Michael Honey undertook more than fifty oral histories of black and white workers and labor and civil rights organizers for his first book, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights (1993). Without people’s stories, he could not tell a story that did not exist on the printed page. Inspired by the work of Theodore Rosengarten, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, and Nell Irvin Painter, he continued on with black worker interviews. In Black Workers Remember (1999), workers tell their own story, mediated by the “shared authority” of the historian. He did more interviews and drew extensively on scores of oral histories done by others located at the Sanitation Strike papers of the Mississippi Valley Collection at the University of Memphis, for Going Down Jericho Road (2007). Pete Seeger introduced Honey to John Handcox, the renowned Southern Tenant Farmer’s Union organizer and African American singer John Handcox who people had disappeared from history since the 1930s, resulting in the book, Sharecroppers’ Troubadour, and recordings of his songs. Some of these works and writing and audio clips can be explored here. He has taught oral history skills to generations of students at the University of Washington Tacoma (see link below).
Michael K. Honey, Ph.D.
Fred and Dorothy Haley Professor of Humanities University of Washington Tacoma
by Ashley Gross