Michael Honey holds the Fred and Dorothy Haley endowed professorship of Humanities and is a founding faculty of the University of Washington Tacoma(1990), where he teaches African-American and labor history and Martin Luther King Studies. His work interweaves songs, photos, film, and oral history and links scholarship and teaching to civic engagement. His path-breaking books explore southern labor and civil rights and black labor history and King’s struggles for racial and economic equality. He has served as president of the Labor and Working-Class History Association and as the Harry Bridges Endowed Chair of Labor Studies at the University of Washington. He is a graduate of Howard and Northern Illinois and Oakland Universities, and lives with his wife Patti Krueger in Tacoma, Washington. Prior to graduate school, he was Southern Director of the National Committee Against Repressive Legislation, based in Memphis.
Research/Teaching Areas: American Labor Since the Civil War, Doing Community and Oral History, Labor and Community Organizing, A Multi-Cultural Perspective, Life and Thought: Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Angela Y. Davis, The Black Freedom Movement in Perspective, Black Labor in America