Joe W. Trotter

The Great migration in historical perspective : new dimensions of race, class, and gender

Foreword by Nell Irvin Painter Preface Acknowledgments Introduction, Black Migration in Historical Perspective: A Review of the Literature Joe William Trotter, Jr. Expectations, Economic Opportunities, and Life in the Industrial Age: Black Migration to Norfolk, Virginia, 1910-1945 Earl Lewis Race, Class, and Industrial Change: Black Migration to Southern West Virginia, 1915-1932 Joe William Trotter, Jr. Rethinking the Graet Migration: A Perspective from Pittsburgh Peter Gottlieb The White Mans Union: The Great Migration and the Resonance of Race and Class in Chicago, 1916-1922 James R. Grossman Getting There, Being There: African-American Migration to Richmond, California, 1910-1945 Shirley Ann Moore Black Migration to the Urban Midwest: The Gender Dimension, 1915-1945 Darlene Clark Hine Conclusion. Black Migration Studies: The Future Joe William Trotter, Jr. Contributors Index

Hurricane Katrina Urban History from the Eye of the Storm

In late August 2005, Hurricane Katrina touched down in the Gulf Coast region of the United States. This massive storm left in its wake death, destruction, and human suffering on a scale and scope that will no doubt make it one of the largest social catastrophes of twenty-first-century American urban history. This disaster soon ignited widespread popular and academic debates over domestic policies dealing with questions of race and class, individual and government responsibility and accountability, and the relationship among society, technology, and the environment. Yet what is too often absent from such discussions are systematic historical perspectives on the role of human decisions in shaping the outcome of so-called “natural disasters.” Accordingly, this essay explores overlapping developments in U.S. and African American urban, social, and environmental history and underscores the significance of history for advancing contemporary debates about the meaning of Katrina and the future of New Orleans and the Gulf States.

Introduction: Urban and Labor History: Old and New Connections

In 1994, the Journal of Urban History (JUH) published its twentieth anniversary issue. In his review of the journal’s first two decades of progress, historian Stuart Blumin took a highly critical view of the journal’s achievements. While acknowledging the ways that the journal helped to nourish urban history toward a more productive field of scholarship, he described two decades of JUH articles “as a composite agenda, impressive in its complexity and scope but also biased and incomplete.” The dearth of essays on labor and workingclass history was perhaps most prominent. Of the 225 full-length articles featured in the journal during the period, no more than 15 focused on “economic institutions, relations, and outcomes,” and even fewer analyzed “urban working class social life.” Over the past seven years, however, in a variety of special issues, JUH facilitated new research in such diverse subfields as “The Environment and the City” (1994), “The New African American Urban History” (1995), and “Women and the City” (1997), as well as a third special issue on “Technology and the City” (1999). With this volume, “Workers and the City,” we continue this expanded reach and present exciting and inventive work from the newest group of scholars who are self-consciously doing urban labor history. These essays accent the ways that joining urban and working-class history promises to change our understanding of both.

African American Urban Electoral Politics in the Age of Jim Crow

This article reviews the literature on black politics in the United States during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It argues that with notable exceptions, the expanding corpus of scholarship on black politics has largely focused on grassroots organizing and social movements, making electoral politics a secondary force in the history of African Americans. This critique of recent scholarship frames and introduces four articles in this special section that carry forward research on urban electoral politics as a central feature of black freedom struggles. By looking at the level of local urban party politics, this new work, this article asserts, challenges familiar narratives about the history of black electoral politics, including the steadfastness of black Republican loyalty before the Depression, the characterization of the black struggle against disfranchisement as a southern story, and the representation of black electoral leadership as middle class.

Contesting the Postwar City: Working-Class and Growth Politics in 1940s Milwaukee

landscapes’ and of meta-movements in the crofting ‘taskscape’ (155). Gentle readers might well boggle at the declaration that ‘Memory attaches to particular places and spaces; in so doing transforming them into psychic terrains which serve as anchors and mnemonics for landmarks of identity at all spatial scales’ (162). The project becomes inflated beyond ordinary credibility. This is unfortunate because the tangle of language and its mesmerizingly mixed metaphors play havoc with the message of the book, obscuring its valuable findings about the actual events and their contexts. Robertson indeed offers a wealth of documentation from the crofters’ petitions to the Board of Agriculture. He shows effectively the psychological shifts carried by men returning from the Great War, telling of their greatly enhanced sense of entitlement to land, echoing similar sentiments to those of their forebears recruited in the Napoleonic Wars a century before. He makes a good case for the notion that these men were emboldened by their war service and that the special circumstances of war and its aftermath may have been critical in the resurgence of land raiding in 1919. There are also good passages on the seasonal incidence of protest and the diffusion of actions across the Hebrides. Yet one yearns for some old-fashioned clear plain descriptions of events, in sequence, together with a systematic presentation of data on the identities and compositions of the land raiders. A clear statement of the economic context, rents, prices, wages and landlord finances would help; so too would a summary of landlord attitudes, which were evidently crucial in the ultimate successes of many land raids. The question of communal support is less well documented and so is that of leadership among the protesters, except for the ‘Shoemaker’ of Raasay, who reminds one of Hobsbawm’s ‘political shoemakers’ of an earlier age of protest. Butmostlywe have a superfluity of ‘nuances’, andmany nice local particulars, while the author offers the honest declaration that the causes of Highland protest were ‘multiple’ and impossible to ‘isolate’ (127). Yet beyond the earnest and offputting jargon of this account, students of social protest will find rich nuggets of direct testimony and a good chronology and geography of the late Highland Land Wars, the true value of this work.

The Dynamics of Race and Ethnicity in the US Coal Industry

By the turn of the twenty-first century, scholars had transformed our understanding of class, race, and ethnicity in the rise and demise of the US coal industry. Under the twin impact of the modern Black Freedom Movement and the rise of the New Labor History, studies of American labor and race relations fragmented during the late twentieth century. Following the lead of pioneering labor historian Herbert Gutman, one influential body of scholarship resuscitated the early history of the United Mine Workers of America and accented the emergence of remarkable forms of labor solidarity across the color line during the industrial era. Before this scholarship could gain a firm footing in the historiography of labor and working-class history, however, social activist and labor scholar Herbert Hill forcefully argued that emerging emphases on interracial working-class cooperation downplayed the persistence of racial divisions even during the most promising episodes of labor unity. In significant ways, the Hill−Gutman debate fueled the florescence of whiteness studies and the myriad ways that both capital and labor benefitted from a racially stratified workforce. Based upon this rapidly expanding historiography of coalminers in America, this essay explores how the overlapping experiences of black and white miners established the foundation for modes of cooperation as well as conflict, but the persistence of white supremacist ideology and social practices repeatedly undermined sometimes heroic movements to bridge the chasm between black and white workers.

Introduction Connecting African American Urban History, Social Science Research, and Policy Debates

Open any newspaper, listen to most news reports, catch the words of many politicians bemoaning the decline of the central city, and for years the images used to accompany the message pictured a black face. Since the 1960s, against the backdrop of race riots and general despair, the words black, inner city, ghetto and problems became connected and at times interchangeable. Oftentimes the stories produced appear as if blacks inhabit the inner cities alone. In this world there are no Asians, Latinos and Latinas, Native Americans, or whites. In this world the central cities are divided from power structures, businesses, labor unions, politics, and adjacent suburbs. In this world race and racism exist within a tightly bound space divorced from the larger society. Why is this? And just as important, how do we add a historical perspective to the long list of policy recommendations that have captivated public discourse for more than four decades? This books attempts to answer these and other questions. It also seeks to uncover the multiple histories of urban life in America. It centers on the history and lived conditions of African Americans, and places them in proximity and interactions with the broad spectrum of others who peopled this nation.