Customer Reviews

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

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This might be the finest book written on Martin Luther King: it certainly is the best one that I have read about him. Honey is a splendid writer, with a style that I find more accessible than Taylor Branch's. No doubt that Branch has written the seminal history of King and his times, but his writing can become tedious due to too much detail and meandering sentences.

Honey is an award-winning historian who has written two previous excellent books that demonstrate his skill as an oral historian. The outstanding feature of this book is the numerous interviews he conducted with important figures, which keep the book always absorbing.

King receives much attention, but Honey shows that the Memphis strike was led by local workers and union officials who were fighting to escape the living hell of dangerous working conditions (the strike grew out of the deaths of two sanitation workers who were mangled in a malfunctioning garbage truck when they sought shelter from a rainstorm).

In addition to the stories about the local workers and organizers, King is portrayed as an important influence who was struggling with internal fighting among black civil rights groups, includng the NAACP, the Urban League, SCLC, and SNCC, the FBI, Lyndon Johnson, who was angered by King's anti-war proclamations, and most whites who thought King was moving too fast. Any reader who questions King's leadership and selflessness, needs to read this book to have those views dispelled.

Ultimately, the Memphis strike paved the way for labor improvements throughout the South.

This superb book should be considered for all major book prizes. For King scholars, it is essential and for all other informed readers, it is an excellent narrative of King and his times.

As one who lived through the history recalled in this book,I found it excellent.It is great to read a book in which you personally knew all the people written about and recall all the events.Michael Honey has done an excelllent job.I highly recommend this book to all students of the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King jr. Especially I recommend it to all residents of Memphis and Tennessee.May we never allow this history to repeat itself

Going Down Jericho Road is an excellent history of the sanitation workers' strike in Memphis and Martin Luther King's involvement in the spreading of the social gospel among America's poor. Michael Honey uses a lot of first-person recollections to bring this story to life and to unearth the racism and classism that defined so much of the nation, not just Memphis, in the 1960s. Behind this excellent tale are ongoing nagging questions. How would we react to the same situation today? Which side would we have supported in 1968? Have things really changed that much in forty years?

In Memphis, we now have a very visible middle class African American community with a black mayor and most public offices held by African Americans. Does this serve to mask the injustices which still plague the poor in this and many other communities? Has the rise of the middle class made the working poor and unemployed even more invisible? Is there any more community now between the white and black communities than there was in 1968?

I don't pretend to have definitive answers to these questions. However, just asking the questions and considering them in light of Michael Honey's historic journal makes one look twice at the comforts we enjoy in this world. If all books could get the reader thinking along these lines, this would be a much better world.

Writings on M. L. King have too often descended into official, religious hagiography that is sacrilege to touch. This work, however, rediscovers the philosophical and moral essence of the man - what made him the leader he was, with all his shortcomings (of which he would be the first to acknowledge).

This work in particular is timely given the current struggle over public employee unions. More than ever is it necessary to remember that all human labor has value because it is the effort of men and women to construct a better world. If only there were another Dr. King - or the man himself - around to keep the country's moral focus in perspective. "Supply side" enrichment, at the expense of the working poor of all backgrounds, would not have dug so deeply into the American system if Dr. King had remained to fight it. But there is still the legacy, presented in fine works such as this.

This vibrant account of MLK's last weeks before the assassination - and of the conditions of black workers in Memphis that drew him to the city - overcomes the cliches that have inevitably encrusted our view of the civil rights struggle. It reminds us what the fight was about and shows us how the actors behaved on all sides. The south in the 1960s was still a bastion of nakedly racist white power, exploiting black laborers unmercifully to keep the white middle class comfortable, with the media, cops, FBI and courts all stomping on the underdog. The book is a great case study of unionizing, of protest organizing and, for that matter, of strike-breaking and of undermining a progressive movement. It is enriched by a ton of detail culled from archival accounts, including FBI files.

One message that comes out from this detailed look is King's generosity and morality: his dedication to lift up blacks and others who were much less well off than he and his educated class. Regardless of threats from white supremacists, dirty tricks by Hoover's FBI, disunity among black movement leaders and trade unions, and his own doubts about what approaches to the Poor People's Campaign could be effective, King stuck with the sanitation workers. The rare altruism described in this book is an inspiration. It's a shame for our entire society that he had no true successors - and that the obstacles to progress towards a decent and just society are so darned hard to surmount.

Anyone looking to understand the late stages of the civil rights movement, the history of Memphis, the South in the 1960s, or the turmoil that Martin Luther King had to deal with will appreciate this book. It helps that it is intelligently and sensitively written from as balanced and objective a perspective as possible.

This book was an excellent account of MLK and related events leading to his assassination in Memphis. Strongly recommended for anyone interested in history or sociology.

This is a thorough and judicious yet passionate explanation of the history and significance of the sanitation workers' strike in support of which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. The background of the strike in Memphis and its relationship to the national unionization movement is vitally important to understanding where the Civil Rights Movement has been -- and where it ought to go from here.