Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle

Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle. By Michael Keith Honey. The George Gund Foundation Imprint in African American Studies. (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, c. 1999. Pp. xxi, 402. $29.95, ISBN 0-520-21774-8.)

In Black Workers Remember, Michael Honey brings together a rich body of interviews with African Americans who worked in industrial plants in Memphis between the 1930s and the 1990s. The book aims to break the "silences imposed by segregation" (p. 1), giving voice to a group often neglected in historical accounts. "Black Workers Remember," the author insists, "shows that working-class blacks were indeed a force in history" (p. 13).

Most of the interviews are with African Americans who worked at Firestone, a rubber factory that was one of the largest employers in Memphis until its...