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

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

Although African Americans have lived in cities since the colonial era, the transformation of rural blacks into a predominantly urban people is largely a twentieth century phenomenon. Only during World War I did African Americans move into cities in large numbers, and only during World War II did more blacks reside in cities than in the countryside. 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". In this ground-breaking text, the work of fifteen top scholars provides a truly interdisciplinary examination of these transformations in African American urban life. Bringing together urban history; contemporary social, cultural, and policy research; and comparative perspectives on race, ethnicity, and nationality within and across national boundaries, the editors have organized this innovative volume in a three part structure ideal for classroom use. The first section provides historical perspectives, the second employs social scientific approaches, and the third offers compares the African American experience to those of other ethnic groups in twentieth-century America using the lens of race and class.