Michael K. Honey
Going Down Jericho Road
The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign
The definitive history of the epic struggle for economic justice that became Martin Luther King Jr.’s last crusade
“A magisterial treatment of this neglected period. Michael Honey is to be saluted!”
—Cornel West, Princeton University
Memphis in 1968 was ruled by a paternalistic “plantation mentality” embodied in its good-old-boy mayor, Henry Loeb. Wretched conditions, abusive white supervisors, poor education, and low wages locked most black workers into poverty. Then two sanitation workers were chewed up like garbage in the back of a faulty truck, igniting a public employee strike that brought to a boil long-simmering issues of racial injustice.
With novelistic drama and rich scholarly detail, Michael Honey brings to life the magnetic characters who clashed on the Memphis battlefield: stalwart black workers; fiery black ministers; volatile, young, black-power advocates; idealistic organizers and tough-talking unionists; the first black members of the Memphis city council; the white upper crust who sought to prevent change or conflagration; and, finally, the magisterial Martin Luther King Jr., undertaking a Poor People’s Campaign at the crossroads of his life, vilified as a subversive, hounded by the FBI, and seeing in the working poor of Memphis his hopes for a better America.
“Going Down Jericho Road is a brilliant achievement.” —William S. McFeely, author of Frederick Douglass
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Michael K. Honey is professor of ethnic, gender, and labor studies and American history at the University of Washington, Tacoma; the author of two prize-winning books on labor and civil rights history; and a former Southern civil liberties organizer. He lives in Tacoma.
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