Clarence Lang on Joe William Trotter, Jr.’s *Building the Black City: The Transformation of American Life*

Joe William Trotter, Jr., – author of the groundbreaking Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915-45, and 2019’s Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America – has become a prolific voice among the ranks of interdisciplinary scholars documenting the case for reparations for people of African descent domestically.[i] Informed by renewed popular demands for racial justice following the COVID-19 pandemic, controversial police shootings, and “Black Lives Matter” organizing during the first Donald Trump presidency, Trotter’s latest work, Building the Black City: The Transformation of American Life, insists on “the need to integrate the creative role of African Americans as city-builders into an overall case for reparations” in the United States (p. 8). Toward this end, he seeks to capture the ways in which “African Americans set about building their own Black city within the city” (p. 1) through the acquisition of property, independent institution-building, and mass democratic movements against white supremacy. He argues that this “city-building” process, then and now, has occurred under a constant state of siege, as Black communities experienced “recurring moments of destruction and rebuilding in the face of racially charged public policies, policing, and the law,” exacerbated by economic exploitation and exclusion, cultural degradation, spatial displacement, and white mob violence (p. 135). Yet, he concludes that the case for reparative justice cannot rest simply on narratives of racial deprivation; instead, it must also include “a profound appreciation for the creativity and productivity of African Americans working on their own behalf” (p. 1).

Drawing from a multidisciplinary body of scholarship, the author takes a sweeping approach to the ways that Black communities have influenced the political, cultural, social and economic landscape of urban areas across the regions of the nation from the colonial period to the present, as well as how they have shaped the built physical environment. Part I focuses on the Lower South, encompassing Charleston, South Carolina; Savannah, Georgia; and New Orleans. This section also includes the “New South” cities of Birmingham, Atlanta, and Durham, North Carolina, as well as urban settlements in areas that Trotter characterizes as the Southeast and Southwest – Tulsa, Oklahoma; Houston, Texas; and Miami, Florida. In contrast, Part II explores Black communities in the Northeast (New York City, Philadelphia, and Boston), the Midwest (Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh), and the West (Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay, and Seattle).

The author observes striking regional differences, making the salient point that the manifestations of white racism – and the particular structures of constraint and opportunity they conditioned – affected urban Black agency in dramatically different ways across locations. For instance, “Black city-building had its deepest and most profound beginnings in the majority and near-majority Black cities of the Lower South”(p. 11), spurred by sugar and rice economies. Yet, “a small but influential slaveholding, propertied, and mixed-race elite emerged across the Lower South and undercut movements to build cohesive multiclass and mixed-race communities” (p. 11). Indeed, the most prosperous free people of color in cities like New Orleans and Charleston often “allied with slaveowners and distanced themselves from their darker-skinned brothers and sisters, enslaved and free” and sought acceptance within the Confederacy during the Civil War.(p. 35).

By comparison, the intra-racial “socioeconomic, political, and cultural conflicts in the urban Upper South were less pronounced than they were in the Deep South. . .partly because the propertied Black elite was smaller and more integrated by color than it was elsewhere” (p. 66). Paradoxically, “the road to liberty, independence, and community development was much more difficult in the urban Upper South” (p. 5) than elsewhere, though most enslaved African Americans in Upper South cities had achieved emancipation by the start of the Civil War. This was due to the fact that slaves in places like D.C. were – relative to their counterparts in the Deep South – more easily able to “hire out” their time, live away from slaveholders, and purchase their freedom. That said, European immigration, mainly from Germany and Ireland, undercut the mobility of free Black communities in the Upper South in ways unfamiliar to the Deep South. Partially as a result of these racial dynamics, the Black urban “New South” centers “provided the institutional and political foundation for challenging the emerging white supremacist Jim Crow order” (p. 68).

Despite these strong Black institutional foundations in the South, however, the most successful early Black entrepreneurs hailed from northeastern cities like Boston and Philadelphia. Moreover, it was the Midwest – altered by the Great Migration of the twentieth century – that became the most dynamic center of Black work and city-building, with Chicago emerging as the foundation for a post-Reconstruction Black resurgence of influence in national electoral politics. On the economic front, though, Black people in the West had higher rates of homeownership earlier than African Americans elsewhere in the nation, even if these properties were often of substandard quality. As Trotter argues, further, Black people in the West and the Southeast/west navigated the most complex set of identities, which made Black unity harder to forge and entailed “complicated social relations between African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, Latinx people, and people of European descent” (p. 180). In Miami, for instance, “both immigrant and American-born Blacks defined their interests in almost exclusively ethnic rather than racial terms,” though they gradually built bridges through celebratory public rituals and, notably, the creation of a short-lived local chapter of Marcus Garvey’s pan-African Universal Negro Improvement Association (p. 96).

While differences, rather than similarities, are essential for the work of historical interpretation, Trotter nevertheless notes several commonalities cutting across all of these cities and regions. First and foremost, Black city-building was anchored in the acquisition of skilled crafts and property, either through purchase or renting. This paved the way for businesses (both legal and illicit), and generated the building construction that altered both the physical and cultural terrain of the cities they inhabited. To be sure, real estate looms the largest in the author’s basis for reparations claims. “Land and homes not only offered subsistence to families and communities,” he contends, “but also provided opportunities to enter the market economy; create a measure of wealth; build institutions; and forge viable political movements for freedom and independence” (p. 123). Second, independent Black churches served a formative role in this process, placing “an indelible mark on the built environment” (p. 78). Trotter writes that “when they occupied their own buildings and opened their doors for service, they not only became magnets for new people moving into the city. They also became highly visible symbols of African American influence on the urban landscape” (p. 129). Third, Trotter highlights the central role of Black women in African American city-building, which reflected their outsized role in the daily organizational life of churches and other civic institutions. Fourth, wherever they lived and circumstances allowed, Black communities mobilized in the electoral realm, especially to challenge urban planning and taxation schemes that deprived them of equitable public resources. On this point, the book illustrates the consistency of white racist exclusion and violence across time and place, though it also captures the overall resilience of Black communities in confronting slavery and, following its demise, subsequent forms of U.S. racial apartheid and mob violence – including the Atlanta riot of 1906, the Houston riot of 1917, rioting in Chicago during the “Red Summer” of 1919, the especially destructive Tulsa riot of 1921, and the Detroit riot of 1943. As the phenomenon of “racial pogroms”[ii] against Black urban communities receded after World War II, a wave of Black rebellions emerged during the 1960s in response to the structural violence of urban-industrial decline.

Trotter observes that in our current era, shaped by racialized mass incarceration, “a new twenty-first century Black metropolis is slowly taking shape around the renovation of old central city neighborhoods; the demolition of large-scale public housing projects; and the creation of new communities on the city’s periphery and in its heretofore all-white suburban neighborhoods” (p. 8). On this point, Trotter references the 2008 home mortgage crisis, rooted in predatory lending practices, that eliminated modest gains in household wealth among a large swath of African Americans. He also gestures toward events in Ferguson, Missouri, where the suburbanization of Black working-class residents collided with a system of fragmented metropolitan governance, concentrated racialized poverty, police profiling, and exploitive municipal fines for petty traffic violations. As he suggests, the 2014-2015 Ferguson uprising was a consequence of the new “Jim Crow” of mass incarceration[iii] – defined not only by skyrocketing rates of Black incarceration for nonviolent drug offenses at the close of the twentieth century, but also by the deepening criminalization of Black communities, an enhanced militarized domestic police force, and the overall abandonment of democratic social welfare policies in favor of an expanded “punishing state.”[iv]

This repudiation of Black demands for a right to the city likely will persist, as illustrated in the recent demolition of Washington, D.C.’s Black Lives Matter Plaza mural near the White House. Coerced through legislative threats to cut the city’s transportation budget, the mural’s removal is also emblematic of efforts on the part of the second Trump presidency to dismantle federal agencies like the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, affecting fair housing practices, neighborhood development, and affordability (It bears noting that African Americans also constitute 19 percent of the federal workforce, though they comprise only 13 percent of the nation’s population.) Yet, to the extent that city-building historically has been a “mode of self-emancipation” (p. 3) for African Americans, building the “Black city” dovetails with the goal of reparative justice – which, it is safe to speculate, will continue, if not escalate, as a focus of political activity in the current environment.[v]

The strongest aspects of Building the Black City include its broad sweep of place and historical period, its extensive bibliography, and its readability for both scholars in the field of Black urban history and a broad reading public generally interested in African American history. In surveying overarching social, political and economic developments, the book’s scale invites more scholarship attuned to the role of everyday culture in making the “Black city” through public celebrations, leisure, parades, memorials, and other activities that claimed space for African Americans.[vi] Trotter’s geographical framework, while certainly comprehensive, also calls attention to the need for additional historical analysis of the “Border South” region encompassing Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, and even southern Illinois and southwestern Ohio. As reflected in the work of historians like Tracy K’Meyer, Luther Adams, Kerry Pimblott, Keona Ervin, and Walter Johnson, the “Border South” historically functioned as a transitional region where both “northern” and “southern” political economies, migration and immigration patterns, and forms of white supremacy and Black agency merged, often forecasting major shifts in the nation’s racial politics. As an analytical tool, this classification also reveals the simultaneous durability and elusiveness of regional distinctions in understanding the complexity of U.S. race relations.[vii]

Notably, Trotter maintains a nuanced historical treatment of intraracial schisms within urban Black communities. Nonetheless, the scope of these “internal ideological, class, and social differences and conflicts” (p. 207) fall out of view as the book’s chronology moves into the twentieth century. Thus, while the author discusses the role of Black middle-class professionals in displacing Black working-class residents from neighborhoods as part of gentrification in the early 2000s and onward, he has relatively little to say about other areas of difference – including the effects of post-1965 immigration from the Caribbean and Africa, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and greater cognizance of integral gender and sexual identities – that complicate the task of recognizing where contemporary Black group interests might converge, let alone determining how to reconcile internal schisms. Similarly, Building the Black City could have benefited from a more sustained description about Black interactions with Latinx and Asian-descended urban residents, particularly as many of the U.S. cities where Black people predominated in the twentieth century are becoming majority-Hispanic in the early twenty-first. Moreover, as Black populations have declined in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas, and as a Black “reverse migration” to Atlanta, Houston, Durham, and other expanding southern cities has occurred in recent decades, Trotter’s central question – “[H]ow should we define the Black city?” (p. 1) – warrants more extensive theorization. This is especially relevant to the contemporary dilemmas facing the nation’s Black mayors, who have been swept into a vortex of diminished revenues, uncertain federal funding, public-private development schemes deepening social inequalities, and national political figures unabashedly championing white supremacy.

As the nation experiences another moment of racial relapse, and African Americans’ claims to citizenship and belonging are again treated with contempt, a strong sense of dignity may compel segments of the Black population to turn further inward politically. This may renew forms of autonomous institution-building that have sustained Black communities in the past, and in the process strengthen efforts around reparative justice in the city today. From this perspective, Building the Black City not only advances the field of African American urban history, but it may also prove instructive for meeting the exigencies of this moment.

[i] Joe William Trotter, Jr., “Building the Black City: Expanding the Case for Reparations for Descendants of African People Enslaved in America,” Presidential Address, Urban History Association 10^th Biennial Conference (“Reparations & the Right to the City”), Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, October 27, 2023. For other examples, see Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality (Routledge, 1995); Robert L. Allen, “Past Due: The African American Quest for Reparations,” The Black Scholar, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Summer 1998): 2-17; Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks (Dutton, 2000); Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, “Slavery, Racist Violence, American Apartheid: The Case for Reparations,” New Politics, Vol. 8, No. 3 (Summer 2001): 46-64; Martha Biondi, “The Rise of the Reparations Movement,” Radical History Review 87 (Fall 2003): 5-18; Mary Frances Berry, My Face is Black is True: Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005); Elliot Jaspin, Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America (Basic Books, 2007); “African Americans and Movements for Reparations: Past, Present, and Future,” special issue, Journal of African American History, Vol. 97, No. 1-2 (Winter-Spring 2012); William A. Darity, Jr., and A. Kirsten Mullen, From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century, second edition (University of North Carolina Press, 2022); Marcus Anthony Hunter, Radical Reparations: Healing the Soul of a Nation (Amistad, 2024); and Calvin Schermerhorn, The Plunder of Black America: How the Racial Wealth Gap Was Made (Yale University Press, 2025).

[ii] Charles L. Lumpkins, American Pogrom: The East St. Louis Race Riot and Black Politics (Ohio University Press, 2008).

[iii] Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New Press, 2010).

[iv] See Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Harvard University Press, 2016); and Julilly Kohler-Hausman, Getting Tough: Welfare and Imprisonment in 1970s America (Princeton University Press, 2017).

[v] Beginning in 2019, cities like Evanston and Chicago, Illinois, and Durham and Asheville, North Carolina, established committees to explore municipal reparations, while the State of California commissioned a Task Force to Study and Develop Reparations Proposals for African Americans.

[vi] See, for instance, Blair LM Kelley, Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class (Liveright, 2023).

[vii] Tracy K’Meyer, Civil Rights in the Gateway to the South: Louisville, Kentucky, 1945-1980 (University Press of Kentucky, 2009); Luther Adams, Way Up North in Louisville: African American Migration in the Urban South, 1930-1970 (University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Kerry Pimblott, Faith in Black Power: Religion, Race, and Resistance in Cairo, Illinois (University Press of Kentucky, 2017); Keona K. Ervin, Gateway to Equality: Black Women and the Struggle for Economic Justice in St. Louis (University Press of Kentucky, 2017); and Walter Johnson, The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States (Basic Books, 2020). See also Clarence Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway: Class Politics and Black Freedom in St. Louis, 1936-75 (University of Michigan Press, 2009); and Lang, “Locating the Civil Rights Movement: An Essay on the Deep South, Midwest, and Border South in Black Freedom Studies,” Journal of Social History, Vol. 47, No. 2 (Winter 2013): 371-400.