History professor earns civil rights book award

UW Tacoma Professor Michael Honey has earned the Organization of American Historians' Liberty Legacy Foundation Award for his book, Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign.

The award is given annually for the best book on any aspect of United States civil rights struggle. Honey received the award Saturday, March 29, in New York.

The organization said the book provides new insights into Dr. King's final year. "More than simply a top-down study of King, Going Down Jericho Road... helps us better understand the high stakes that surrounded King's final efforts to transform American society."

Released in 2007, Going Down Jericho Road is the first in-depth story of the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers' strike, a pivotal moment in the late 20th-century human-rights movement. The book tells the story of the strike, which started after two sanitation workers died in their truck due to outdated equipment and the indifference of their white supervisors. Their deaths touched off one of the most significant labor strikes in the history of the nation, one that before its end would rock the plantation mentality of Memphis' government to its core and, on April 4, 1968, see the tragic death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The Organization of American Historians is the nation's largest society dedicated to the teaching and study of the American past. The group promotes excellence in scholarship, teaching and presentation of American history.

Honey teaches labor and ethnic studies and American history and holds the Fred T. and Dorothy G. Haley Endowed Professorship of the Humanities. He has taught at UW Tacoma since the campus opened in 1990. For more information about Honey or Going Down Jericho Road, please visit Dr. Honey's Web site.