Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915-45

Other historians have tended to treat black urban life mainly in relation to the ghetto experience, but Trotter offers a new perspective which complements yet also goes well beyond that approach. The blacks in Black Milwaukee were not only ghetto dwellers — they were also industrial workers. The process by which they achieved this status is the subject of Trotter’s ground-breaking study. Trotter shows how, in contrast to conventional Marxist notions, the “proletarianization” of black Milwaukee did not cause any fundamental loss of black autonomy. The making of this working class was almost exclusively a shift upward into factory jobs — away from such low-status positions as southern rural sharecroppers and northern common laborers, domestics, and personal service workers. Although these jobs were at the bottom of the urban economy, blacks were able to forge a distinctive support system that helped them survive the harsh realities of both the industrial experience and interracial conflict. Black Milwaukee offers several other significant contributions. First, Milwaukee, which was led by a socialist mayor between 1916 and 1940, provides a unique opportunity to view black urban life within a socialist context. Second, Trotter’s focus on a metropolitan area with one of the smallest black populations among major U.S. cities sharpens our overall image of blacks in the urban North. Moreover, Trotter deals with a period seldom covered in other histories of black urban communities, a period which saw the rapid expansion of the industrial work force during two world wars as well as its severe contraction during the Depression. Finally, Milwaukee provides a useful case study and theoretical model for comparing the emergence of black and white proletariats in other northern and southern cities.