A pioneering effort to understand working-class African Americans as historical agents, Black Milwaukee situated the Great Migration within an ongoing debate over workers' ability to shape the transition from agricultural to industrial society. By joining that debate, Trotter inherited an attention to class consciousness and the significance of work that distinguished the “new labor history” of the 1960s and 1970s, but he also adopted a teleological understanding of modernization that elided historical and geographical complexities of working-class experience. By developing a more flexible understanding of “proletarianization,” the author argues, contemporary scholars can benefit from Trotters' theoretical framework without replicating its conceptual blind spots.
Joe William Trotter Jr., Black Milwaukee : The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915-45 (Urbana, 1985).
2.
For the claim that new labor historians overlooked race, see Herbert Hill, “The Problem of Race in American Labor History,” Reviews in American History24 ( 1996): 189-208. For an overview of Gutman's scholarship, see Ira Berlin's, “ Introduction,” in Gutman, Power and Culture: Essays on the American Working Class (New York, 1987), 3-69; Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1972); Sidney W. Mintz, “ Slavery and the Rise of the Peasantry,” Historical Reflections6 (Summer 1979); 215-42; David Montgomery, Beyond Equality; Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862-1872 (New York, 1967); and Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War ( New York, 1970). For more nuanced critiques of race and labor history, see Nell Irvin Painter's critique of Hill in “ The New Labor History and the Historical Moment,” Politics, Culture and Society2 (Spring 1989 ): 367-70; and David Roediger, “ `Labor in White Skin': Race and Working Class History,” in Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays in Race, Politics and Working Class History (New York, 1994 ), 21-38.
3.
August Meier and Elliot Rudwick, Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW (New York, 1979); Nell Irvin Painter, The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: His Life as a Negro Communist in the South ( Cambridge, 1979); Paul B. Worthman, “Black Workers and Labor Unions in Birmingham, Alabama, 1897-1904,”Labor History10 (Summer 1969), 375-407; James Green, “The Brotherhood of Timber Workers, 1910-1913: A Radical Response to Industrial Capitalism in the Southern U.S.A,” Past and Present60 (August 1973), 161-200; and Jervis Anderson, A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait (New York, 1972); Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem during the Depression (Urbana, 1983). For an early review of the literature on race and labor, see Joe William Trotter, “ African American Workers: New Directions in U.S. Labor Historiography,” Labor History35 (Fall 1994): 495-523. Unfortunately, little of this early work gained the attention of scholars who attempted to synthesize the new labor history in the late 1980s. See, for example, the essays in J. Carroll Moody and Alice Kessler-Harris, eds., Perspectives on American Labor History: The Problems of Synthesis ( DeKalb, 1989).
4.
Lee D. Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954 (Berkeley, 1998); Daryl MichaelScott, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880-1996 (Chapel Hill, 1997); E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (Chicago, 1939); and Charles S. Johnson, The Negro in American Civilization: A Study of Negro Life and Race Relations in the Light of Social Research (New York, 1930). For a critique of the comparison between African Americans and immigrants, see Steven Steinberg, The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in America ( New York, 1981); Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto, 1890-1930 (New York, 1963); Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920 (Chicago, 1967); and Kenneth L. Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870-1930 (Urbana1976). Trotter cites their dissertations with his own in Black Milwaukee, 279, n. 4.
5.
Daniel T. Rogers , “Tradition, Modernity, and the American Industrial Worker: Reflections and Critique,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History7 (Spring 1977): 659. See also Frederick Cooper, “ Africa and the World Economy,” in Frederick Cooper, Florencia E. Mallon, Steve J. Stern, Allen F. Isaacman, and William Roseberry, eds., Confronting Historical Paradigms: Peasants, Labor, and the Capitalist World System in Africa and Latin America (Madison, 1993), 106-7.
6.
On the change in civil rights history, see Charles M. Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Struggle (Berkeley, 1995), 413-41; Trotter, Black Milwaukee; Dennis Dickerson, Out of the Crucible: Black Steelworkers in Western Pennsylvania, 1875-1980 (Albany, 1986); Peter Gottleib, Making Their Own Way: Southern Blacks' Migration to Pittsburg, 1916-1930 ( Urbana, 1987); James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration ( Chicago, 1989); Peter Rachleff, Black Labor in the South: Richmond, Virginia, 1865-1890 (Philadelphia , 1984); Earl Lewis, In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia ( Berkeley, 1991); and Eric Arnesen, “Up from Exclusion: Black and White Workers, Race, and the State of Labor History,” Reviews in American History26 ( 1998):, 146-74.
7.
Nikhil Pal Singh , Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, 2004 ); and Jacqueline Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History91 (March 2005): 1233-63.
8.
Trotter, Black Milwaukee, 238, 1, 237.
9.
For examples of reviews, see Kenneth Kusmer, “Urban Black History at the Crossroads,” Journal of Urban History13 (1987): 460-70; James R. Grossman, “ Making the Afro-American Working Class,” Reviews in American History14 (1986): 226-32; and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels , “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (New York, 1972), 335, n. 5.
10.
Julie Saville, The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina, 1860-l870 (New York, 1994); Alex Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South (New York, 1996); and Tera W. Hunter, To “Joy MyFreedom”: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge, 1997).
11.
William P. Jones, The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South (Urbana, 2005); and Friedrich Engels, “ On Social Relations in Russia,” in Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader, 597.
12.
Trotter, Black Milwaukee, 1-36, 207; and Hunter, To “Joy My Freedom.”
13.
See Heather Ann Thompson, “ Making a Second Urban History,” 291-97 at 294, and Arnold R. Hirsch, “Second Thoughts on the Second Ghetto ,” 298-309 at 300, both in Timothy J. Gilfoyle, ed., “ Urban History, Arnold Hirsch, and the Second Ghetto Thesis,” Journal of Urban History29 (March 2003).
