Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle - Hardcover

Honey, Mich�l Keith

4.42

12 ratings by Goodreads

9780520217744: Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520217748 ISBN 13: 9780520217744

Publisher: University of California Press, 2000

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

The labor of black workers has been crucial to economic development in the United States. Yet because of racism and segregation, their contribution remains largely unknown. Spanning the 1930s to the present, Black Workers Remember tells the hidden history of African American workers in their own words. It provides striking firsthand accounts of the experiences of black southerners living under segregation in Memphis, Tennessee. Eloquent and personal, these oral histories comprise a unique primary source and provide a new way of understanding the black labor experience during the industrial era. Together, the stories demonstrate how black workers resisted racial apartheid in American industry and underscore the active role of black working people in history.

The individual stories are arranged thematically in chapters on labor organizing, Jim Crow in the workplace, police brutality, white union racism, and civil rights struggles. Taken together, the stories ask us to rethink the conventional understanding of the civil rights movement as one led by young people and preachers in the 1950s and 1960s. Instead, we see the freedom struggle as the product of generations of people, including workers who organized unions, resisted Jim Crow at work, and built up their families, churches, and communities. The collection also reveals the devastating impact that a globalizing capitalist economy has had on black communities and the importance of organizing the labor movement as an antidote to poverty. Michael Honey gathered these oral histories for more than fifteen years. He weaves them together here into a rich collection reflecting many tragic dimensions of America's racial history while drawing new attention to the role of workers and poor people in African American and American history.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

Michael Keith Honey is Harry Bridges Chair of Labor Studies and Professor of African-American, Ethnic and Labor Studies, and American History at the University of Washington, Tacoma. He is the author of the prize-winning Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (1993).

Review:

"Honey serves as a symphony conductor, skillfully blending the voices into a powerful choir singing a song of freedom." -- Dallas Morning News

"Honey serves as a symphony conductor, skillfully blending the voices of . . . laborers into a . . . choir singing a song of freedom." -- Dallas Morning News

"It's a gifted storyteller who can capture a reader's heart and mind with fiction." -- Tacoma News-Tribune

"It's a gifted storyteller who can capture a reader's heart and mind with fiction . . . greater . . . who can . . . with nonfiction." -- Tacoma News-Tribune

"Poignant reading, Honey's interviews reflect his clear sympathy and admiration for his subjects and their achievements." -- Gerald Friedman, Journal of Economic History

"[T]he workers interviewed . . . give voice to the . . . ideal of a living wage as a right, not . . . a privilege." -- American Prospect

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.