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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.

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.

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Source: UC Press Blog

 Dr. Ralph Proctor, local author and CCAC professor of Ethnic and Diversity Studies, recently released his latest book, “Song of the Hill,” a memoir and tribute to the special place and culture known in Pittsburgh as “The Hill.”

The book is a moving and intimate portrait of a community that has long been the focus of authors and playwrights. Yet, according to Proctor, the area has been widely misrepresented because stories of the Hill District have featured either famous entertainers and jazz musicians or negative depictions of a downtrodden community.

“Many writers who never lived there give an erroneous picture of the Hill. This area was not about drugs, poverty and unhappy people. It was a thriving middle-class community. This book is my personal account of what life was like for an average citizen.”

“Song of the Hill” is Proctor’s recollection of his experiences between 1938 and 1960 as a youngster and through adulthood. The book also touches on the forces that destroyed this remarkable community. The author tells his story through the eyes of real people from his past, depicting everyday life, family, church, food and culture during a time period of both innocence and shameful injustice.

“I grew up in this comforting, loving neighborhood surrounded by good, hardworking people. While in the sheltering arms on the Hill, we never experienced racism. But urban renewal, white flight and racism tore down a culture, destroying lives, ambitions and dreams,” said Proctor.

Available through most online booksellers, including Amazon and Barnes & Noble, “Song of the Hill” is the third in a four-book series. Ralph Proctor’s previous titles include “Racial Discrimination against Black Teachers and Black Professionals in the Pittsburgh Public School System: 1834–1973” and “Voices from the Firing Line,” a personal account of the civil rights movement.

Kardea Brown, the breakout star of Food Network’s hit show Delicious Miss Brown celebrates the Gullah/Geechee culinary traditions of her family in this spectacular cookbook featuring 125 original mouthwatering recipes and gorgeous four-color photos.

The Way Home brings a taste of the Lowcountry South home, offering flavor-packed dishes everyone will enjoy such as:

She-Crab Soup

Seafood Potato Salad

Crabcake Benedict

Smoked Pasta Salad

Savory Bread Pudding

Peach Dump Cake

Blood Orange Salmon

Smothered Chicken

Low Country Spaghetti

Sweet Potato Cheesecake

Kardea shares her multi-generational “passed down” recipes and innovative takes on Gullah classics with home cooks everywhere. “Gullah” and “GeeChee” refer to a distinct group of African Americans living in the coastal areas of South Carolina and Georgia who have preserved much of their West African language, culture, and cuisine. The Way Home is an unabashed love letter to her family’s roots, packed with dishes that combine West African herbs, spices, and grains with traditional Southern cooking. “Gullah people laid the foundation for Southern cooking. Before farm-to-table was a fad, it was what Gullah people did,” Kardea explains. “I want to show the world that soul food is not monolithic. It’s so much more than fried chicken and vegetables cooked in pork. It’s seasonal, fresh and delicious! ”

Flavoring her recipes with cherished family anecdotes, memories, and helpful tips, The Way Home is a perfect blend of the modern and the traditional. Kardea honors her proud heritage and shows off her own signature class and sass. The result is a marvelous, big-hearted collection of recipes and stories that will nourish you, body and soul.

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 It is not difficult to identify acts of overt racism in America today. They are blaring and clear violations of civil and human rights. Unfortunately, as a nation, our attention is so focused on mitigating overt racism that we ignore micro-aggressions against people of color -- acts of racism that are equally as damaging but harder to identify because they operate within the law. NEGOTIATING A HISTORICALLY WHITE UNIVERSITY WHILE BLACK unpacks many of the difficulties awaiting a person of color in academic spaces, allowing the reader to experience the types of micro-aggressions that subtly maintain a “Whites only” culture within academia. Jack L. Daniel gives a face and a voice, sometimes via humor, other times via heartbreak, to the African American experience in historically White institutions of higher education. It is an honest, self-reflective autoethnographic narrative that is thought-provoking and timely, challenging African American students to take responsibility for their own pursuit of excellence while at the same time challenging faculty and administration to play their roles in ensuring equal education access and success. by Stacy Johnson 

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