Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers

The Working Class in American History

by Michael K. Honey

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.

Genres: History, Labor, Race, Nonfiction, African American, American History

400 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1993

Reviews

[ivan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Long before the civil rights movements of the 1950s, black industrial workers in the 1930s and '40s set the stage in the South for social change movements. Labor organizers, wary of the racially-exclusive AFL, began organizing for the CIO, with significant support from the organization. Their participation in union politics, elections and organizing "profoundly unsettled the segregation system."

It also confronted trade unions with whether they were concerned simply with wages and working conditions or with larger social goals. While civil rights movements of the era were wholly defeated, the success of the CIO in the 1940s arose largely from the civil rights organizing, and they laid the groundwork for the movements of the '50s and '60s. For instance, racial segregation under local political boss Edward H. Crump extinguished many civil rights for working-class whites as well as blacks, and organizing for civil rights and labor rights became intertwined.

[Franklin · Rating 3 out of 5]

the author is Callie's uncle