UWT Professor Wins Book Award

This past weekend UWT Professor Michael Honey won an award for his book “Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign.”

The award was from the Organization of American Historians’ Liberty Legacy Foundation and is given annual for the best book on civil rights in the US. Professor Honey received the award in New York.

From the press release:

Released in 2007, Going Down Jericho Road is the first in-depth story of the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers’ strike, a pivotal moment in the late 20th-century human-rights movement. The book tells the story of the strike, which started after two sanitation workers died in their truck due to outdated equipment and the indifference of their white supervisors. Their deaths touched off one of the most significant labor strikes in the history of the nation, one that before its end would rock the plantation mentality of Memphis’ government to its core and, on April 4, 1968, see the tragic death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Honey teaches labor and ethnic studies and American history at UWT; he has taught there since the campus opened in 1990. We thought it was a nice feather in UWT’s cap.