“All Labor Has Dignity”
November 13, 2012
http://faculty.washington.edu/mhoney/ "All Labor Has Dignity" by Martin Luther King Jr., Michael Honey (Editor) People forget that Dr. King was…
Michael Honey
Michael Honey is an educator who combines scholarship with civic engagement. He teaches African-American, civil rights and labor history and specializes in work on Martin Luther King, Jr. Honey holds the Fred T. and Dorothy G. Haley Endowed Professorship in the Humanities at the University of Washington, Tacoma (UWT) and previously served as the Harry Bridges Chair of Labor Studies for the University of Washington and as President of the Labor and Working-Class History Association. Honey’s work is noted for his extensive use of oral history, deep archival research, and vibrant writing style. The History Book Club called Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign (W.W. Norton, 2007), “a truly great book” and Cornell West deemed it a “magisterial treatment.” It won awards from the Robert F. Kennedy Book Foundation, the Organization of American Historians, the Southern Historical Association, and the United Association of Labor Educators. Honey won the University of Washington, Tacoma’s Distinguished Research award and the Weyerhaueser Foundation’s Martin Luther King Award for community leadership and service. Honey’s collection of King’s labor and economic justice speeches, titled All Labor Has Dignity (Beacon Press, 2011) is endorsed by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka as “powerful and inspiring” and not just a testament to King’s rhetorical legacy but “a call to action.” Honey’s previous award-winning books proved path breaking in linking labor and civil rights histories. Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Unionism, Segregation and the Freedom Struggle (University of California Press, 1999 was called “poignant reading” by economist Gerald Friedman and “eloquent” by historian Bruce Nelson. Many consider his first book, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (University of Illinois Press, 1993), a classic and a journal reviewer deemed it “among the best and most ambitious recent works on labor in the South.” A southern civil rights and civil liberties organizer from 1970-1976, Honey links scholarship, music, and public speaking with community and labor organizing. He performed his "Links on the Chain" labor and civil rights songs with Pete Seeger, Bettie Mae Fikes and other freedom singers and he has given invited lectures before numerous campus and community organizations (the University of Florida, the University of New Hampshire, the University of Louisville, Northwestern and Seattle Universities, the University of Illinois, Northern Illinois University, the National Labor College, and the AFL-CIO among others). As a founding faculty member at the University of Washington, Tacoma (1990), Honey helped shape the Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences program and its Ethnic, Gender and Labor studies major. Students in his Tacoma Oral and Community History project have produced scores of personal histories that are archived and online. His "Underdog Productions" produced short films including one on war resister Lt. Ehren Watada. Honey has received numerous research grants and fellowships from scholarly organizations. These include the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Research and Conference Center, the Huntington Library, and the Stanford Humanities Center. He has published many scholarly articles in books and journals as well as columns on current issues in mass media (including the Nation, the Seattle Times and Post-Intelligencer, the Memphis Commercial Appeal, the Tacoma News Tribune, the Progressive, the History News Network). Honey is a graduate of Northern Illinois University (Ph.D.), Howard University (M.A.) and Oakland University (B.A.). He lives in Tacoma with his wife Pat Krueger, a professor of music education at the University of Puget Sound.
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