The African American Urban Experience: Perspectives from the Colonial Period to the Present - Hardcover

Historians and general readers alike owe a debt to Joe W. Trotter, Earl Lewis, and Tera W. Hunter for this wide-ranging, deep-running, interdisciplinary study of African-American urban history. Placing African Americans at the center of their investigation, they show the complexities of class, gender, and race in urban life. This fresh and important history is essential reading for anyone interested in American cities. It testifies to the vigor of collaborative scholarship.

- Nell Irvin Painter, Edwards Professor of American History at Princeton University, author of Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol and Southern History Across the Color Line.

"An intellectually enchanting collection - a state of the field volume that brings African American history to life. The distinguished editors provide both an essential reference work and an exciting undergraduate reader."

- Vicki L. Ruiz, author of From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth Century America

"Trotter, Lewis, and Hunter have assembled a lively collection of essays covering topics as wide-ranging as the history of slavery, public policy, gender, and labor. This volume offers a valuable introduction to the state of social scientific and historical research on blacks in urban America."

- Thomas J. Sugrue, Bicentennial Class of 1940 Professor of History and Sociology Chair of the History Graduate Group University of Pennsylvania

From the early years of the African slave trade to America, blacks have lived and laboured in urban environments. Yet the transformation of rural blacks into a predominantly urban people is a relatively recent phenomenon - only during World War One did African Americans move into cities in large numbers, and only during World War Two did more blacks reside in cities than in the countryside. By the early 1970s, blacks had not only made the transition from rural to urban settings, but were almost evenly distributed between the cities of the North and the West on the one hand and the South on the other. 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' or 'Flight from Egypt'. In order to illuminate these transformations in African American urban life, this book brings together urban history; contemporary social, cultural, and policy research; and comparative perspectives on race, ethnicity, and nationality within and across national boundaries.