The African American Urban Experience

Although African Americans have lived in cities since the colonial era, the transformation of rural blacks into a predominantly urban people is largely a twentieth century phenomenon. Only during World War I did African Americans move into cities in large numbers, and only during World War II did more blacks reside in cities than in the countryside. In their quest for full citizenship rights, economic democracy, and release from an oppressive rural past, black southerners turned to urban migration and employment in the nation's industrial sector as a new "Promised Land".

In this ground-breaking text, the work of fifteen top scholars provides a truly interdisciplinary examination of these transformations in African American urban life. Bringing together urban history; contemporary social, cultural, and policy research; and comparative perspectives on race, ethnicity, and nationality within and across national boundaries, the editors have organized this innovative volume in a three part structure ideal for classroom use. The first section provides historical perspectives, the second employs social scientific approaches, and the third offers compares the African American experience to those of other ethnic groups in twentieth-century America using the lens of race and class.

Joe Trotter is Mellon Bank Professor and Director of the Center for Africanamerican Urban Studies and the Economy at Carnegie Mellon University. He is one of the foremost historians of African American urban history, and has written numerous books on the topic.

Earl Lewis is Dean of the Graduate School and professor of history and African American studies at the University of Michigan. He is author of In Their Own Interests: Race, Class and Power in Twentieth-Century Norfolk and co-author of Love on Trial.

Tera Hunter is associate professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University, and author of the award-winning book To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War.

Part I: Historical Perspectives * 1. James Oliver Horton, “Urban Alliance: The Emergence of Race-Based Populism in the Age of Jackson” *2. Ronald L. Lewis, “Industrial Slavery: Linking the Periphery and the Core” * 3. Thomas Buchanan, “Life on the Mississippi Reconsidered: African-American Steamboat Laborers and the Work Culture of the Antebellum Western Steamboats" * 4. Brenda Stevenson, “The Nature of Slave Women’s Work: A Working Paper on Slavery” * 5. Tera Hunter, “’The Brotherly Love’ for Which This City is Proverbial Should Extend to All” * 6. Quintard Taylor, “Urban Black Labor in the West, 1849-1940: Reconceptualizing the Image of a Region” * Part II: Social Scientific, Cultural, and Policy Perspectives * 7. Alice O’Connor, “Race, Class, and Conceptual Exclusion: The Underclass Concept in Historical Perspective” * 8. Susan McElroy, “Race, Economics, and Education in the U.S.: Perspectives on Economic Thought and Methods” * 9. William A. Darity and Patrick L. Mason, “Evidence on Discrimination in Employment: Codes of Color, Codes of Gender” * 10. Karen Gibson, “Race, Class, and Space: An Examination of Underclass Notions in the Steel and Motor Cities” * 11. Richard Walter Thomas, “The Black Community Building Process in Post-Urban Disorder Detroit, 1967-1997: Implications for Public Policy” * 12. James H. Johnson, Walter C. Farrell, Jr., and Jennifer A. Stalloff, “Race, Residence, and Economic Vulnerability in a Multi-Ethnic Metropolis: The Case of the African American Male” * Part III: Comparative Perspectives * 13. Chris Friday, “Asian American Labor and Historical Interpretation” * 14. Camille Guerin-Gonzales, “Conversing Across Boundaries of Race, Ethnicity, Class, Gender, and Region: Latino and Latina Labor History” * 15. Earl Lewis, “Race” * 16. Alan Dawley, “The Problem of the 21st Century”