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

By Joe William Trotter Jr.

Book Overview

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 Trotter'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 Milwaukee'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 Trotter'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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0252060350
• ISBN13: 9780252060359
• Release Date: June 1988
• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Length: 302 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.