A vivid account of the Memphis strike, King's last fight

The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign

By Michael K. Honey

W.W. Norton & Co. 619 pp. $35

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The Memphis sanitation workers strike came at a time when the civil-rights movement was at a crossroads. By 1968 the movement led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had achieved many of its initial goals - segregation in public accommodations had been outlawed and voting-rights legislation was being deliberated in Congress. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of nonviolence was being challenged by younger people, new organizations and a white backlash.

King had turned his energy to opposing the Vietnam War and to organizing the Poor People's Campaign. The Memphis strike offered him an opportunity to regain some of his luster, but the racial climate had changed. He was not prepared for what happened. He was not an organizer. He mobilized. And when things fell apart, he was blamed.

What Michael K. Honey does best in Going Down Jericho Road is re-create the feelings and tensions of Southern racial segregation, Jim Crow, in all of its repressive manifestations. Black people were barred from jobs, forced into inferior schools, invisible in the halls of power, not listened to, lynched, burned. He describes Memphis as a large urban plantation ruled over by politicians elected to keep the black underclass at bay. He reminds those who remember what Jim Crow was like, and reconstructs for those who can't imagine them the very real horrors of the system, not least of which was that, for as long as black labor was kept impoverished, disenfranchised and in fear, the white underclass would be checked as well.

The Memphis pigmentocracy was both an economic and a social pyramid made up of rich and educated whites, light-skinned and educated blacks, poor whites, and poor blacks. Unions, especially black ones, were a threat to the old order and had to be curtailed.

Honey is a professor of American history and of ethnic, gender and labor studies at the University of Washington in Tacoma. He has written two other related books: Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers and Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism and the Freedom Struggle. Jericho Road blends ideas and methods used in those works, in addition to explaining the importance of King to the strike before and after his assassination.

Honey himself supported the civil-rights movement, watching the impact of the 1967 Detroit riots, but at the time believed King was not radical enough. He moved to Memphis in 1970 as a civil-liberties worker and witnessed police beatings and murders. He comes to this story with a point of view. Perhaps this explains the thoroughness, intensity and clarity of his writing.

In some places the book reads like a novel. Descriptions are vivid and detailed. One learns the timbre of a voice, the number of steps taken, which facial expression is made. The shooting of King is graphic: "The bullet slammed through King's jaw on a downward trajectory, ripping through his jugular vein and spinal cord. The force of this powerful rifle shot coming at a speed of 2,670 feet per second from a distance of 260 feet twisted him and threw him flat on his back. A woman in the courtyard cried out, 'O Lord, they've shot Martin.' " The dialogue is amazing, too, thanks to Honey's extensive use of oral sources from ordinary citizens, labor leaders and city officials, as well as FBI tapes of civil-rights leaders, including King himself.

The strength of Honey's book is also its weakness (though the strengths overcome the weaknesses). Honey wants us to know everything he knows about the Memphis strike, which he spent 10 years researching. He makes the same points over and over again, albeit with different facts that are often interesting in themselves. But there is just too much information. He gives us more than we need and certainly more, in many instances, than we want. He dissects almost every element of the Memphis strike. Indeed it is this, rather than King, that is the focus of this work.

For Jericho Road - the path of the good Samaritan - did not lead to the Promised Land, but, rather, to the end of the civil-rights movement.