Journal of Urban History

This article briefly examines Joe W. Trotter's Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915-45 twenty years after its publication and notes its significance for urban history. Particularly important was the book's challenge to the “ghetto synthesis,” an influential analysis of the African American experience in U.S. cities, instead of which Trotter proposed a proletarianization model. In the wake of Trotter's critique of the ghetto synthesis, studies of American cities have arrogated greater agency to African Americans.

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.

This article reflects upon the contributions and limits of Joe William Trotter Jr.'s Black Milwaukee by revisiting the book's proletarianization model. This model helped to complicate analyses and historical narratives of black urban experiences by departing from “ghetto”-based paradigms and focusing squarely on economy, class relations, and black people as laborers. But the model also proved limited, particularly as it related to the substantive versus “snapshot” incorporation of women's stories and gender analysis.

Over the past twenty years, Black Milwaukee has had a major impact in the fields of African American and American labor history, but its influence on students of urban history has been more ambiguous. Despite the significant growth over the past twenty years in the study of African Americans in cities, the subfields remain segregated. More recent work has made successful attempts to merge the study of change within American cities with an analysis of the role of African Americans in these processes. These studies' reliance on Black Milwaukee as a model shows its continuing relevance.

In his response to commentaries on Black Milwaukee, Joe William Trotter Jr. not only provides insight into his own intellectual journey toward a class-based analysis of the black urban community but acknowledges the salient limitations of the proletarianization thesis, particularly vis-à-vis the experiences of black women as outlined by Rhonda Williams. Among the specific arguments of contributors to this volume, however, he gives substantial attention to Will Jones's notion that proletarianization entailed acceptance of a “teleological model of modernization,” Wendell Pritchett's suggestion that perhaps urban historians have perceived Black Milwaukee as primarily a labor study and overlooked its contributions to urban history, and Roger Biles's query about the generalizability of the Milwaukee experience to other industrial cities. Professor Trotter concludes with reflections on the changing state of the field of African American urban history and how he might write a history of blacks in Milwaukee today.

Through an examination of the riot in Plainfield, New Jersey, in July 1967, this article explores the history of race relations, violence, and conflict in the suburban north. Nearly half of the uprisings during the “long hot summer” of 1967 occurred in small towns and suburbs, though their history is virtually unknown. This article argues that the civil disorders of the 1960s were the consequence of a long, unresolved history of racial tension in the suburbs, the failure of local government to address the grievances of African Americans, and the growing currency of a militant rhetoric of self-determination and rebellion among black suburban youth.

The limits of honor and dishonor, order and disorder, and theirs and ours were negotiated in the early modern nighttime streets. These cultural negotiations are approached here from the viewpoint of one particular street fight in the seventeenth-century town of Turku in the province of Finland, in the kingdom of Sweden. The drunken, out-of-control fight included both ritualistic forms of a masculine street fight and uncontrolled rage as well as a territorial contest over urban space. The material form of the street as well as the time of the day added their own influences. The nighttime street emerges as a place of metaphorical and physical boundaries, where open and closed, shared and private, and controlled and suppressed were defined. The aim of the article is to see urban space as something more than just a neutral site of actions and practices or a mere network of social interactions without clear material referents.