of 1,300 sanitation workers, nearly all of them African American, in Memphis, Tenn. The workers were demanding 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 sanitation strike and its famous “I Am A Man” slogan gained national attention and was the catalyst for the Poor People’s Campaign. King delivered his famous “I Have Been to the Mountaintop” speech at a sanitation strikers’ rally on the day before he was killed.

In a Point of View guest column on the AFL-CIO website, Honey says we should remember King not only for his speeches and his leadership of the civil rights revolution, but also for his quest for economic equality. 

What’s missing from the discussions of King’s life, Honey says, is the fact that King always stressed economic equality and workers’ rights up until his last day on earth. Click here to read “Forty Years Since King: Labor Rights Are Human Rights.”

In an article first published in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, Honey says King’s life demonstrated that labor rights, human rights and civil rights are indivisible. He quotes King as saying, “We can get more organized together than we can apart.”  

He points out that in one of his last speeches, King told the Memphis sanitation workers:

All labor has dignity. You are…reminding the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages. We know that it isn’t enough to integrate lunch counters. What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee?

For more information on Honey’s talk, click here.

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