Southern African American Workers

Many themes are presented in this excellent, often poignant, book that contends the labor of black workers has been at the heart of U.S. history and economic development. According to Honey, the core of the African American struggle for equality is the right to a good job and decent wages, not just civil rights; a living wage is the right of all Americans, not a privilege, thereby tying economic well-being to citizenship. Honey argues that although black workers fighting for equal rights have not usually been identified as part of the broader civil rights movement," they clearly are (176). One of Honey's major themes is that the black factory workers described in his book "were as much a part of the freedom struggle as the Montgomery bus boycotters or the freedom riders in the 1960s" (p. 176). He points out that southern black workers believed unionization would act "as a transformative agent" with which they could fight the forces of white supremacy and the racial apartheid they were forced to live under in American in

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ry collections, memos (from Urban League and United Auto Workers files among others), depositions, interviews, Freedom of Information Act documents, Ph.D. Dissertations and other sources. Although the oral histories are recounted from the point of view of those who experienced them, they are backed up by Honey with background information and explanations, as well as his own personal views. Regarding his methodology, Honey writes that the history of black working class struggle and endurance "could never be recounted with such clarity by anyone who had not lived it. The power of remembering is that, instead of generalizations, we dealt with specifics" (7). Regarding his collaboration with the African American workers who "testified," Honey acknowledges that, "race shaped our interactions" but that his "past history in Memphis as a civil liberties and civil rights organizer boded well for collaboration" (9). He writes that his working-class origins "sensitized me to the economic roots of racial injustice" (1). Honey unequivocally believes that racism "rationalized the destruction of black rights" and that the "denial of black rights and the pervasive violence of white supremacy deeply affected the lives of all those who tell th
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Approximate Word count = 1891
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)