Michael K. Honey's Going Down Jericho Road
Wellington, Darryl Lorenzo
As I WRITE these words, Martin Luther King Day 2007 has just passed. As the years have gone by-2007 marks the thirty-ninth anniversary of his death—King's membership in the pantheon of great...
...It is important for Honey not to bury the names and faces of the strikers under King's fame...
...Then he began his Poor People's Campaign, a last ditch effort to convince the government to shift priorities from military spending to ending poverty...
...These chapters promoted white supremacy and openly banned blacks from membership...
...it was—at long last—powerful...
...Ralph Ellison...
...As far as grassroots activism goes, the students were wet behind the ears, but their intentions were good...
...The student banquet that I attended concluded with a reading from King's texts...
...Pro-union activists carried stick-with-the-union placards...
...King also used the analogy of the Good Samaritan and the traveler waylaid on Jericho Road...
...The Poor People's Campaign floundered after King's assassination, but the Memphis strike was ultimately successful...
...One man died instantly...
...Honey's book deals with the Poor People's Campaign, King's very last campaign before his death...
...the sanitation workers were the least of men, the wounded, the dispossessed, abandoned on the roadside by American democracy, and the civil rights movement was the Good Samaritan...
...Jones also composed the first official list of sanitation workers' grievances...
...Honey writes, "The Memphis story provides a window through which we can understand the struggles of the 60's as well as the deep obstacles to King's dream of a united peaceful, integrated, democratic society...
...The other attempted to scurry to safety...
...Loeb was notoriously opposed to the concept of workers' rights and, in particular, black workers' rights...
...He remembers, "Like many new leftists, by 1968, I thought perhaps King was not radical enough...
...There is a war in Iraq...
...At the end of a miserable, cold workday, Echol Cole's and Robert Walker's soiled, worn-out clothes smelled of garbage...
...The students read in their own voices, sans King's rhetorical flamboyance, sometimes proficiently, sometimes falteringly...
...It is an answer to the constant barrage of sentimentalized images of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott or the March on Washington...
...The sanitation workers' trucks were "outmoded" —to say the least—and the most mechanically inefficient ones occasionally switched into operation by themselves...
...In 1968, Honey was a young activist and draft resister...
...Lawson encouraged King's intervention, even though King's own staff was skeptical...
...The strike dragged on for weeks before King's arrival...
...then became forever linked with King's name in history and tragic fate...
...There were the customary parades—the lines of high school, college, and NAACP-sponsored floats—and speeches, sermons, and the usual homilies...
...They did hard, heavy work, lifting garbage tubs and carrying them on their shoulders or heads or pushcarts to dump their contents into outmoded trucks...
...He had clear links to workingclass and poor people through his family, 106 DISSENT / Spring 2007 church, and community, and from an early age he advocated an economic justice agenda that went far beyond civil rights...
...We need Honey's refurbished King—the union man and leader of a united front...
...As the years have gone by-2007 marks the thirty-ninth anniversary of his death—King's membership in the pantheon of great Americans and the historical uniqueness of the nonviolent protest movement he led appear indisputable...
...He also went to its commercial capital of Memphis, Tennessee, to aid 1,300 black sanitation workers on strike for union rights...
...It was King's attempt to create a massive protest movement, amid the turmoil of Vietnam, and has been criticized as a frantic attempt to shame the government into ending the Vietnam War and focusing its resources on instituting mass economic reforms...
...The strikers themselves voted that by itself a pay increase was unacceptable without a more permanent and official guarantee of rights...
...Busby is the author of Ralph Ellison (New York: Twayne/Macmillan, 1991...
...The question becomes how to honor King's message by adapting it to the world of today...
...There is in today's America no stone wall of injustice as visible and indefensible as segregation was...
...The effect was more than charming...
...Almost oral history, Going Down Jericho Road is somewhat unwieldy, but necessarily so...
...Honey reminds us that the strike "proceeded under its own name and with its own leaders, but eventually the local moment and King's became inextricably bound...
...Loeb stuck to this claim despite the fact that unions were already present in Tennessee in government professions dominated by white workers...
...Honey is not a poetic writer, but through the accumulation of facts he portrays how the workers labored under conditions that were dangerous, dehumanizing, and unrepentantly segregated...
...I also attended a banquet for college students who had spent the day honoring a legacy of self-sacrifice by engaging in humanitarian activities...
...The confusion over King's legacy is in fact chimerical...
...We need this brandished image every King holiday, lest King have won a Pyrrhic victory in the politics of images...
...He is a poet living in Charleston, South Carolina...
...CALL FOR ARCHIVAL MATERIAL Did you correspond with Dissent in the fifties and sixties...
...It contains a tide of voices...
...The Poor People's campaign has remained controversial...
...Nor are you likely to hear criticisms of King from within his own organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, such as Ella Baker's charge that SCLC depended too much upon King as a charismatic figurehead...
...It is a reappraisal of his legacy and an unapologetic homage that attempts to substitute the worn-out images of King with a refurbished, relevant image...
...Too little attention is given to nonviolence as either a philosophy or as a political tactic...
...Like the strike, Honey's book begins before King's DISSENT / Spring 2007 105 arrival...
...He also developed a labor perspective and connections to unions that influenced his strategy for change...
...they don't know that he died in a struggle for the right of workers to have a union...
...MORE DRAMATIC than analytical, Going Down Jericho Road is a masterful piece of documentary history that, in my opinion, loses nothing by avoiding theorizing about the dynamics of race and class...
...At various points Loeb offered the workers a pay increase...
...Honey begins with a brief explanation of his personal relationship to the material...
...King said in a speech, "We know that it isn't enough to integrate lunch counters...
...It was in Memphis that King was assassinated, on April 4, 1968...
...Loeb and the sanitation workers had drawn a line in the sand over Loeb's refusal to recognize a sanitation workers' union...
...108 DISSENT / Spring 2007...
...The hydraulic ram snagged his coat and pulled him down...
...A witness to the second man's brief escape would recall "He was just standing there on the end of the truck, and suddenly it looked like the big thing just swallowed him...
...It tells a story, traces its historical background, and encompasses a variety of points of view...
...King arrived in Memphis— the strike a month old—with the intention of making a one-day commitment...
...By that I mean the possibility of engaging in mass demonstrations and justice campaigns comparable to those waged to end minority second-class citizenship and segregation...
...The coaDISSENT / Spring 2007 107 lition included international union leaders and presidents, Teamsters, hospital workers, retail and department store workers, farm equipment and electrical workers, the American Screen Actors' Guild and National Education Association teachers in unity with each other in opposition to racism and classism...
...Pay of less than $70 a week, no guarantees of acceptable wages on rainy days, old equipment and inadequate safety provisions, fear of being fired for belonging to a union, and no prospects for improvement...
...but there is no mandatory draft...
...After the two men died—deaths of such grotesqueness as to challenge any scene in a horror movie—"nearly 1,300 black men in the Memphis Department of Public Works went on strike, giving no notice to anyone...
...for many workers and union personnel it was about labor...
...King brought the Poor People's Campaign to Memphis to leverage his national fame in support of the sanitation employees...
...E-mail editors@dissentmagazine.org . CORRECTION Because of a copyediting error, both Mark Busby and his work on Ralph Ellison were misidentified in Darryl Lorenzo Wellington's essay in the Summer 2005 issue of Dissent, "Fighting at Cross-Purposes: Irving Howe vs...
...T. 0. Jones, a local union representative "saw this as the time to organize, and seized it...
...Ethnically minded activists carried antiracist placards...
...For many blacks the Memphis strike was about race...
...ACORRECTIVE TO THE whitewashing of King's language and legacy is a book like Michael K. Honey's Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, King's Last Campaign...
...In a 1961 speech at the national AFL-CIO Convention titled 'If the Negro wins, labor wins' King said that blacks and labor remained historically tied in a common destiny, that the civil rights movement had picked up the spirit of the union movements in the 1930's...
...He seems to have interviewed every living person who had a substantial connection to the Memphis strike...
...What King Day lacks is a sense of political realities beating at the door...
...On one hand, King seems a victor in the American politics of images...
...King hoped to build a movement of the poor, beginning in the Mississippi Delta heartland of cotton, segregation and poverty...
...to dispel the cobwebs all we have to do is remember the Poor People's Campaign...
...Honey had befriended many of the organizers and activists who had been involved in the sanitation workers' strike, giving him a unique perspective on the city that was infamous to the rest of the world as King's death place...
...Yet, even though the annual memorial is the pinnacle of King's legacy, it is a burden upon it...
...The city did not provide them with gloves, uniforms, or a place to shower...
...King had been kept abreast on the Memphis strike by his friend James Lawson, a Memphis clergyman and fellow student of nonviolence...
...The spark that lit the fuse of the Memphis strike was the pointless death of two sanitation workers...
...What results at these commemorations is language with neither political nor rhetorical impetus...
...King Day is so one-dimensionally upbeat that no one in the audience is likely to learn (or remember) that by the time of his death, King had suffered a major breach with the NAACP, which denounced him in 1967 for his opposition to the Vietnam War...
...the national holiday assures this...
...What was lacking was a sense of tumult and struggle...
...He led a less than successful protest march—the march erupted in violence and was suspended midway through—but King planned to lead a subsequent nonviolent march and protest action...
...I had arrived in Memphis two years after King's death, but until I began researching this book I still only vaguely understood what had happened there during the great upheavals of 68 and 69...
...The mayor of Memphis, Henry Loeb, had already broken a sanitation workers' strike two years earlier, forcing employees back to work without offering concessions...
...Throughout the sixties, King encouraged a labor-civil rights coalition...
...DARRYL LORENZO WELLINGTON writes frequently for Dissent...
...It helped us hear the words and, within the words, the violence and desperation of the times in which they were composed...
...There are ghettoes as heinously disenfranchised as in King's day and mass injustices such as the absence of universal health care...
...On the other, the relevance of his legacy has been diminished by isolating civil rights as a separate agenda from economic empowerment...
...Although many people know King died in Memphis, many don't know what he was doing there...
...Jones's union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), sent mediators to Memphis and financially supported impoverished strikers...
...HONEY NOTES that Martin Luther King, Jr., the country's most renowned civil rights leader "never confined his politics to civil rights...
...the truck's hydraulic system switched on and the ram of the truck battered both men to death...
...We want to fill in gaps in our archives...
...Do you have original letters from the editor or staff...
...Michael Honey moved to Memphis in 1970 and spent the next six years working for the Memphis chapter of the ACLU...
...This is exactly what happened on the day Cole and Walker died...
...Yet this is also King's book...
...Following King's death, Loeb faced a juggernaut that, Honey writes "represented the coalition that King had always sought to build [making the Memphis strike] a threshold moment connecting struggles for black freedom and economic justice and creating a labor and civil rights alliance...
...A national holiday is a deserved tribute...
...During the strike the sanitation workers carried signs reading "I Am a Man...
...However, this clarity brings new stirrings of confusion...
...He was inspired by the workers' plight and stayed on...
...The strike began as an emotional act of defiance...
...Every King holiday we are reminded that King was "nonviolent...
...This audience of very young people finally began to appreciate how it was that although King's message was not so very complicated—equal parts fiery protest and Christian love—it was the right message for the moment, and it stirred the world...
...However, to sustain itself and achieve results, it would need organization and support...
...He often spoke to unions and made many overtures to organized labor to work at clarifying and supporting their mutual goals...
...However, even as the civil rights movement scored successes in equal access to public accommodations such as buses, hotels, and schools and lesser successes in integrating job opportunity, King's vision of a full-fledged civil rights-labor union coalition was continually stymied...
...Eventually, even the AFL-CIO supported the Memphis strike...
...but there is little sense of how these ills could possibly be redressed by rallies and protest marches...
...King's memory will be with us forever...
...Yet it is a story that has been almost lost to history...
...What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn't earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee...
...On this particular day, Cole and Walker rode in a precarious, stinking perch between a hydraulic ram used to mash garbage into a small wad and the wall of the truck's cavernous container...
...It is also a new look at one man in particular—King, the one-dimensionalized martyr of the civil rights struggle, whom Honey evokes anew through the use of fresh and unfamiliar quotes...
...Memphis illustrated the point so ideally that King's commentary during the strike became interchangeable with the rhetoric of labor rights...
...I attended the King Day events in Charleston, South Carolina, which certainly mirrored events throughout the United States...
...For Honey, Memphis was also the location of a desperate strike that escalated and attracted King's attention...
...There are neither mass protests nor mass riots on the level that characterized 104 DISSENT / Spring 2007 the 1960s...
...King joined the demonstrations, the various placards strapped across his chest...
...He claimed that city employees possessed neither the right to strike nor the right to unionize...
...Often called upon to address the question, "Why Memphis...
...It seems the beatific privilege of a saint who above all else possessed a "dream...
...Honey sheds light on the relationship between race and class by offering a narrative example, rather than exegesis...
...The AFL-CIO contributed funds to King's civil rights activities, but its president, George Meany, was reluctant to take punitive measures against certain Southern chapters...
...We were trying to organize poor whites, Hispanics, southern blacks, northern blacks— I mean there was just a tremendous organizing job and I don't know how you could take on anything else...
...Loeb was forced, grudgingly, to accept the democratic rights of workers to form an AFSCME local, a success that paved the road to the general unionization of public employees in Memphis...
...Doubtless, Honey wants to show that broadbased alliances that include a cross section of American workers as well as ethnic and gender agendas are possible today...
...This is easily the most comprehensive book ever written on the Memphis sanitation workers' strike and King's participation in it...
...He was assassinated the week before the follow-up march would have taken place...
...Andrew Young remembers "We had charted out fifteen cities that we were going to try to organize...
Vol. 54 • April 2007 • No. 2
