Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers
- ISBN-10
- 0252063058
- ISBN-13
- 9780252063053
- Category
- Business & Economics
- Pages
- 364
- Language
- English
- Published
- 1993
- Publisher
- University of Illinois Press
- Author
- Michael K. Honey
Description
Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights chronicles the rarely studied southern industrial union movement from the Great Depression to the cold war, using the strategically located river city of Memphis as a case study. Michael Honey analyzes the economic basis of segregation and the denial of fundamental human rights and civil liberties it entailed. Frequently telling his story through personal portraits of those directly involved, Honey documents the dramatic labor battles and sometimes heroic activities of organizers and ordinary workers that helped to set the stage for segregation's demise. His study of interracial industrial union organizing locates some of the roots of the 1960s civil rights struggles in this earlier era. Honey provides a new context for understanding Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 1968 campaign in support of poor people and black labor organizing in Memphis. This detailed account provides a fresh perspective on African-American, labor, civil rights, and southern history. It clarifies the relationship between labor and civil rights struggles, deepens our understanding of the role of racism in blocking working-class advancement, and emphasizes the importance of southern interracial organizing to the history of social movements in the United States.
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 2023-02-03
- 404 pages
- Ebook
- University of Illinois Press
Similar books
-
Southern Struggles: The Southern Labor Movement and the Civil Rights Struggle
By John A. SalmondJohn A. Salmond is professor emeritus of American history and former pro-vice chancellor at La Trobe University, Victoria, Australia.
-
"All Labor Has Dignity"
By Jr., Dr. Martin Luther KingThe collection begins with King’s lectures to unions in the 1960s and includes his addresses during his Poor People’s Campaign, culminating with his momentous “Mountaintop” speech, delivered in support of striking black sanitation ...
-
Reconsidering Southern Labor History: Race, Class, and Power
By Matthew Hild, Keri Leigh MerrittThe broad chronological sweep and comprehensive nature of Reconsidering Southern Labor History set this volume apart from any other collection on the topic in the past forty years.
-
Conflict of Interests: Organized Labor and the Civil Rights Movement in the South, 1954–1968
By Alan DraperThis book looks at the ways that tension was expressed and ultimately resolved within the southern labor movement.
-
The Black Worker: Race, Labor, and Civil Rights Since Emancipation
By Eric ArnesenAiming to establish the richness of the African American working-class experience, and the indisputable role of black workers in shaping the politics and history of labour and race in the...
-
Labor in the Modern South
By Glenn T. EskewEmbracing but moving beyond the traditional concerns of labor history, these nine original essays give a voice to workers underrepresented in the scholarship on labor in the twentieth-century South.
-
Sharing the Prize
By Gavin WrightGavin Wright shows that the civil rights struggle was of economic benefit to all parties: the wages of southern blacks increased dramatically but not at the expense of southern whites.
-
Labor Rights Are Civil Rights: Mexican American Workers in Twentieth-Century America
By Zaragosa VargasVargas carefully illustrates how union mobilization in agriculture, tobacco, garment, and other industries became an important vehicle for achieving Mexican American labor and civil rights.
-
Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South
By Robert R. KorstadZieger, CIO, 286–87 (all quotes); Rosswurm, CIO's Left-Led Unions, 1–2. 11. WSJ, November 12, 1949. 12. Hickey, “Radio Broadcast,” ODP. 13. Ibid.; WSJ, November 12, 1949. See Zieger,CIO, 254–55, for the record of left-led unions ...
-
Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America
By Joe William Trotter Jr.... 1915–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 94, 96, 108, 129–30; Kathleen M. Blee, Women of the Klan: ... 1982), 45–70; William M. Tuttle, Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (1966; repr., New York: Atheneum, ...