Bringing Back the Black Working Class

The COVID-19 pandemic in the United States has had disproportionately horrific consequences for the health, safety, and economic stability of African American and working-class communities. However, the crisis also has illustrated the ways in which Black working-class people have not been the passive victims of the federal state’s decades-long retreat from job security, social welfare protections, and equitable policymaking that preceded the coronavirus outbreak. Where they have not lost employment altogether due to COVID, Black workers have been frontline responders in essential, low-paid service industries and the public sector. As home health employees; food workers; caretakers in child, senior, and disabled care facilities; restaurant carry-out and grocery deliverers; janitorial and postal staff; warehouse and food processing plant workers; mass transit operators; and providers in contemporary “gig” markets, they have stood in harm’s way for others by virtue of their precarious location in the economy. Further, Black working-class protesters have spearheaded resurgent “Black Lives Matter” mass demonstrations against the police violence and extralegal racial terror that intensified under the Donald J. Trump presidency—yet reflected a longer history of governmental neglect and complicity in areas such as housing, education, wages, and wealth alongside the deadly operations of the criminal justice system. Indeed, Black laborers have been an undervalued bellwether of the status of social citizenship, participatory democracy, and transformative prospects for the nation’s working-class majority.

Joe William Trotter, Jr.’s sweeping yet concise book, Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America, presents a compelling, highly readable case that African American workers—far from being a burden or a threat to the body politic—have been assets and contributors to global capitalist development, urbanization, community development, and political transformation from the transatlantic slave trade to the present millennium. A comparable work that comes to mind is Trotter’s own Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915–45 (1985), a pioneering book that challenged literature portraying the twentieth-century Black urban migration from the narrow standpoint of ghetto formation, and urban crisis and decline. Here, Trotter argued that the formative processes shaping newly arrived southern migrants’ lives were instead their transformation into an industrial working class and the broad-based Black community- and institution-building that issued from this metamorphosis.

At the time of Black Milwaukee’s initial publication, the “working class” as a general social category had long since lost currency in U.S. Cold War politics and culture as officials and commentators recast the nation as a prosperous “middle class” republic against the backdrop of mid-century economic expansion (At a popular level, one of the many accomplishments of the “Occupy Wall Street” insurgency of the 2010s was reasserting class conflict as a defining feature of U.S. life.) Then, too, the Black working class had been further obscured in the discourse of the “underclass,” an emergent category of the 1970s that removed displaced Black workers from any structural relations of production. Instead, this racialized minority was characterized less by their joblessness than by a deficient “culture of poverty” that reinforced their dismal circumstances. Like its predecessor, then, Workers on Arrival builds on Trotter’s long-term project of bringing the working class back into sharp focus and taking steady aim at depictions of an American working class that, when recognized at all, too often has been equated with blue-collar whiteness. Spanning a wider swath of time than Trotter’s groundbreaking classic, Workers on Arrival synthesizes nearly a century of African American labor, working class, and urban historical scholarship for general and academic audiences. A prolific and influential author and editor, Trotter also highlights new directions in the field for specialists.

From the colonial period onward, forced African migrants generated wealth not only through uncompensated labor but also through their value as commodities bought and sold on global and domestic markets. However, a “free wage-earning black proletariat gradually emerged within the...