For over three decades, Joe William Trotter Jr. has been first a pioneer and then a leader in the new African American labor and urban history and a generous mentor to younger scholars working in these areas. The author and editor of numerous books, he has explored the making of a black working class in Milwaukee, black coal miners in West Virginia, the gender and class dimensions of the Great Migration, and black life in the Ohio Valley, among many other topics. His latest book, Workers on Arrival, joins several other overviews of black labor history, particularly William H. Harris's The Harder We Run: Black Workers since the Civil War (1982) and Robert Zieger's For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America since 1865 (2007). Trotter's version of a familiar story differs from its predecessors in a number of ways, particularly in its far broader chronological scope and its situating of the black labor experience in its larger urban and community context. Admittedly a work of historical synthesis, Trotter's book reiterates central themes of his academic career: that the African American experience cannot be understood without recognizing the centrality of the working-class experience in black history, the class dimensions of black urban history, and the importance of race in American labor history. It is also animated by a political desire to challenge contemporary analysis, advanced by some, that portrays the “black poor and working class as consumers rather than producers, as takers rather than givers, and as liabilities rather than assets” (p. xv). To the contrary, Trotter insists persuasively, black workers have been “producers, givers, and assets” (p. xv). This may come as no surprise to American historians, but it is a point worth driving home in our current polarized political environment where deep historical thinking appears in short supply.

The title of the book makes clear that those Africans who were forcibly ripped from their homes and transported against their will to the Americas were workers on arrival. And most of their descendants remained workers over the next four centuries—as slaves in agricultural and urban settings and as free black artisans, laborers, sharecroppers, convict laborers, domestic servants, semiskilled and skilled workers, and more. From the era of slavery to the early twenty-first century, black men and women, he demonstrates through countless examples, confronted profound legal and customary barriers to their economic advancement. White employers’ assumptions about the capacity of black people to carry out sustained or skilled labor (at least without compulsion) and white workers’ resentment of black competition kept black workers out of higher-paid and more skilled positions in the labor force in industry after industry across the country from the era of slavery to the late twentieth century. But the ubiquity of employment discrimination was matched only by the determination of black workers to achieve “economic equality … and full citizenship rights” (p. 26). Those efforts manifested themselves in multiple ways: through migration from South to North, the formation of protest organizations (like the post–World War I–era Universal Negro Improvement Association, the Great Depression–era National Negro Congress and Don't Buy Where You Can't Work groups, and the World War II–era March on Washington Movement), the creation of all-black trade unions, and struggles to join the larger white labor movement. Over time, Trotter argues, urban black workers “forged vibrant new social movements to meet the demands of life and labor in the industrial age” (p. 109). In so doing, they “spurred the rise of the Modern Black Freedom Movement” (p. 110).

Trotter's account differs from earlier overviews in its attention not just to the workplace and organized labor but to formation of urban communities and civic and religious organizations. During the era of the Early Republic, “African Americans began a dynamic community-building process in the face of extraordinary oppression,” he notes, and that process continued and evolved over the course of the next two centuries (p. 27). Supplementing the detailed examination of discrimination on the job, he explores the experiences of black workers in their communities—rural and urban, southern and northern—highlighting how white violence against black urbanites, pervasive housing discrimination, and a lack of political power constrained black ambitions and the myriad ways in which black workers challenged those constraints. Together, Workers on Arrival in some ways functions both as a book on African American labor history and as a survey of much of black social and community history as well.

A strength of Trotter's book is its attempt to be as comprehensive as possible, based on the existing literature, in its depiction of the black working-class experience over a considerable period of time. But comprehensiveness in a short book (it runs 191 pages, followed by a 26-page historiographical essay on a century of scholarship) can also be a weakness. Because he covers so much, a great deal of it necessarily appears in abbreviated form. The monographic literature he skillfully draws upon (and always credits fully) is often rich and detailed, but space limitations compel him to capture only a small fraction of what that scholarship has to offer. In many instances, readers encounter vivid descriptions more than they do an analysis of labor organizations or social movements and a deeper assessment of the effectiveness of different strategies.

Our current efforts to “address the persistent challenges of inequality in a democratic society,” Trotter concludes, “require deeper and more thoughtful historical perspectives on the dynamics of race and class relations in the economy, institutions, culture, and politics of the past. Workers on Arrival offers a place to start” (p. 183). The same might be said of the new black labor and urban history: Trotter's sweeping overview serves as an entrée to the work of dozens of scholars who have transformed the field over the past half century. If it refreshes or expands scholars’ knowledge of a large and growing field or inspires students new to the subject to delve further into it, it will have accomplished a significant task.