This article briefly examines Joe W. Trotter's Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915-45 twenty years after its publication and notes its significance for urban history. Particularly important was the book's challenge to the “ghetto synthesis,” an influential analysis of the African American experience in U.S. cities, instead of which Trotter proposed a proletarianization model. In the wake of Trotter's critique of the ghetto synthesis, studies of American cities have arrogated greater agency to African Americans.
Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto, 1890-1930 (New York: Harper, 1971 ); Allan Spear , Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967); Seth Scheiner, Negro Mecca: A History of the Negro in New York City, 1865-1920 (New York: New York University Press, 1965); David Katzman, Before the Ghetto: Black Detroit in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 1973); Kenneth Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976); Thomas Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto: Neighborhood Deterioration and Middle-Class Reform, Chicago, 1880-1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); James Borchert, Alley Life in Washington: Family, Community, Religion, and Folklife in the City, 1850-1970 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980); Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 ( Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Arnold R. Hirsch, “Second Thoughts on the Second Ghetto ,” Journal of Urban History29 (March 2003): 299. Joe William Trotter Jr., discusses this historiography in Appendix 7 of Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915-45 (Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 1985).
2.
National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders ( New York: Pocket Books, 1968).
3.
Trotter, Black Milwaukee, 274.
4.
Steven M. Gelber , Review of Black Milwaukee, by Joe William Trotter, Jr, American Historical Review90 (December 1985): 1288. See David Montgomery , Workers' Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (Cambridge , UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979); and Herbert G.Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America (New York: Vintage Books , 1976).
5.
Trotter, Black Milwaukee, 136.
6.
James R. Grossman , “Making the Afro-American Working Class ,” Reviews in American History14 (June 1986): 228; Margo Conk, Review of Black Milwaukee, by Joe William Trotter, Jr, Journal of Interdisciplinary History18 (Summer 1987): 193; Gelber, Review of Black Milwaukee.
7.
Kenneth W. Goings and Raymond A. Mohl, eds., The New African American Urban History (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996).
