Table of Contents

OAH Magazine of History
Volume 7, No 4
Summer 1993

Copyright ©
Organization of American Historians

African-American History: Origins, Development, and Current State of the Field

Joe W. Trotter

In a 1986 historiographical essay, John Hope Franklin argued that every generation of historians has the opportunity to write its own history and that it was obliged to do so. According to his calculations, four generations of unequal length characterized the development of Afro-American history. With some modifications, particularly during the nineteenth century, this essay builds upon Franklin’s general periodization (2).

The first generation emerged before the Civil War and persisted through the 1890s. The nineteenth century pioneers included Robert Benjamin Lewis, William Wells Brown, Martin R. Delaney, William Cooper Nell, James C. Pennington, George Washington Williams, and W. E. B. Du Bois. These black historians produced seminal studies of black life, which linked the experiences of Africa, the United States, and other parts of the diaspora. Only Du Bois—educated at Fisk University, Harvard, and the University of Berlin—brought university training to the task. The early writers included many ministers with a deep commitment to theological interpretations of the world. They used the Bible as both source material and inspiration. Much like their white counterparts during the period, their work was narrative rather than analytical in style: it eschewed strict adherence to the emergent canons of historical scholarship and enlisted history as a tool in advancing the “progress of the race” (3). The nineteenth century pioneers also believed, as historian Clarence Walker has noted, that “self-conscious elevation of mind and manners would put prejudice to flight” (4).

Scholarship on black history changed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Historian George Washington Williams helped usher in a new type of African-American history in 1882, when he published his two-volume History of the Negro Race in America (5). Although Williams adopted the fundamental conceptual framework of his forebears, he moved beyond the use of biblical texts and employed a wide-range of primary sources—newspapers, organizational records, statistics, archival manuscripts, and personal interviews. In effect, Williams reflected to a great extent the growing emphasis in America and Europe on a systematic or “scientific” approach to historical scholarship. Still, Williams remained committed to the notion that “in the interpretation of History the plans of God must be discerned. ‘For a thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday when it is passed, and as a watch in the night’” (6). Thus, rather than making a fundamental break with the “idealist tradition,” Williams served as a bridge leading to the second generation of scholarship on black history (7).

During World War I and the 1920s, the professional and scholarly activities of W. E. B. Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson symbolized the rise of a second generation of black historians. Supplementing his 1896 study The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States, 1638-1870, Du Bois in 1915 published The Negro, signalling the slow emergence of university-trained professionals in the field. It was Carter G. Woodson, however, who would become most influential. Educated at Berea College in Kentucky, the Sorbonne in Paris, the University of Chicago (M.A., 1908), and Harvard, where he received the Ph.D. in 1912, Woodson pursued an energetic schedule of professional, promotional, and publishing activities. In rapid succession, he helped to found the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (1915), the Journal of Negro History (1916), Negro History Week (1926), and the Negro History Bulletin (1933). Building upon the research methodology of the expanding historical profession, Woodson and Du Bois developed a more rigorous, systematic, and analytical approach to black history. They also emphasized the contributions of African Americans to the development of American society, particularly its literary, artistic, and musical traditions (8). Woodson expressed this new sentiment in a famous statement about the obligation of black historians. They must, Woodson argued, “save and publish the records of the Negro, that the race may not become a negligible factor in the thought of the world” (9). In short, such studies highlighted the positive side of black participation in American culture as a means of combating white racist portrayals of African Americans and as a way of instilling racial pride.

Under the onslaught of the Great Depression and the continuing profes-sionalization of the field, however, students of black history questioned aspects of the analytical but nonetheless contributionist paradigm. At a time when black workers suffered rising unemployment, poverty, and homelessness, it seemed less meaningful to highlight the extraordinary doings of educated black elites. Du Bois would once again play a leading role in rethinking African-American history just as he had participated in other phases of black historiography. Although his writings had taken an increasingly separatist turn by the early 1930s, Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction (1935) exhibited faith in the efficacy of interracial class unity (10). Emphasizing the role that slaves played in their own emancipation, Du Bois advanced an original interpretation of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Other black historians also expressed growing dissatisfaction with the liberal perspective which the depression had brought into sharp relief. In 1937, for example, in an essay entitled “A New Interpretation of Negro History,” historian Lawrence Reddick decried the liberal approach to black history. Trained at Fisk University and later at the University of Chicago, where he completed his doctoral studies in history in 1939, Reddick criticized established studies for failing to systematically analyze the factors that shaped black life, and for ignoring which forces were “influential” and “under what circumstances” (11). Along with Du Bois, Reddick advocated a new interpretation of black history—one that emphasized “the record of the clashes and rationalizations of individual and group impulse against an American social order of an unfolding capitalism, within which operates semiarticulate arrangements and etiquettes of class and caste” (12).

The radical sensibilities of scholars like Reddick and Du Bois were subordinated in subsequent years to an integrationist agenda. With the onset of World War II, the economy recovered and stimulated the resurgence of black migration into the urban industrial centers of the nation. Re-employment during the war years rekindled hope that perhaps blacks would enter the mainstream of American life after all. The number of university-trained black historians increased markedly, although their numbers remained relatively small; they were joined by an increasing number of white historians who largely adopted the prevailing black perspective, which emphasized the impact of Afro Americans on the history of the nation (13).

Stimulated by the expanding Civil Rights movements, post-World War II scholars also sought ways to reinforce the black struggle for full citizenship rights. As historian John Hope Franklin noted, “Historians of the third generation were compelled by circumstances to fight for the integration of Afro-American history into the mainstream of the nation’s history. Their fight to integrate Afro-American history into the mainstream was a part of the fight . . . to gain admission to the mainstream of American life—for the vote, for equal treatment, for equal opportunity, for their rights as Americans” (14). As might be expected, then, this third generation of historians turned to the experiences of the free black population in the late antebellum years and to the events of Reconstruction for subject matter. In so doing, they countered prevailing notions that ex-slaves were illiterate, corrupt, and politically unprepared to participate in a democracy.

By overturning demeaning stereotypes, scholars of black history believed that they could help to complete America’s unfinished revolution which began with emancipation and create a truly multiracial and pluralist society. Kenneth Stampp, a highly sympathetic white historian of the period, captured the essence of the liberal integrationist perspective when he wrote in 1956 that “innately Negroes are, after all, only white men with black skins, nothing more, nothing less” (15). This perspective suggests how far the third generation had travelled toward reversing the racist portrait of African Americans in U.S. history, but it also reflected how far succeeding generations would have to travel in order to correct remaining cultural and gender biases.

A fourth generation of scholars challenged the liberal, integrationist paradigm and pushed black history in new and often radical directions. During the 1970s, black historians and their white allies broke ranks with the older revisionist perspectives. Spurred on by the Black Consciousness Movement, new writers used slavery rather than Reconstruction or free blacks as a springboard to alter the shape of black history. They adopted interpretive strategies and techniques that illuminated the interior lives of slaves and outlined the development of “a distinct Afro-American culture” (16). Like their white counterparts, many of the black scholars of this era received their training in the major graduate schools of the nation. By the late 1980s, however, some of these scholars had started to question the prevailing “community and culture” focus. Such studies invariably overlooked the gendered nature of black history, and, for the industrial era, only slowly apprehended the dynamics, meaning, and significance of a working class forming within the African-American community (17). A closer look at the historiography of slavery, emancipation, and black life in the industrial era brings the development of African-American history into sharper focus.

In 1918, the white historian U. B. Phillips published American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime. Using plantation records, which offered unusual insight into the words and deeds of the planter class, Phillips portrayed slavery as a paternalistic institution. He recognized the coercive nature of the slave regime, but justified the institution as a mechanism for introducing “backward Africans” to the fruits of western culture. Although W. E. B. Du Bois, Carter Wood-son, and a few other black historians rejected this portrait, Phillips nonetheless became the principal authority on black life under bondage.

During the 1950s, scholars gradually revamped our understanding of slavery and overturned the paternalistic thesis. Stampp in 1956 published The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South and Stanley Elkins released his Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life in 1959. Both Stampp and Elkins emphasized the coercive nature of slavery, an institution designed to reap profits rather than incorporate slaves into the mainstream of western culture. Stampp showed in substantial detail how slaves resisted bondage through a variety of tactics, including running away, work slowdowns, feigning sickness, and, at times, by violent rebellions and plots to rebel. Unlike Stampp, however, Elkins conceptualized slavery as a concentration camp, using the Nazi analogy, and treated slaves as uniformly subdued by the system. As Elkins understood it, slavery divorced Africans from their heroic traditions and transformed “men” into “boys” (18). Only during the 1970s did scholars challenge these perspectives on slaves and slavery.

As the non-violent Civil Rights movement gave way to the separatist Black Power movement during the late 1960s and early 1970s, historians challenged the image of slaves as culturally impoverished, devoid of family life, isolated from community, and largely passive in the face of a dehumanizing experience. John Blassingame, Eugene Genovese, Lawrence Levine, and the late Herbert Gutman all helped to establish a new portrait of African-American cultural and community life under slavery (19). These scholars moved beyond plantation records to examine sources left by slaves themselves which revealed unique family and religious practices, songs, dances, folklore, and oral traditions. These studies demonstrate how slaves responded to their lowly position by promoting group solidarity, building self-esteem, and supporting both covert and sometimes overt forms of resistance to bondage. John Blassingame argued, for example, that “however oppressive or dehumanizing the plantation was, the struggle for survival was not severe enough to crush all of the slave’s creative instincts” (20). During the 1980s and early 1990s, while scholars continued to elaborate upon the community and culture perspective, they deepened our understanding of slavery by adding new chronological, regional, and topical dimensions, including studies of slave religion, women, and the process of emancipation and community formation in the antebellum North (21).

Research on emancipation and Reconstruction has also highlighted the role of blacks in shaping their own history. Studies by Barbara Fields, Eric Foner, Thomas Holt, Leon Litwack, Nell Painter, Armstead Robinson, and others, all have shown how ex-slaves defined their own freedom and took steps to establish a new life after the Civil War (22). This scholarship reveals, for example, that the sharecropping system was not merely an unequal and exploitative relationship between landowners and workers, but an intense bargaining arrangement: landowners reluctantly gave black laborers access to land and a measure of independence in its cultivation. Building upon their cultural experiences in the slave community, ex-slaves also founded a plethora of new institutions, especially churches, fraternal orders, and social clubs, which in turn stimulated the growth of small business, professional, political, and civil rights organizations. Although black workers and the poor would often articulate goals and aspirations at odds with emerging black economic and political elites, they nonetheless supported elite efforts to advance the interests of the race.

Paralleling the growth of scholarship on the early emancipation era were studies of the origins, causes, and consequences of Jim Crow. C. Vann Woodward helped to launch this field of inquiry in 1955 when he published The Strange Career of Jim Crow. He emphasized the proliferation of state statutes prescribing a separate place for blacks and whites in the institutional, social, and political life of the South. In the “rigid and universal” form that it had taken by the mid-twentieth century, Woodward argued that the segregationist system was a product of the 1890s and early 1900s. Before disfranchisement, lynchings, and de jure racial separation fully triumphed, he said that there had transpired a period of experimentation, alternatives, and roads not taken, including some evidence of a liberal philosophy of integrationism. In this way, similar to the post-World War II scholars of slavery, Woodward held out hope that contemporary desegregation efforts would find fruitful southern soil and grow.

The modern segregationist system produced no scholarly defense comparable to U. B. Phillips’s defense of the antebellum slave South. This was undoubtedly a consequence of the prevailing social climate. For at the time that historians turned their attention to this important subject, African Americans and their tiny core of white supporters were hard at work dismantling the system. Nevertheless, students of Reconstruction like Joel Williamson soon challenged the Woodward thesis. Williamson downplayed the importance of the law, located the origins of segregation in the racist mentality of whites, and pushed its beginnings back toward the early emancipation years. With the exception of August Meier’s groundbreaking study Negro Thought in America, 1880-1915 (1963), the debate between Woodward and his critics unfolded with little sense of blacks as agents in the making of the segregationist era. In 1978, however, Howard Rabinowitz published his Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865-1890, and changed the terms of the debate.

Focusing on the responses of blacks, as well as the nature of black-white interactions, Rabinowitz moved the discussion onto new terrain. He stressed the importance of black exclusion, alongside issues of integration and segregation. In the region’s institutional life, he argued that segregation sometimes replaced exclusion, making the integration-segregation dichotomy untenable. Moreover, Rabinowitz demonstrated that segregated institutions, such as schools, were not gifts of an increasingly racist society, but the product of demands from a highly politicized black community. In subsequent years, using different approaches, a variety of scholars advanced the study of black life in the Jim Crow South, by giving increasing attention to workers in rural and urban contexts (23).

Scholars of American and African American urban history are also transforming our understanding of black life. Studies of the Great Migration of World War I and its aftermath reflect these changes. Until recently, scholars of black population movement emphasized how blacks were pushed out of the rural South by intolerable socioeconomic and political conditions on the one hand, and pulled into the urban North by the labor demands of wartime production, restrictions on European immigration, better race relations, and access to citizenship rights on the other. Recent studies by Earl Lewis, James Grossman, and Peter Gottlieb have challenged this static image of black migration. These scholars demonstrate how African Americans used their kin and friendship networks, pooled their resources, shared information, and in general played a pivotal role in organizing their own movement into the expanding cities of the North and South (24).

Even before scholars turned to the Great Migration, however, they had focused—and continued to focus—on the transformation of black urban life itself. By the mid-1970s, Gilbert Osofsky, Allan Spear, and Kenneth Kusmer had documented the rise of black urban ghettos. They illustrated the impact of white racism on various aspects of black urban life, highlighted sharp differences between blacks and European immigrants, and established a uniquely racial and spatial interpretation of black urban history. By the mid-1980s, an increasing number of new studies addressed significant blind spots in this scholarship. Books by Dennis Dickerson, Robin D. G. Kelley, Peter Rachleff, and Joe W. Trotter, to name a few, emphasized the emergence of new classes and social relations within the black urban community (25). In varying degrees, they document the development of the black community and the transformation of black institutions and politics. Either explicitly or implicitly, they also conclude that the process of class formation or proletarianization is as critical to understanding the black urban experience as is the process of residential and institutional segregation.

Despite important strides in the development of African American history as the 1990s got underway, important conceptual and substantive gaps remained. The role of black women and gender analysis only slowly entered the field. Helping to pave the way, however, were books and essays by Elsa Barkley Brown, Sharon Harley, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Darlene Clark Hine, Dolores Janiewski, Jacqueline Jones, Earl Lewis, Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, and Deborah Gray White, among others (26). These studies illuminate the interactive impact of gender, class, and race dynamics on the black experience. They also suggest essential components of a new synthesis—the specific outlines of which will be complex. But its central theme is quite clear: In the face of external hostility and substantial internal fragmentation, African Americans created a unified (if not unitary) cultural, political, and community life.

Bibliography
Cox, LaWanda, “From Emancipation to Segregation: National Policy and Southern Blacks” in John B. Boles and Evelyn Thomas Nolan, ed., Interpreting Southern History: Historiographical Essays in Honor of Sanford W. Higginbotham. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987.

Franklin, John Hope, “On the Evolution of Scholarship in Afro-American History” in Darlene Clark Hine, ed., Afro-American History: Past, Present, and Future. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986.

———, “Afro-American History: State of the Art,” Journal of American History (June 1988): 163-173.

———, George Washington Williams: A Biography. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1985.

Harris, Robert L., “Coming of Age: The Transformation of Afro-American Historiography,” Journal of Negro History 57 (1982): 107-121.

Higginbotham, Elizabeth and Sarah Watts, “The New Scholarship on Afro-American Women,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 1 and 2 (1988): 12-21.

Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 17 (1992): 251-274.

Hine, Darlene Clark. Afro-American History: Past, Present, and Future. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986.

Hoover, Dwight W., ed. Understanding Negro History. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968.

Kusmer, Kenneth L., “The Black Urban Experience in American History,” in Darlene Clark Hine, ed., The State of Afro-American History: Past, Present and Future. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, l986.

Meier, August and Elliott Rudwick. Black History and the Historical Profession. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986.

Rabinowitz, Howard, “From Exclusion to Segregation: Southern Race Relations, 1865-1890,” Journal of American History 63 (Sept. 1976).

Redding, J. Saunders, “The Negro in American History: As Scholar, as Subject,” in Michael Kammen, ed., The Past Before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980.

Reddick, Lawrence, “A New Interpretation of Negro History,” Journal of Negro History 22 (Jan. 1937): 17-28.

Thorpe, Earl E. Black Historians: A Critique. New York: William Morrow Company, 1971.

Trotter, Joe William, Jr., “Afro-American Urban History: A Critique of the Literature,” in Joe William Trotter, Jr., Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915-45. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, l985.

———, ed. The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gender. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.

———, “African American Society,” in Peter N. Stearns, ed., Encyclopedia of Social History. New York: Garland Publishing, 1993.

Walker, Clarence E, “The American Negro as Outsider, 1836-1935,” Canadian Review of American Studies (Summer 1986): 137-154.

Williamson, Joel. The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South since Emancipation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Woodman, Harold D., “Economic Reconstruction and the Rise of the New South, 1865-1900” in John B. Boles and Evelyn Thomas Nolan, ed., Interpreting Southern History: Historiographical Essays in Honor of Sanford W. Higginbotham. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987.

Woodward, C. Vann. American Counterpoint: Slavery and Racism in the North/South Dialogue. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.

Endnotes
1. Darlene Clark Hine, Afro-American History: Past, Present, and Future (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986); August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, Black History and the Historical Profession (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); Peter N. Stearns, ed., Expanding the Past: A Reader in Social History, Essays from the Journal of Social History (New York: New York University Press, 1988).

2. John Hope Franklin, “On the Evolution of Scholarship in Afro-American History,” in Hine, ed., Afro-American History,14-22; J.HFranklin, “Afro- American History: State of the Art,” Journal of American History (June 1988): 163-173.

3. Robert L. Harris, “Coming of Age: The Transformation of Afro-American Historiography,” Journal of Negro History 57 (1982): 107-121; Clarence E. Walker, “The American Negro as Outsider, 1836-1935,” Canadian Review of American Studies (Summer 1986): 137-154; Earl Thorpe, Black Historians: A Critique (New York: William Morrow Company, 1971), 27-61.

4. Walker, “The American Negro as Outsider,” 137.

5. John Hope Franklin, George Washington Williams: A Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).

6. Quoted in Franklin, George Washington Williams, 113; Harris, “Coming of Age,” 111.

7. For an insightful discussion of the “idealist tradition” in early black historiography, see Walker, “The American Negro as Outsider.”

8. Meier and Rudwick, Black History and the Historical Profession, 1-71; Thorpe, Black Historians, 65-124; Franklin, “Afro-American History,” 162-163; Franklin, “On the Evolution of Scholarship,” 50-51; Harris, “Coming of Age,” 111.

9. Quoted in Meier and Rudwick, Black History and the Historical Profession, 9; Franklin, “On the Evolution of Scholarship,” 51.

10. Harris, “Coming of Age,” 112-113; Walker, “The American Negro as Outsider,” 144; Franklin, “On the Evolution of Scholarship,” 51-52; Meier and Rudwick, Black History and the Historical Profession, 101-102.

11. Lawrence Reddick, “A New Interpretation of Negro History,” Journal of Negro History 22 (Jan. 1937): 17-28; Meier and Rudwick, Black History and the Historical Profession, 103-104.

12. Reddick, “A New Interpretation,” 26.

13. Meier and Rudwick, Black History and the Historical Profession, especially chapters 2 and 3. Also see C. Vann Woodward, “Clio with Soul,” Journal of American History (June 1969): 5-20.

14. Franklin, “On the Evolution of Scholarship,” 56-57.

15. Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1956), vii-viii.

16. Leslie H. Owens, “The African in the Garden: Reflections about New World Slavery and its Lifelines,” in Hine, ed., The State of Afro-American History, 25-36; Harris, “Coming of Age,” 114-115; Meier and Rudwick, Black History and the Historical Profession, 239-276.

17. Darlene Clark Hine, “Lifting the Veil, Shattering the Silence: Black Women’s History in Slavery and Freedom,” in Hine, ed., The State of Afro-American History, 223-249; Elizabeth Higgin-botham and Sarah Watts, “The New Scholarship on Afro-American Wo-men,” Women’s Studies Quarterly, 1 and 2 (1988): 12-21; Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and the Meta-language of Race,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 17 (1992): 251-274; Kenneth Kusmer, “The Black Urban Experience in American History,” in Hine, ed., The State of Afro-American History, 91-122; Joe W. Trotter, “Afro-American Urban History: A Critique of the Literature,” in Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915-45 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 264-282.

18. See David Brion Davis, “Slavery and Post-World War II Historians,” Daedalus 103 (1974): 2-16.

19. Meier and Rudwick, Black History and the Historical Profession, 239-276.

20. John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 105.

21. Margaret Washington Creel, “A Peculiar People”: Slave Religion and Community-Culture Among the Gullahs (New York: New York University Press, 1988); Mechal Sobel, Trabelin’ On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1985). For a review of recent studies of black life in the antebellum North, see James Oliver Horton, Free People of Color: Inside the African American Community (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 1-19.

22. Useful reviews of this extensive scholarship include Armstead Robinson, “The Difference Freedom Made: The Emancipation of Afro-Americans,” in Hine, ed., The State of Afro-American History, 51-74; LaWanda Cox, “From Emancipation to Segregation: National Policy and Southern Blacks,” in John B. Boles and Evelyn Thomas Nolen, ed., Interpreting Southern History: Historiographical Essays in Honor of Sanford W. Higginbotham (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 199-253; Harold D. Woodman, “Economic Reconstruction and the Rise of the New South, 1865-1900,” in Boles and Nolen, ed., Interpreting Southern History, 254-307; and Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988).

23. C. Vann Woodward, “The Strange Career of a Historical Controversy,” in Woodward, American Counterpoint: Slavery and Racism in the North-South Dialogue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 234-260; Howard Rabinowitz, “From Exclusion to Segregation: Southern Race Relations, 1865-1890,” Journal of American History (Sept. 1976): 325-350; Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). Cf. C. Vann Woodward, “Strange Career Critics: Long May They Persevere,” Journal of American History 75 (Dec. 1988): 857-868; Howard N. Rabinowitz, “More Than the Woodward Thesis: Assessing Strange Career of Jim Crow,” Journal of American History 75 (1988): 842-856.

24. A review of this literature is in Joe W. Trotter, ed., The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gender (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).

25. Dennis Dickerson, Out of the Crucible: Black Steelworkers in Western Pennsylvania, 1875-1980 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986); Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Peter Rachleff, Black Labor in the South: Richmond, Virginia, 1865-1890 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984); Trotter, Black Milwaukee. Cf. Eric Arnesen, “Following the Color Line of Labor: Black Workers and the Labor Movement before 1930,” Radical History Review 55 (1993): 53-87.

26. Hine, “Lifting the Veil,” in Hine, ed., The State of Afro-American History, 223-249; Higginbotham and Watts, “The New Scholarship on Afro-American Women,” 12-21; Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History,” 251-274; Elsa Barkley Brown, “Womanist Consciousness: Maggie Lena Walker and the Independent Order of Saint Luke,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14 (1989): 610-633; Dolores Janiewski, Sisterhood Denied: Race, Gender, and Class in a New South Community (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985); Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present (New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1985); Earl Lewis, In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), esp. 101-109; Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?.

Joe W. Trotter is Professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University. His books, Black Milwaukee and Coal, Class, and Color, are seminal studies in the history of African-American working class formation.