Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America by Joe William Trotter, Jr. (review)

Too often in today's popular discourse "working class" means white, male workers in industrial settings. This narrow conceptualization distorts the true working class in the United States and limits opportunities for mobilizing workers in social justice campaigns to expand democracy, increase economic security, and dismantle structural racism. Joe Trotter's Workers on Arrival centers black urban workers in the historical development of the United States and provides a much needed corrective to popular conceptions of the working class. This well-written, fast-paced, and engaging history integrates labor history, global studies, capitalism, slavery, African American studies, and comprehensive micro-histories that contextualize race, labor, and gender to detail all the ways black workers have always participated as "producers, givers, and assets" in the making of America (xv).

While centering black urban workers in this history of the United States, Workers on Arrival details the ways black people used existing institutions, built communities, and created opportunities to fight for freedom, equality, and citizenship. Trotter demonstrates that to understand US history, we must recognize the centrality of the African American working class. The book covers roughly three hundred years of the preindustrial black experience and looks at the urban, industrial black working class from the Great Migration to twenty-first-century challenges.

Trotter expertly weaves a comprehensive account of the ways black workers helped develop colonies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and created opportunities to be active participants in "their own lives as well as the New World social order" (3). Black workers enriched the colonies through their labor and by being purchased on the open market. At the same time, they found creative ways to build dynamic communities that supported self-help organizations and social movements, including abolition, civil rights, and labor rights. This long view of black workers in the history of the United States paints a vivid picture of the vital roles black people have played in shaping the nation.

During the antebellum period, black workers, free and enslaved, provided the necessary labor to build urban infrastructure, support expanding plantation systems, and offer expert knowledge in key areas like canoe building, carpentry, blacksmithing, and ship piloting. They worked as skilled craftsmen, general laborers, and domestic laborers. After the Revolutionary War, the slow move toward freedom also coincided with challenges from new immigrants and racist employment practices that shut the door to many skilled trades and general laborer positions. As the nation moved closer to a confrontation over slavery, states and municipalities undermined opportunities for black laborers with restrictive legislation. Mob violence also restricted free black workers' opportunities for skilled and, increasingly, even general labor and domestic work. It also increased and solidified residential segregation.

Drawing from their African heritage, black people in early America built independent black institutions to protect themselves from violence and fight racist conditions in urban societies. Mutual aid societies, fraternal societies, labor organizations, and religious congregations all provided avenues for black community building and economic and social security. The escalating national tensions around slavery opened the door for black Americans to turn the Civil War into a fight for full equality "as workers and citizens of African descent" (46). Black efforts for full equality and citizenship through land ownership and paid labor were met with massive resistance by the elite white planter class through a new system of forced labor, mass incarceration, and mob violence after the war. Many young black men and women moved to urban areas across the nation to gain access to more equitable employment, education, and housing. Because the organized labor movement remained overwhelmingly white, black male workers found entry to northern manufacturing jobs through strikebreaking.

Expanding job opportunities and the Great Migration created an exciting period of activism for the black working classes. Black workers challenged the state, white hostility, and employers to dismantle the racial job ceiling, end housing segregation, and gain...