Class and Color: An Interview with Joe William Trotter, Jr.

Joe William Trotter, Jr. has foregrounded "the centrality of the African American working class to an understanding of U.S. history," as he puts it in Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America (2019). Through the first half of the 20th century, as Trotter observes, African American history tended to focus on elite figures, shifting in the 1960s and 70s to look at the ghetto and the underclass resulting from segregation. Beginning in the 1980s, Trotter and colleagues such as Earl Lewis have called attention to the everyday work that many African Americans have done in building the modern U.S., particularly following the Great Migration, the exodus of African Americans from the rural South to the industrial North, as well as to urban areas in the South.

Trotter began with granular studies of the Black working class, notably in his first two books, Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915-45 (1985; expanded ed., 2007), and Coal, Class, and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia, 1915-32 (1990). They were pathbreaking efforts, drawing on archival records, newspaper accounts, interviews, and other sources to reconstruct a largely invisible history, and Trotter continued to sketch the history of the Ohio River Valley in further volumes, including River Jordan: African American Urban Life in the Ohio Valley (1998) and Race and Renaissance: African Americans in Pittsburgh Since World War II (with Jared N. Day; 2010). Alongside those, Trotter has co-edited a number of volumes on the region, including African Americans in Pennsylvania: Shifting Historical Perspectives (with Eric Ledell Smith; 1997); Honoring Our Past: Proceedings of the First Three Conferences on West Virginia's Black History (with Ancella Bickley; 1991); and Teenie Harris Photographer: Image, Memory, History (with Cheryl Finley and Laurence Glasco; 2011).

Building on those specific histories, Trotter has also produced more synthetic accounts of African American life from the 1600s to the present, culminating in Workers on Arrival, as well as the comprehensive textbook The African American Experience (2001) and the high school text From a Raw Deal to a New Deal?: African Americans in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (Young Oxford History of African Americans, Vol. 8; 1995). In addition, he has co-edited a number of volumes on broad topics, including The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gender (with Earl Lewis; 1991); African Americans in the Industrial Age: A Documentary History, 1915-1945 (with Earl Lewis; 1996); Encyclopedia of the Great Depression, vols. I and II (2004); The African American Urban Experience: From the Colonial Era to the Present (with Earl Lewis and Tera W. Hunter; 2004); African American Urban History Since World War II (with Kenneth Kusmer; 2009); and The Ghetto in Global History: 1500 to the Present (with Wendy Z. Goldman; 2017).

Born in 1945, Trotter grew up in Vallscreek, West Virginia. His parents had experienced the Great Migration, moving from Alabama to West Virginia for work in the 1930s, and they raised a large family there. In high school in West Virginia, Trotter took courses to be a brick mason, but after his father's premature death, his mother moved the family to Newcomerstown, Ohio in 1961. Taking more academic courses in his final two years of high school, he planned on joining the Air Force, but, encouraged by a coach to go to college, he attended community college in Illinois and Carthage College in Kenosha, WI (BA, 1969). He taught history at Tremper Senior High School in Kenosha for six years, as well as worked extra jobs, for instance at the Snap-On Tool Co. there. In 1975 he returned to graduate school, attending the University of Minnesota, where he received his MA and PhD (1980), writing his dissertation on the black working class of Milwaukee, which formed the basis for his first book. Thereafter he taught at UC-Davis (1980-85), moving to Carnegie Mellon University, where he founded CAUSE, the Center for African-American Urban Studies and the Economy, in 1995, and has since directed it. He currently holds the Giant Eagle Chair...