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

by Michael Honey (Author)
Key Phrases: sanitation strike, strike supporters, white council members, Black Power, City Council, African Americans (more...)

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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post
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 strikers' picket signs. "I Am A Man," their slogan read. But the strike meant something to King as well, Honey says, something fundamentally important. He came to Memphis as a favor to local ministers, who hoped his presence would force the mayor to begin bargaining. He found there the makings of a new mass movement that pushed beyond civil rights to demand economic justice for the most marginal of Americans. With that vision before him, King rekindled the grand hopes that even he had felt slipping away.

Then the movement took an ugly turn. On March 28, King tried to lead some 10,000 marchers on a peaceful protest through downtown Memphis. But he couldn't control the teenagers at the tail end of the march, who started shattering shop windows. Looters grabbed whatever they could, the police attacked, and within moments King found himself in the midst of a riot. The incident turned into a public relations nightmare: The next day politicians, newspapers and television outlets across the country assailed the prophet of nonviolent resistance for loosing anarchy in the streets.

Worse was yet to come. King's advisers urged him to abandon the strike, but he knew that was impossible. "The Movement," he told them, "lives or dies in Memphis." After a week's respite from the city, King returned to Memphis on April 3 to solidify plans for yet another march. The following afternoon, while he was standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, he was shot in the head. As news of the murder spread, rioting swept across 125 cities. By week's end, 43 Americans had been killed and 20,000 arrested in the most fearsome wave of domestic disorder since the Civil War.

Though Honey recounts these events in chilling detail, he refuses to cast the strike in tragic tones. While the nation's inner cities burned, Memphis's sanitation workers remained peaceful, as King would have wanted them to be. Their resolve -- and intense national pressure -- forced Mayor Loeb finally to settle the dispute largely on the strikers' terms. But it was the struggle itself that really mattered, Honey contends, "because it opened people's eyes to the injustices of poverty and racism, and it gave them hope for a different world." That's an admirable sentiment. But it's hard to read Going Down Jericho Road without reaching the opposite conclusion. In Memphis, it wasn't hope that triumphed. It was brutal, bloody violence.

Reviewed by Kevin Boyle
Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 640 pages
• Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co.; 1 edition (January 17, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393330532
• ISBN-13: 978-0393330533
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #124,503 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Measure of the Men, January 5, 2007

By	Karl Helicher (King of Prussia, PA) - See all my reviews

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

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.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Recalling memories, July 13, 2007

By	John V. Atkinson (tennessee) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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

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

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More Questions Than Answers, May 14, 2008

By	J Martin Jellinek (Memphis, TN United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.