Review Essay: The African American Experience in Slavery and Freedom: Black Urban History Revisited: Eric Arnesen,Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,2002,pp. 332,illustrations,notes,index,$18.95 paperback. Joe William Trotter and Eric Ledell Smith,eds.,African Americans in Pennsylvania: Shifting Historical Perspectives. University Park,PA: Penn State University Press,1997,pp. xv,519,illustrations,tables,index,$45 cloth,$19.95 paper. Craig Steven Wilder,In the Company of Black Men: The African Influence on African American Culture in New York. New York: New York University Press,2001,pp. xi,333,illustrations,notes,bibliography,index,$39.50 hardback,$22.00 paperback

Historian W.D. Wright in Black History and Black Identity: A Call for a New Historiography, makes a compelling case for the use of “Black” instead of “black” when defining people of African descent in the United States. According to Wright, middle-class and professional African Americans have, in recent years, urged society to capitalize the first letter in the word “black” when describing African Americans of the United States. This designates ethnicity, while “black” defines race and color. Wright also argues that this designation must and should be determined by African Americans, and not others. I have, therefore, decided to adopt “Black” instead of “black” when defining the race and ethnicity of people of African descent. To avoid controversy, I have also decided to use “White” when defining people of European descent, “Brown” when referring to people of Latin America, and so forth. The use of “Black” instead of “black” also challenges standard sentiment surrounding the definition “black.” While standard dictionaries define the word as a color, racial category, etc., in Western culture the term is largely associated with negativity. Here, the author attempts to challenge society's association with Blackness, including Black people, as a negative. See W.D. Wright , Black History and Black Identity: A Call for a New Historiography (Westport, Connecticut, 2001), 1-21; John McWhorter , “ Why I'm Black, not African-American,” Detroit News, September 30, 2004.

Of particular interest to scholars of the twentieth-century Black urban experience is the recent migration and community building studies within the field of Black urban history. Beginning in the 1980s, a number of Black urban history specialists began recognizing and discussing in their works the nexus between migration and the transplanting of rural culture, working-class activism, agency, comparative history, and social policy. For detailed descriptions of this emerging and evolving literature, see Joe William Trotter, Jr. , Earl Lewis , and Tera Hunter , “ Introduction: Connecting African American Urban History, Social Science Research, and Policy Debates,” in Joe William Trotter, Earl Lewis, and Tera Hunter, eds., The African American Urban Experience: Perspectives from the Colonial Period to the Present ( New York, 2004), 1-20; Earl Lewis , “To Turn as on a Pivot: Writing African Americans into a History of Overlapping Diasporas,” The American Historical Review 100 (June 1995): 765-87; Richard B. Pierce , “ Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Some Things Black?: African American Urban History,” Journal of Urban History 31(November 2004): 106-14; Kenneth L. Kusmer , “ The Black Urban Experience in American History,” in Darlene Clark Hine, ed., with an introduction by Thomas C. Holt, The State of Afro-American History ( Baton Rouge, 1986); Joe William Trotter, Jr. , Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915-1945 (Urbana, 1988), 264-82; Kenneth W. Goings and Raymond A. Mohl , “Toward a New African American Urban History,” Journal of Urban History 21 (March 1995): 283-295; Carole Marks, Farewell—We're Good and Gone: The Great Migration ( Bloomington, 1989), 1-13; Joe William Trotter, Jr., ed., The Great Migration in Historical Perspective (Bloomington, 1991); Richard Thomas , Life for Us Is What We Make It: Building Black Community in Detroit, 1915-45 (Bloomington, 1992); Gretchen Lemke Santangelo , Abiding Courage: African American Migrant Women and the East Bay Community (Chapel Hill, 1996); Alferteen Harrison, ed., Black Exodus: The Great Migration from the American South (Jackson, 1991); The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture Presents: In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience [online February 27, 2005], http://www.inmotion.org/; Quintard Taylor , In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the West, 1528-1990 (New York, 1999); Nancy Foner and George M. Frederickson , eds., Not Just Black and White: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States (New York, 2004); Robin D. G. Kelley and Earl Lewis , To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans ( New York, 2000); Kimberly Phillips , Alabama North: African-American Migrants, Community, and Working-Class Activism in Cleveland, 1915-1945 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); and James R. Grossman , Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

While the subfield of Black urban history emerged forty years ago when professional historians published scholarly works on the Black urban experience, its roots can be traced back a century ago to the discipline of sociology. One of the “founding father[s] of American sociology,” William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, in his pioneering study, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899; reprint with a new introduction by Elijah Anderson, Philadelphia, 1996), launched the first of what would later be known as the race relations interpretation of Black urban sociology. Concentrating primarily on the city's Black population in the Seventh Ward, his sociological study advanced the argument that Black migration from the Upper South severely weakened Philadelphia's Black community. Over the next one hundred years, social scientists, social workers, and reformers of many disciplines and interests echoed the social pathology arguments of Du Bois and other race relations scholars. While Carter G. Woodson produced the first historical work in the area of Black urban history, the majority of scholars, social workers, and reformers writing on the Black urban experience studied outside the discipline of history. See Carter G. Woodson , “ The Negroes of Cincinnati Prior to the Civil War,” Journal of Negro History 1 (1916 ): 1-22; Kusmer , “The Black Urban Experience in American History,” in Darlene Clark Hine, ed., with an introduction by Thomas C. Holt, The State of Afro-American History (Baton Rouge , 1986), 91-122; Trotter , Black Milwaukee, 264-82; Trotter , The Great Migration in Historical Perspective , 10-14.

Melville J. Herskovits , Myth of the Negro Past ( New York, 1941), 6. The civil rights movement, the emergence of social history, and the profession's insistence on revisionist histories, especially in the area of slavery, led to a proliferation of ground-breaking Black urban history studies on colonial/antebellum slaves, free Blacks, and African American communities following the Civil War. For a look at recent slavery studies and the evolution of the scholarship with respects to Black urban history, see Peter H. Wood , “`I Did the Best I Could for My Day': The Study of Early Black History during the Second Reconstruction, 1960-1976,” William and Mary Quarterly 35 (January 1978): 166-99; Paul Finkelman , Encyclopedia of Slavery (Upper Saddle, New Jersey , 1997); Paul Finkelman , Slavery and Historiography: Articles on American Slavery (New York 1990); William D. Piersen , Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England (Amherst, 1988); Francis G. Couvares et al., ed., Interpretations of American History: Patterns and Perspectives, V. 1, 7th ed. (New York, 2000); Sylvia Frey , Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (New Jersey, 1991 ); Shane White , Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York, 1770-1810 (Athens, 1991 ); Michael Mullin , Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean, 1736-1831 ( Urbana, 1992); David Brion Davis , The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Ithaca , 1975); Donald R. Wright , African Americans in the Early Republic, 1789-1831 (Arlington Heights, Illinois , 1993); Leslie M. Harris , African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863 (Chicago, 2003); Richard C. Wade , Slavery in the Cities: The South, 1820-1860 (New York, 1964); Leon Litwack , North of Slavery: the Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (Chicago, 1961); Nell Irvin Painter , Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (New York, 1996); Betty Fladeland , Abolitionists and Working Class Problems in the Age of Industrialization ( Baton Rouge, 1984); Ira Berlin , Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York , 1974). Daniel E. Walker , No More, No More: Slavery and Cultural Resistance in Havana and New Orleans ( Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).

For a detailed description of African and African American voluntary associations and societies, see Toyin Falola, ed., Africa, V. 2, African Cultures and Societies Before 1865 (Durham, 2000); Basil Davidson , The African Genius: An Introduction to African Social and Cultural History ( Boston, 1969); Cheikh Anta Diop , The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality, edited and translated by Mercer Cook (1955; Westport, Connecticut, 1974); M.C. Jedrej , “Medicine, Fetish, and Secret Society in West African Culture,” Africa 46, No. 3 (1976): 176-88; Ruth B. Phillips , “Masking in Mende and Sande Society Initiation Ritual,” Africa 48, No. 3 (December 1976): 265-76; Darlene Clark-Hine and Earnestine Jenkins , eds., A Question of Manhood: A Reader in U.S. Black Men's History and Masculinity, 1750-1870 (Bloomington, 1998); Robert L. Harris , “Early Black Benevolent Societies, 1780-1830,” Massachusetts Review (Fall 1979); Michael Gomez , Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South ( Chapel Hill, 1998); Mullin , Africa in America; Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves ( New York, 1999); Julia Sudsbury , “Other Kinds of Dreams”: Black Women's Organizations and the Politics of Transformation (London, 1998); Evelyn Brooks-Higginbotham, Religious Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, 1993); Cynthia Nerdon-Morton , Afro-American Women of the South and the Advancement of the Race, 1895-1925 (Knoxville, 1989). For a look at White secret societies in British North America and the United States, see Charles William Heckethorn , The Secret Societies of All Ages and Countries: A Comprehensive Account of Upwards of One Hundred and Sixty Secret Organizations—Religious, Political, and Social—from the Most Remote Age Down to the Present Time (New York , 1897); J.M. Roberts , The Mythology of Secret Societies (New York, 1972); Bernard Fay , Revolution and Freemasonry, 1680-1800 (Boston, 1935 ).

For a discussion on African religious customs and beliefs, the development of African American religion in British North America and the United States, and the emerging scholarship on the subject of Black Christianity in the United States, see John S. Mbiti , African Religious and Philosophy, 2nd ed. (1969; New York, 1990); Timothy E. Fulop and Albert J. Raboteau, eds., African-American Religion: Interpretive Essays in History and Culture ( New York, 1997); Cornel West and Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., eds., African American Religious Thought: An Anthology (Louisville , 2003); Phillip Luke Sinitiere , “Early Desert Christianity in African-American Relief,” unpublished paper, 2003; Steve Vaughn , “Making Jesus Black: The Historiographical Debate on the Roots of African-American Christianity,” Journal of Negro History 82 (Winter 1997): 25-41; Judith Weisenfeld , “ On Jordan's Stormy Banks: Margins, Center, and Bridges in African American Religious History,” in Harry S. Stout and D. G. Hart, eds., New Directions in American Religious History ( New York, 1997).

For new scholarship that examines contemporary African American fraternities and sororities, see Tamara L. Brown , Gregory S. Parks , Clarenda M. Phillips , eds., African American Fraternities And Sororities: The Legacy And The Vision (Knoxville, 2005); Walter M. Kimbrough , Black Greek 101: The Culture, Customs, and Challenges of Black Fraternities and Sororities (Madison and Teaneck, New Jersey, 2003); Lawrence C. Ross, Jr. , The Divine Nine: The History of African American Fraternities and Sororities (New York, 2002); Ricky L. Jones , Black Haze: Violence, Sacrifice, and Manhood in Black Greek-Letter Fraternities (Stony Brook, New York, 2004); Elizabeth C. Fine , Soulstepping: African American Step Shows (Urbana, 2003); Dorie Williams-Wheeler , Be My Sorority Sister—Under Pressure (Chicago, 2003); Paula J. Giddings , In Search of Sisterhood ( New York, 1994).

For other historiographical and historical discussions on Blacks in Pennsylvania away from African Americans in Pennsylvania, see Gary B. Nash , Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia's Black Community, 1720-1840 ( 1988; reprint, Cambridge, 1991); Patrick Rael and Phillip Lapsansky , eds., Pamphlets of Protest: An Anthology of Early African-American Protest Literature, 1790-1860 (New York , 2001); William J. Switala , Underground Railroad in Pennsylvania (Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, 2001); Gary B. Nash and Jean R. Soderlund , Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath (New York, 1991); Roger Lane , Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 1860-1900 (Cambridge, 1986); Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (1961 ; reprint, New York, 1996); Julie Winch , ed., Sketches of the Higher Classes of Colored Society in Philadelphia (University Park, Pennsylvania , 2000); Thomas P. Slaughter , Bloody Dawn: The Christiana Riot and Racial Violence in the Antebellum North ( New York, 1991); Geraldine R. Segal , Blacks in the Law: Philadelphia and the Nation (University Park: Pennsylvania, 1983); Billy G. Smith and Richard Wojtowicz, comp., Blacks Who Stole Themselves: Advertisements for Runaways in the Pennsylvania Gazette, 1728-1790 (University Park: Pennsylvania , 1989); Margaret S. Creighton , The Colors of Courage: Gettysburg's Forgotten History: Immigrants, Women, and African Americans in the Civil War's Defining Battle (New York, 2005); David McBride , Integrating the City of Medicine: Blacks in Philadelphia Health Care, 1910-1965 (Philadelphia, 1989); Peter Gottlieb , Making Their Own Way: Southern Blacks' Migration to Pittsburgh, 1916-30 (Urbana, 1989); Charles Pete T. Banner-Haley , To Do Good and to Do Well: Middle Class Blacks and the Depression, Philadelphia, 1929-1941 ( New York, 1993); Lawrence A. Glasco , ed., The WPA History of the Negro in Pittsburgh (University Park: Pennsylvania, 2004 ); Dennis B. Downey and Raymond M. Hyser , No Crooked Death: Coatesville, Pennsylvania, and the Lynching of Zachariah Walker ( Urbana, 1991); Elijah Anderson , Tukufu Zuberi , eds., The Study of African American Problems: W. E. B. Du Bois's Agenda, Then and Now (Thousand Oaks, California, 2000 ); John Bodnar , Roger Simon , and Michael P. Weber , Lives of Their Own: Blacks, Italians, and Poles in Pittsburgh, 1900-1960 ( Urbana, 1982); Dennis C. Dickinson , Out of the Crucible: Black Steelworkers in Western Pennsylvania, 1875-1980 (Albany, 1986).

Black labor history, like slavery studies, has undergone a transformation within the past two to three decades. With increased emphasis placed on community agency, southern cultural dynamics, the role of the agricultural labor force on Black industrial labor, gender, interracial and intra-racial dimensions, ethnicity, alternating civil rights and trade union strategies, and comparative history, African American labor history today builds from the earlier intellectual approaches of W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles Wesley, Carter G. Woodson, Abram Harris, Sterling D. Spero, Lorenzo Greene, and others writing largely in a trade unionist and race relations context. The literature also adds to the new social history paradigm of Herbert Gutman and David Montgomery, a theoretical framework that emphasizes Black autonomy, self-assertiveness, and class consciousness. Contemporary authors, like Eric Arnesen, assert that African American consciousness and self-esteem among the working class was largely rooted in cultural constructs, a civil rights credo, and community agency. Interestingly, while trade unionism played a profound role in expanding the labor movement among African Americans, routinely, the union movement and its clear lines of demarcation hampered total Black dependence on organized labor. For a detailed discussion of Black labor history and historiography, see Sterling D. Spero and Abram L. Harris , The Black Worker: The Negro and the Labor Movement (1931; reprint with a new preface from Herbert G. Gutman, New York, 1968), vii-xiii; David Montgomery , Workers' Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (1979; reprint, New York, 1981); Herbert H. Gutman , “ The Negro and the United Mine Workers of America: The Career and Letters of Richard L. Davis and Something of Their Meaning,” in Julius Jacobson, ed., The Negro and the American Labor Movement (Garden City, New York, 1968); Philip S. Foner and Ronald L. Lewis, eds., The Black Worker: A Documentary History from Colonial Times to the Present ( Philadelphia, 1980); William H. Harris , The Harder We Run: Black Workers since the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); William H. Harris , Keeping the Faith: A. Phillip Randolph , Milton P. Webster , and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 1925-37 (Urbana, 1977); Tera Hunter , To `Joy Our Freedom': Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Cambridge, 1997); Earl Lewis , In Their Own Interests, xiii-xiv; Trotter , Black Milwaukee, xv-xvi; Gottlieb , Making Their Own Way, ii; Jacqueline Jones , Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York , 1986); Michael R. Botson , Labor, Civil Rights, and the Hughes Tool Company (College Station: Texas A. & M. University Press, 2005); Neil Foley , The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture ( Berkeley, 1997); Rebecca Montes , “Working for American Rights: Black, White, and Mexican American Dockworkers in Texas during the Great Depression,” in Samuel C. Hyde, Jr., ed., Sunbelt Revolution: The Historical Progression of the Civil Rights Struggle in the Gulf South, 1865-2000 ( Gainesville, 2003); Ernest Obadele-Starks , Black Unionism in the Industrial South (College Station, Texas , 1993); Michael K. Honey , Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Memphis Workers Organize (Urbana, 993); Eric Arnesen , Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Politics, 1863-1923 (New York, 1991); Joe William Trotter, Jr. , “A frican-American Workers: New Dimensions in U.S. Labor Historiography,” Labor History 35, No. 4 (1994): 495-523; Julia Kirk Blackwelder , Now Hiring: The Feminization of Work in the United States, 1900—1995 ( College Station, Texas, 1997); Eric Arnesen, ed., The Human Tradition in American Labor History (Wilmington, Delaware, 2004); Mary Romer , Maid in the U.S.A, tenth anniversary edition (New York , 2001). James S. Olson , “Organized Black Leadership and Industrial Unionism: The Racial Response, 1936-1945,” Labor History, 10, No. 3 (1969): 476-85.

For scholarly discussions on contemporary anti-Black male bias, see Michael B. Katz , Mark J. Stern , and Jamie J. Fader , “ The New African American Inequality,” Journal of American History 92 (June 2005): 75-108; Andrew Hacker , Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, and Unequal (New York , 2003); Stephan Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom , America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible (New York, 1997); Manning Marable , The Great Wells of Democracy: The Meaning of Race in American Life (New York, 2002).