Michael Honey: The 60’s activist turned historian

It’s no coincidence that a CNN documentary series on the decades of the American 20th century drew its highest ratings when dealing with the 1960s and 1970s.

Michael Honey remembers them – they shaped his life.

“It was an amazing time in this country – you had the fight for civil rights, black power, feminism, Vietnam,” Honey said. “I was arrested in a Louisville, Ky. at a civil rights protest. That’s when they started my FBI file.”

Honey was a 22-year-old Michigan student, the son of a Navy Air Force veteran, when he filed with the draft as a conscientious objector in 1969. He was assigned alternative public service, and went to Louisville to work for civil rights.
He has been an anti-war activist since, and worked seven years in the South for civil rights. Along the way, he became a writer, then a scholar and an educator.

Since 1990, the year the University of Washington-Tacoma opened, Honey has been a professor there. And not just any professor. As the new campus came together, programs and courses were designed on the fly. A history teacher, Honey stayed with his strengths. ...