UC Press Blog

Building the Black City shows how African Americans built and rebuilt thriving cities for themselves, even as their unpaid and underpaid labor enriched the nation's economic, political, and cultural elites. Covering an incredible range of cities from the North to the South, the East to the West, Joe William Trotter, Jr., traces the growth of Black cities and political power from the preindustrial era to the present.

Joe William Trotter, Jr., is Giant Eagle University Professor of History and Social Justice, Director and Founder of Carnegie Mellon University's Center for Africanamerican Urban Studies and the Economy (CAUSE), and author of Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America.

In BUILDING THE BLACK CITY, you use the term “Black City” as a way of describing a unique type of urban environment and experience. Why was it important for you to name it, and how do you differentiate the “Black City” from a city with Black people living in it?

I define the Black City as an area that reflects the impact of a predominantly Black community in an urban environment, but the Black City is by no means exclusively Black in spatial terms nor was it built only by Black people. It included substantial collaboration with whites and included whites and other ethnic/racial groups within its geographical parameters. Moreover, ideologically, it also embraced the notion that the Black City would be more inclusive and democratic than the predominantly white, racially segregated portion of the community. Just as the US was known historically as a white nation with a variety of groups including people of African descent living within it, the Black city is not construed as only Black.

Much of the material written about the Black experience in early America is centered on rural areas, which had the largest populations of enslaved people. What do we miss when we neglect to study Black lives in urban communities?

By neglecting the Black urban experience at the founding of the nation and earlier, we are left with the erroneous impression that Black people only became significantly urban people during the 20th century Great Migration, which is not true. African Americans participated in the building of the predominantly white city from the outset of the nation's history. They also undertook the work of building their own urban communities at the same time. A focus on the early urban history of Black people is important for shedding light on the Black city-building process as a long-term historical phenomenon.

There has been a Black urban working class since this country’s inception. How has it shaped America’s cities?

In my previous book, Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America, I emphasize how unfree enslaved African American labor and later underpaid free Black labor played a major role in building the American city across all regions of the country, North, South, and West. In early America, enslaved African American workers provided the bulk of the workforce in the building of majority and near-majority Black cities like New Orleans, Savannah, and Charleston. In the urban Upper South, Black workers helped to build Baltimore, Richmond, and Washington, DC, including the White House and the US Capitol building. And in the urban Northeast, enslaved and later free people of color left their mark on the construction of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. Similarly, under the impact of the Great Migration, they helped to shape the building of cities in the urban midwest, including Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Cincinnati, to name a few. In the case of Chicago, it was a Black man, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, who became known as the first non-Indigenous American to settle and help build Chicago. Although their numbers were much smaller in the urban West until the mid to late 20th century, African Americans also helped to influence the city-building process in the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, and Los Angeles.

Throughout the book, no matter the city, two institutions that bonded the Black community were the church and the school. Can you speak to the obstacles that were erected by whites to prevent religious and educational development in Black communities?

It was not just the church and the school that stood out in the building of the Black City. It was most often the church, fraternal orders and mutual benefit societies, the school, and diverse entrepreneurial developments that took center stage in the building of Black cities. Each of these entities faced enormous obstacles gaining a foothold in the city but Black people found ways to circumvent white resistance and built their own institutions. Indeed, the independent Black church emerged at the forefront of these infrastructure building efforts. Take the pioneering African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), for example. In the 1790s, when it broke ranks with the white church and set up an independent body, it faced tremendous white resistance. It took another 20 years of legal struggles and a major court case before the white church relinquished control over the finances, buildings, and liturgy of the Black congregation.

The book goes into great detail highlighting the entrepreneurs, pastors, teachers, and community leaders who helped create the Black urban experience. Why was it important to you to give a face to individual people, and who were some you found the most interesting?

There is a long tradition of historical writings on the African American experience that emphasize the doings of the most well-educated and wealthier members of the African American community (particularly doctors, lawyers, and educators), especially since there was an even longer tradition of anti-Black historical studies that accent notions of Black intellectual inferiority, "laziness," and people with a poor work ethic. My book aims to supplement portraits of energetic and creative Black professionals, intellectuals, and business people with a more detailed focus on the poor and working-class dimensions of the Black city-building process. The role of ordinary everyday people (general laborers and household workers as well as skilled craftsmen and women) receives substantial attention in this book. They not only contributed to community-building as clients and dues-paying members of a variety of Black businesses and professional services, but they often contributed their labor to the actual work of constructing Black churches, schools, and fraternal organizations. Pioneering Black leaders often emerged out of the soil of working-class Black life. Richard Allen, founder of the independent Black church movement with Absalom, was a butcher, woodcutter, shoemaker, and janitor, while Andrew Bryan, the founder of the Afro-Baptist church in Savannah, was an enslaved worker on a nearby plantation. For her part, when the enslaved household worker and field hand Harriet Tubman escaped from a Maryland plantation and moved to Philadelphia, she became a wage-earning domestic laborer in the homes of the city’s white elite.

A common theme in the Black urban experience is white terrorism, two infamous examples being the Tulsa race riots and the New York City draft riots during the Civil War. How central are those two events and their aftermath to the broader story of this book? 

The Tulsa and New York City riots are emblematic of the violent resistance that African Americans faced nationwide in their efforts to construct the Black city, an independent movement that aimed to transform what one historian has described as "segregation," a demeaning experience, into "congregation," a symbol of empowerment. Across America, over several centuries, Building the Black City shows how Black people constructed their own institutional infrastructure against the ongoing backdrop of racial violence and hostility—in the urban South, North, West, and Midwest, most notably the destructive Atlanta Riot of 1906 and the "Red Summer" Chicago Riot of 1919, among many others.