African American Urban History from Past to Future: Essays on the State of a Field

Drawing on significant recent scholarship on African American urban life over three centuries, Black Urban History at the Crossroads bridges disparate chronological, regional, topical, and thematic perspectives on the Black urban experience beginning with the Atlantic slave trade. Across ten cutting-edge chapters, leading scholars explore the many ways that urban Black people across the United States built their own communities; crafted their own strategies for self-determination; and shaped the larger economy, culture, and politics of the urban environment and of their cities, regions, and nation. This volume not only highlights long-running changes over time and space, from preindustrial to emerging postindustrial cities, but also underscores the processes by which one era influences the emergence of the next moment in Black urban history.

Leslie M. Harris is professor of history at Northwestern University. She is the author of In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863 and coeditor of Slavery in New York and Slavery and Freedom in Savannah.

Clarence Lang is Susan Welch Dean of the College of the Liberal Arts and professor of African American studies at The Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Grassroots at the Gateway: Class Politics and Black Freedom Struggle in St. Louis, 1936-75 and Black America in the Shadow of the Sixties: Notes on the Civil Rights Movement, Neoliberalism, and Politics.

Rhonda Y. Williams is professor and the Coleman A. Young Foundation Endowed Chair in the African American Studies Department at Wayne State University. She is the author of The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles against Urban Inequality and Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power in the 20th Century, as well as coeditor of the Justice, Power, and Politics book series at the University of North Carolina Press. 

Joe William Trotter Jr. is the Giant Eagle University Professor of History and Social Justice at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the author of Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America; Pittsburgh and the Urban League Movement: A Century of Social Service and Activism; and African American Workers and the Appalachian Coal Industry.