Michael Honey holds the Fred and Dorothy Haley endowed professorship of Humanities and is a founding faculty of the University of Washington Tacoma(1990), where he teaches African-American and labor history and Martin Luther King Studies. His work interweaves songs, photos, film, and oral history and links scholarship and teaching to civic engagement. His path-breaking books explore southern labor and civil rights and black labor history and King’s struggles for racial and economic equality. He has served as president of the Labor and Working-Class History Association and as the Harry Bridges Endowed Chair of Labor Studies at the University of Washington. He is a graduate of Howard and Northern Illinois and Oakland Universities, and lives with his wife Patti Krueger in Tacoma, Washington. Prior to graduate school, he was Southern Director of the National Committee Against Repressive Legislation, based in Memphis.
Awards:
Robert F. Kennedy award, Liberty Legacy award, H.L. Mitchell award, University Association of Labor Educator and International Labor Research Association best book awards, for Going Down Jericho Road (2007)
Lillian Smith Book Award for Human Rights, H.L. Mitchell Award for Southern Labor History, Washington State Murray Morgan Award for non-ficiton, for Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle (1999)
Charles Sydnor Award for Southern History, James Rawley Award for Race Relations History, and Herbert Gutman Award for Social History, for Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (1993)
Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Humanities Center, Stanford Humanities Center, Rockefeller and National Archives fellowships, Morehouse University’s Gandhi/King/Ikeda award, and The Boeing Corporation Martin Luther King, Jr., Award for Community Service in the South Puget Sound.
