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

Joe William Trotter Jr. is one of the deans of African American labor history. His latest contribution, Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America, is magisterial in its scope and ambition despite its length of fewer than three hundred pages. This book provides an overview of four centuries of African American labor history approximately since the arrival of slaves at Jamestown in 1619, albeit with very little coverage of the seventeenth century.

Trotter posits a simple but powerful thesis. After beginning with the assertion that "African Americans have a unique history of labor exploitation and wealth creation on American soil," he contends that "too often, popular, journalistic, public policy, and academic analyses treat the black poor and working class as consumers rather than producers" (p. xv). African American workers, therefore, must be restored to their "broader historical context … as producers, givers, and assets" (p. xv). Doing so, he argues, is vital to the important ongoing debates in the United States about the future of the city, the nation, and American democracy.

Workers on Arrival is divided into two parts. Part 1, which consists of three chapters, is titled "Preindustrial Beginnings." It covers the labor and community building of enslaved and free Black men and women; the roles played by African Americans in the abolition of slavery; rural, rural-industrial, and convict labor; and the beginnings of a Black urban industrial working class. Part 2, which consists of four chapters, is titled "The Twentieth Century." Topics examined in this section, which constitutes about 70 percent of the text, include how the Great Migration that began during World War I created a Black industrial workforce in northern cities, while also explaining how "southern cities built upon an extensive prewar history of employing black men and to some extent black women in the industrial sector" (p. 81); interracial and independent labor organizing; the "demolition of the old Jim Crow order" during the post–World War II era (chap. 6); and how the decline of the U.S. manufacturing sector during the late twentieth century eroded gains that had been made by working-class Black families, as did "the rapid spread of a … hostile and punitive system of incarceration" that disproportionately impacted the African American and Latino/Latina populations (p. 180).

Trotter concludes Workers on Arrival with a clarion call. He suggests that despite obstacles, working-class African Americans represent "the most promising prospects for rebuilding a vibrant labor movement in the twenty-first century" (p. 181). He also argues that African Americans must be considered more for their roles as "givers" rather than "takers" in thinking about how to deal with the ongoing issues of poverty, health care, housing, unemployment, and, of course, "the recent upsurge of lethal police-community relations" (p. 183).

Workers on Arrival represents an example of purpose-driven history, which Trotter, in fact, clearly states. He intends for this overview of African American labor history to serve as a tool for activists. For scholars, the book's value lies in its original and, for its length, fairly thorough survey of that subject. The book draws almost entirely on secondary sources, but it is an original synthesis and interpretation of past scholarship. Furthermore, the twenty-five-page appendix, "Interpreting the African American Working-Class Experience: An Essay on Sources," is a valuable contribution in and of itself, which must also be said of the sixty-eight pages of endnotes. This book is a must-read for students of African American labor history and of African American history generally.