Black Urban History at the Crossroads: Race and Place in the American City [Hardcover]

Drawing on significant recent scholarship on African American urban life over three centuries,Black Urban History at the Crossroadsbridges disparate chronological, regional, topical, and thematic perspectives on the Black urban experience beginning with the Atlantic slave trade. Across ten cutting-edge chapters, leading scholars explore the many ways that urban Black people across the United States built their own communities; crafted their own strategies for self-determination; and shaped the larger economy, culture, and politics of the urban environment and of their cities, regions, and nation. This volume not only highlights long-running changes over time and space, from preindustrial to emerging postindustrial cities, but also underscores the processes by which one era influences the emergence of the next moment in Black urban history. “This outstanding collection captures the transition in African American urban history from the preindustrial, industrial, and postindustrial era side-by-side with the post-Obama changes already underway. It fills an important void in the literature by accenting the significance of Black urban history as a vital field of American and African American studies.”
 
—Darryl C. Thomas, Penn State University
 “This collection is a timely and important consideration of the field of African American urban history by a group of the most important and influential scholars working in the field today. This is scholarship of great social and political importance and will make a great contribution to African American history, urban history, and to those concerned more broadly with the work of freedom in America.”
 
—Luther Adams–Free Man of Color, University of Washington
 “For anyone who wants fully to grasp what has made this nation’s cities the extraordinary, vibrant, and contested crucibles of hope, struggle, andlãš