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To the Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice

2019; Oxford University Press; Volume: 106; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jahist/jaz484

1945-2314

John A. Kirk,

American Political and Social Dynamics

Michael K. Honey's book explores Martin Luther King Jr.'s lifelong advocacy for economic justice. Drawing upon Honey's earlier work, it provides a short and accessible synthesis of his larger body of scholarship in six chapters and in less than two hundred pages. The first three chapters, covering King's family background and life up to 1966, draw upon Honey's edited collection of King's speeches and statements (“All Labor Has Dignity,” 2012) along with other sources to assess King's thoughts and declarations on economic justice. The final three chapters focus on 1967 and 1968, and draw upon Honey's award-winning Going down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign (2007) to examine King's and the Southern Christian Leadership Conferences' Poor People's Campaign and support for striking sanitation workers in Memphis. King was assassinated in April 1968 amid Memphis demonstrations. Honey is among a number of scholars who have sought to portray a more radical King—a fighter for economic justice and human rights rather than the more anodyne King portrayed in popular culture, where he is often reduced to a sound bite from his 1963 March on Washington “I Have a Dream” speech. More broadly, Honey also makes the case for an intimate connection between struggles for civil rights and economic justice, and he argues that the ties between King, the civil rights movement, and labor unions were closer than much of the literature conveys. In refuting claims by those on the American right that they represent King's and the movement's legacy today, cherry-picking specific statements and ideas to do so, Honey is entirely convincing in his argument that both King and the movement would be firmly located on the left of American politics in terms of their strident pursuit of economic justice.