History of Southern African American Workers

236). erotic love refers to the relationship amongst unions and cultivated rights as "civil rights unionism, a unionism keeped simultaneously with striving for decent jobs and equal political and levelheaded rights" (237). In analyzing the encroachment of the political economy on racial segregation, love life shows how the fight for unionization has been inextricably intertwined with the fight for civil rights.

Black workers faced a dual system of scotch and racial exploitation, and unions became the most(prenominal) powerful instrument for social change. Honey acknowledges that while subdued workers used industrial unions to expand their freedoms, the struggle movement itself imposed "severe constraints" upon them (171); these constraints included segregation in the workplace, low-level jobs and lack of direct union representation.

Other themes Honey deals with include the negative effect of the contemporary global capitalistic economy, most particularly how globalization has harmed the earning power of poor pack such as African American southerners. Honey contends that by the mid-1970s unionized black industrial workers "had torn down most Jim Crow barriers within their workplaces and unions" but a growing de-industrialization in the U.S. coupled with companies moving their f shamories to separate countries "had a devastating impact" on unionized black industrial workers" (322-333). Honey faults the national government for this turn of events.

Although the book deals with several key themes, it is organ

Irene Branch recalls, "They'd give the severeest jobs they could to the blacks. They'd give you the jobs a white person wouldn't want and you'd be making slight money. It was really tough. You could be working align by side with a white person, and they'd get double the money you got?.You couldn't do nothing else but take it or get qualifying?." (95).

One of the most powerful and eloquent parts of the book is the well-known 65-day charter of Memphis sanitation workers in 1968, an incident that, fit to Honey cemented union activism with civil rights activism.

The plight of the sanitation workers (who acquire so little they qualified for food stamps), is best remembered as the cause for which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his full support, and his life. Following King's assassination when he returned for a second march (the first stopped because of an act of violence), more than 20,000 people (many well-known) from all over the country united together with the striking sanitation workers for a silent march. That boot of support and financial aid for the sanitation workers to continue their strike forced the city of Memphis to recognize the union and sign a contract resulting in better pay and working conditions for black workers.

To write this book, Honey spent more than 15 years of research, documentation and gathering oral histories that recover and remember the befogged history of Southern black industrial workers. Even though the power of the book lies in the oral histories, Honey supplements these with hard documentation from books, journals, papers in library collections, memos (from Urban federation and United Auto Workers files among others), depositions, interviews, Freedom of Information Act documents, Ph.D. Dissertations and other sources.

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