“I grew up as a follower of Martin Luther King,” said Michael K. Honey, Fred T. and Dorothy G. Haley Endowed Professor of the Humanities and professor of labor and ethnic studies and American history, University of Washington, Tacoma. “When I was in high school, I followed his campaign for desegregation in the South on TV. I saw the vicious dogs attacking young men who refused to react as the fire hoses turned on children in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. I became aware of racial injustice and oppression through the campaign for voting rights in Selma, where police on horses rode people down and smashed their heads in 1965.”
Honey delivered the keynote address at the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Sunrise Celebration held annually during ALA's Midwinter Meeting. The 2011 theme was “Everybody Can Be Great.”
Growing up in Michigan, Honey said he “saw the horrific riots and the repression against racial rebellion in nearby Detroit in 1967” and supported King’s efforts to address the poverty of the inner cities. He traveled to Washington to support King’s Poor People’s Campaign and at the age of 18 registered with the draft board as a conscientious objector against the Vietnam War and against all wars. In 1970, Honey said he “went South to defend the victims of President Richard M. Nixon’s efforts to repress movements for peace and social justice.”
“During all that time and still today, I kept King’s teachings in my mind: An injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere; the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice; an eye-for-an-eye and a tooth-for-a-tooth leaves everybody toothless and blind; the best thing to make out of an enemy is a friend; justice and peace are indivisible; follow what’s right even if it means sacrificing yourself in order to save others, as the Good Samaritan did going down Jericho Road,” he told the audience.
Honey said only when he went to graduate school at Howard University and then Northern Illinois University and began to research African-American and labor history did he really learn the full scope of King’s teachings. “For 20 years I researched the historic efforts of black and white workers to overcome the racial barriers put in place to separate them into hostile and antagonistic camps, first by slavery and segregation, then the poll tax and literacy tests, by war and poverty and anti-union crusades,” he added.
He told the crowd that gathering research for his books led him back to Memphis, where he had worked for six years as a civil liberties and community organizer, leading him to write Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, King’s Last Campaign (W.W. Norton, 2007). “That story opened my eyes to one of the most important facets of Dr. King’s work for human rights, his support for the labor movement,” Honey explained. “Dr. Benjamin Mays said at Dr. King’s funeral that he could have died anywhere on his Jericho Road to support human rights, but we should never forget that Dr. King died leading a strike of the working poor for the right to form a public employee union. Or, as Coretta King put it, her husband ‘gave his life for the poor of the world, the garbage workers of Memphis and the peasants of Vietnam. The day that Negro people and others in bondage are truly free, on the day want is abolished, on the day wars are no more, on that day I know my husband will rest in a long-deserved peace.’”
Honey said the King family and its Legacy Series at Beacon Press asked him to edit the just-released collection All Labor Has Dignity that details Dr. King speaking to union members all across this country about labor rights and economic justice from 1957 to 1968. “These speeches should help us to remember that Dr. King’s sacrifice in Memphis helped to make possible the revolution in public worker organizing that occurred in the 1970s and 1980s and that made public employee unions the strongest element of organized labor today,” he explained.
“If you support the human rights campaigns of Dr. King, you should support his belief that labor rights are human rights,” Honey said. “As he warned the AFL-CIO in 1961, the reactionary right in coalition with many businesses will stop at nothing to turn back the clock on both the labor movement and the civil rights movement. Through outsourcing and downsizing and automation and globalization they have whittled down the great industrial unions of this country to a shadow of their former selves and driven down the wages of most Americans.”
Honey said, “You can trace the decline of government that puts people before profits to the decline of industrial unions in every decade since the 1980s. And now, a right-wing business climate has created a full-scale economic crisis. The very banks, the giant corporations, the extremely wealthy, and the extremely right wing that created that crisis now want to destroy public employee unions and do away with the last vestige of union consciousness. ‘These menaces now threaten everything decent and fair in American life,’ Dr. King told the AFL-CIO, and they would like to create a political climate ‘made to order for those who would seek to drive labor into impotency’ and undermine our civil rights gains.”
“Dr. King’s warning has now come to pass,” Honey maintained. “Without unions, black and white and workers of all ethnicities and nationalities will be back at each other’s throats, as throughout so much of our history. And we can go back to a time when people who should be retired are ‘too old to work and too young to die.’ We can go back to an era when working people could not afford to send their kids to college, to own a decent home and to have health care.
“But King’s greatest message was and is hope. The power of organizing, King said, is that it can make the owners of capital and the right wing forces in politics say yes to workers and poor people when they want to say no. If Dr. King were alive today, he would be telling us to stand up for your rights, stand up for dignity, stand up for peace, stand up for the poor and the working class, stand up for your unions. Don’t give in or give up.”
The King Sunrise Service is sponsored by the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Task Force of the ALA Social Responsibilities Round Table, the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, and World Book. It is supported by ALA’s Office for Literacy and Outreach Services.