Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign (Hardcover)

by Michael Honey (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Although many people know Martin Luther King Jr. died in Memphis, few know what he was doing there, observes labor historian Honey in this moving and meticulous account of the sanitation workers' strike in Memphis between January and April 1968. Marrying labor history to civil rights history, the University of Washington professor fluently recounts the negotiations that ensued after black sanitation workers revolted over being sent home without pay on rainy days, although white workers were paid. While showing how their work stoppage became a strike, then a local movement, before coalescing in the Poor People's Campaign, Honey also reveals King's shift in emphasis "from desegregation and voting rights to the war and the plight of the working class." He also vividly captures many dramatic moments, including marches and sermons as well as King's assassination and its violent aftermath. While familiar villains, famous civil rights activists and King himself often take center stage, the rank-and file workers, whose lives are revealed here, remain the story's heroes and martyrs. Honey's passionate commitment to labor is undisguised, making this effort a worthy and original contribution to the literature. (Jan.)
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From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Reviewed by Kevin Boyle By the early months of 1968, Martin Luther King Jr.'s public ministry was in free fall. The great moral power he had unleashed in Birmingham and Selma, Ala. -- the nation made anew by peaceful protest -- had given way to a sickening cycle of violence: white terrorism in the South, black rioting in the North, war in Vietnam. As the brutality accelerated, King himself came under repeated attack. Advocates of Black Power dismissed him as too moderate. Many whites, angered by his criticism of Northern segregation and his opposition to the war in Southeast Asia, condemned him as too radical. Even some of his longstanding supporters wondered whether his campaigns on behalf of the dispossessed had become quixotic.

Then King went to Memphis.

In Going Down Jericho Road, Michael K. Honey painstakingly recreates the explosive situation King stepped into. On Feb. 12, 1968, Memphis's 1,300 sanitation workers, almost all of them African American, went on strike. They didn't ask for much: recognition of their union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees; an agreement that the city would withhold union dues from workers' paychecks; a small pay raise; and improved safety standards. But for men who had always lived under the crushing weight of white supremacy, even such simple demands represented an exhilarating assertion of human rights. By walking off their jobs, the strikers were laying claim to the dignity and justice long denied them.

Memphis's conservative mayor, Henry Loeb, understood precisely what was happening. So he refused to negotiate. With the strike deadlocked, workers and their supporters took their protests to the streets. The city met mass marches with mass arrests. Repression triggered talk of armed resistance and sporadic acts of violence, much of it caused by young militants in the thrall of Black Power. By the time King arrived in Memphis on March 18, the sanitation strike had turned into a battle for the city's soul.

Honey devotes the second half of Going Down Jericho Road to King's month-long engagement with the strikers' struggle. A former union organizer turned labor historian at the University of Washington, Tacoma, Honey has a sure feel for the idealism that surged through the strike that spring. King's willingness to stand by the sanitation workers reinforced the sense of personal empowerment expressed on the striker