Workers on Arrival: Black Labor and the Making of America. By Joe William Trotter, Jr

Abstract

The history of how African Americans “forged strong identities as workers” (183) is “critical to any discussion of the nation’s productivity, politics, and the future of work in today’s global economy” (xv), writes Joe Trotter, Jr. This claim would seem to represent a consensus view. But so often in American history, journalists, elite leaders, politicians, and even historians have argued or presumed otherwise. As such, Workers on Arrival is not just a welcome new synthesis of Black workers in urban America but an urgent history that seeks to overturn assumptions about who is part of the “working class,” and indeed, who built America. In seven concise chapters, Trotter weaves together threads from more than a century of historiography to recount four centuries of African American labor history in specific urban contexts. As Trotter warns his reader at the outset, the book does not depict “a linear process that moved inexorably from historic patterns of exclusion to inclusion” (xix). Indeed, acknowledging this non-linear history allows for “deeper and more thoughtful historical perspectives on the dynamics of race and class relations” in American history, and even debunks its master narratives (183).