Bringing Back the Black Working Class

Abstract

Joe William Trotter, Jr ’s sweeping yet concise book, Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America, presents a compelling, highly readable case that African American workers—far from being a burden or a threat to the body politic—have been assets and contributors to global capitalist development, urbanization, community development, and political transformation from the transatlantic slave trade to the present millennium [ ]of Black Milwaukee’s initial publication, the “working class” as a general social category had long since lost currency in U S Cold War politics and culture as officials and commentators recast the nation as a prosperous “middle class” republic against the backdrop of mid-century economic expansion (At a popular level, one of the many accomplishments of the “Occupy Wall Street” insurgency of the 2010s was reasserting class conflict as a defining feature of U S life ) Then, too, the Black working class had been further obscured in the discourse of the “underclass,” an emergent category of the 1970s that removed displaced Black workers from any structural relations of production Channeling insights from scholars like Darlene Clark Hine, Jacqueline Jones, Victoria Wolcott, Leslie Brown, LaShawn Harris, and Marne L Campbell, Trotter argues that women were crucial actors in the internal migration of black workers, and they often circulated in and out of industrial work themselves, as well as continued to carve out employment opportunities for themselves, and others, in underground ventures [ ]these activities—and women’s roles therein—were central to the “upbuilding” of vibrant Black urban public spheres that flourished on the margins of teeming industrial economies and racially restrictive housing markets “The explosion of postwar government-funded housing, health, education, and transportation projects created a ‘golden age’ for building and construction workers, bankers, and contractors,” Trotter summarizes, “but black workers received few of the employment benefits of this expansive economic growth” (p 142)