To the Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice by Michael K. Honey

Abstract

Reviewed by: To the Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice by Michael K. Honey Marcia Chatelain To the Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice. By Michael K. Honey. (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2018. Pp. xii, 241. $34.99, ISBN 978-1-4328-5047-0.) Each January, scholars and activists alike prepare to refute superficial and simplistic tributes to Martin Luther King Jr. The widespread celebration of the King holiday—from churches to schools to corporations—makes this difficult. King's legacy is invoked to promote empty multiculturalism and facile ideas of change, and it reflects erasures in civil rights history. Historian Michael K. Honey rights some of these wrongs in To the Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice. With clear writing and a thoughtful voice, Honey guides readers through pivotal movements of King's life by foregrounding his tense and symbiotic relationships with the labor movement. Honey adds texture to King's journey from being a descendant of people who "experienced deep poverty in the countryside" to the supporter of striking sanitation workers in Memphis the day before his assassination (p. 22). Honey emphasizes that King's path was sometimes cleared, and sometimes muddied, by an interracial, but not always harmoniously integrated, labor movement. Honey provides a biographically driven look at how the labor movement formed King's leadership style and strategies. King's class consciousness emerged early, with his having lived in Jim Crow Atlanta, and grew sharper during his years at Morehouse College, when he partially financed his education by doing manual labor jobs. King wrote, "I saw economic injustice firsthand, and realized that the poor white was exploited just as much as the Negro" (p. 28). King's belief that economic injustice knew no color and demanded solidarity did not always resonate with working-class whites in labor unions. King not only had to overcome the racism within union hierarchies but also had to contend with virulent red-baiting. Honey notes that the 1955 merger of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) led to barriers for King. "These tragic developments of the Cold War era," Honey writes, "cut short hopes that civil rights and labor organizing would move forward together" (p. 35). Although the movements unfolded at different speeds, labor unions such as the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and AFL-CIO affiliate the United Packinghouse Workers of America continued to provide support for King. The tensions between King and the AFL-CIO extended into other realms of Cold War politics, including King's support for a "third way" approach to reconciling impulses toward "capitalism and communism," in newly independent nations around the world (p. 61). While chronicling King's relationship to the labor leaders who supported efforts like the March on Washington, Honey connects King's work with the other signs of growing hostility toward organized workers. For instance, King was indicted in Alabama for violating "a state antiboycott law," a measure that had been passed to curtail union mobilization; and the 1964 Civil Rights Act ensured workers of color rights to "union apprenticeships" and provided other worker protections (pp. 41, 62). The second half of the book traces the years from the height of labor–civil rights coalition building, epitomized in the United Auto Workers' support of the Selma-to-Montgomery [End Page 548] march, to the day of King's death, the day after his speech that demanded a "dangerous unselfishness" in behalf of workers (chap. 6). Honey's book ends in the present, with an overview of failures to realize King's vision. Yet the sober and optimistic tone of the narrative continues as Honey describes the electoral victories and continued work of racially progressive labor organizing, and he recognizes Coretta Scott King's labor activism after her husband's death. Honey concludes the book by wondering if we are closer to King's hope for a world where "'resources are held not for ourselves alone but as instruments of service for the rest of humanity.'" "Are we moving in that direction?," Honey asks. And, with King, he...