Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915-45

Other historians have tended to treat black urban life mainly in relation to the ghetto experience, but in Black Milwaukee, Joe William Trotter Jr. offers a new perspective that complements yet also goes well beyond that approach. The blacks in Black Milwaukee were not only ghetto dwellers; they were also industrial workers. The process by which they achieved this status is the subject of Trotterrs"s ground-breaking study. This second edition features a new preface and acknowledgments, an essay on African American urban history since 1985, a prologue on the antebellum and Civil War roots of Milwaukeers"s black community, and an epilogue on the post-World War II years and the impact of deindustrialization, all by the author. Brief essays by four of Trotterrs"s colleagues--William P. Jones, Earl Lewis, Alison Isenberg, and Kimberly L. Phillips--assess the impact of the original Black Milwaukee on the study of African American urban history over the past twenty years.

Joe William Trotter Jr. is Mellon Professor of History and director of the Center for African American Urban Studies and Economy (CAUSE) at Carnegie Mellon University. He is also past president of the Labor and Working Class History Association and the author of Coal, Class, and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia, 1915-32.