Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle. (Book Reviews).

Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle. By Michael Keith Honey. The George Gund Foundation Imprint in African American Studies. (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, c. 1999. Pp. xxi, 402. $29.95, ISBN 0-520-21774-8.)

In Black Workers Remember, Michael Honey brings together a rich body of interviews with African Americans who worked in industrial plants in Memphis between the 1930s and the 1990s. The book aims to break the "silences imposed by segregation" (p. 1), giving voice to a group often neglected in historical accounts. "Black Workers Remember," the author insists, "shows that working-class blacks were indeed a force in history" (p. 13).

Most of the interviews are with African Americans who worked at Firestone, a rubber factory that was one of the largest employers in Memphis until its closure in 1983. Together with his own writing, Honey uses interview extracts, affidavits, depositions, and legal testimony in order to present a multigenerational account of black workers' struggle for freedom. The book starts by exploring racial violence against blacks in the 1930s and proceeds to examine how black expectations were raised by World War II. The way that the anticommunism of the post-World War II era restricted the organization of unions, particularly those that challenged the color line, is also detailed. Honey also includes interviews with workers active in the 1968 strike by the city's sanitation workers, a struggle that gained national media attention due to the involvement of Dr. Martin Luther King. A separate chapter explores the experiences of black women, highlighting their efforts to secure and hold onto factory work. A final chapter, detailing the deindustrialization of Memphis in the 1980s, provides a bleak postscript to the efforts of black workers to break down job discrimination. Indeed, just as their efforts were beginning to produce real results, plant closings had a devastating effect on black working-class communities in Memphis.

A number of central themes emerge from the book. Like many recent works, Honey's book challenges the standard narrative of the civil rights movement, which concentrates on the protests of the 1950s and 1960s. Instead, the author emphasizes the "long decades of striving" (p. xviii) that black workers in Memphis engaged in from the 1930s through to the 1980s. Honey repeatedly stresses the positive role that unions played in the lives of black workers, arguing that "civil rights unionism" (pp. 237, 283) enabled African American workers to overcome racial discrimination in the workplace. Honey also argues that black workers became increasingly assertive between the 1930s and 1970s. While the first generation of black factory workers survived due to their ability to endure the indignities that segregation imposed on them, a later generation, hired during the era of civil rights upheavals, favored "a more militant response to white racism" (p. 121).

While primarily an oral history collection, the author does contribute a great deal to this book. In each of the eight chapters, Honey includes detailed sections that both set the context for the interviews and analyze their broader significance. These sections help to engage the reader with the themes raised in the extracts. The interviews themselves are vivid and largely succeed in presenting the "hidden history" (p. 8) of the black freedom struggle that the author promises.