Michael K. Honey, University of North Carolina Oral History collection

Labor: Michael Honey Collection on Southern Labor, 1981-1998.

Interviews conducted by University of Washington at Tacoma professor and author Michael K. Honey between 1981 and 1998 as part of his research on southern labor and civil rights. This project focuses on the close relationship between labor organizing and the civil rights movement in Memphis, Tenn., and elsewhere in the South from the 1930s through the 1970s and 1980s. Many interviewees, black and white, were workers, organizers, and rank and file union members at the Firestone Tire and Rubber Plant in Memphis, Tenn.; others, especially Myles Horton (E-0177) had close ties to the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tenn. Among other interviewees are life-long social justice and labor activists such as Hosea Hudson (E-0178). Topics include race relations at the Firestone plant before and after integration, red-baiting and other challenges unique to organizing in the South, women's experiences in industrial work and labor organizing, and occupational hazards at the Firestone plant. These interviews were used in the following works:

• Honey, Michael, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (Champaign: The University of Illinois Press, 1993).
• Honey, Michael, Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle ( (Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press, 2002).
• Honey, Michael, Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign ( (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2007)

Some interviews include Mike Honey's notes and partial transcripts. The quality of these documents may be poor because of file conversion from older word processing formats.

ONLINE INTERVIEW DATABASE

Click here for the online, sortable list of oral history interviews in this series. Each interview is cataloged in the interview database with descriptive information about the interviewee and the contents of the interview. Transcriptions and audio recordings for many of the unrestricted interviews are available in this online database.