Over the past twenty years, Black Milwaukee has had a major impact in the fields of African American and American labor history, but its influence on students of urban history has been more ambiguous. Despite the significant growth over the past twenty years in the study of African Americans in cities, the subfields remain segregated. More recent work has made successful attempts to merge the study of change within American cities with an analysis of the role of African Americans in these processes. These studies' reliance on Black Milwaukee as a model shows its continuing relevance.
Joe William Trotter Jr., Black Milwaukee : The Making of an Industrial Poletariat, 1915-45 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985). For examples of works that Trotter referred to as the “ghetto synthesis,” see Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto (New York: Harper , 1971); Allan Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967); David Katzman, Before the Ghetto: Black Detroit in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 1976); and Kenneth Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976).
2.
See William P.Jones's discussion of the historiography of African Americans and labor history in this issue: “Black Milwaukee, Proletarianization, and the Making of Black Working-Class History,” Journal of Urban History33, no. 4 (2007): 544-50.
3.
See, for example, HeatherAnn Thompson, Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City ( Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).
4.
James Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Earl Lewis , In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); and Robin D.G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990).
5.
Timothy Gilfoyle , “White Cities, Linguistic Turns, and Disneylands: The New Paradigms of Urban History,” Reviews in American History26, no. 1 (1998): 175-204, 192-93; and Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
6.
See Gilfoyle, “White Cities,” for an excellent overview of the state of urban history at the end of the twentieth century. Two of the most deservedly celebrated books in urban history during the past two decades, Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), focus almost exclusively on the white political leaders and neighborhood residents who successfully worked to limit black mobility and give little attention to the response of blacks to these efforts.
7.
Cohen, Making a New Deal, Howard Gillette, Between Justice and Beauty: Race, Planning, and the Failure of Urban Policy in Washington, D.C. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Ronald H. Bayor, Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); and Kenneth W. Goings and Raymond A. Mohl, The New African-American Urban History (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996).
8.
Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
9.
Stephen Gregory , Black Corona: Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); Heather Thompson, Whose Detroit? and Guian McKee, “Liberal Ends through Illiberal Means: Race, Urban Renewal, and Community in the Eastwick Section of Philadelphia, 1949-1990,”Journal of Urban History27, no. 5 (2001): 547-83. Also see Joe William Trotter , ed., The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gender (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Joe William Trotter, River Jordan: African American Urban Life in the Ohio Valley (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998); and Joe William Trotter, Earl Lewis, and Tera Hunter, eds., The African American Urban Experience: Perspectives from the Colonial Period to the Present (New York: Palgrave , 2004).
