African Americans in Pennsylvania

by Joe William Trotter Jr. (Editor), Eric Ledell Smith (Series Editor)

From the onset of the modern civil rights and black power movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s through recent times, scholarship on Pennsylvania's African American experience proliferated. Unfortunately, much of it is scattered in books and journals that are not easily accessible. Under the editorship of Joe W. Trotter and Eric Ledell Smith, African Americans in Pennsylvania brings together an outstanding array of this scholarship and makes it accessible to a wider audience, including general as well as professional students of the black experience. This volume, co-published with the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, offers the most comprehensive history of the state's black history to date. Chapters emphasize the interplay of class and race from the origins of the Commonwealth during the seventeenth century, through the era of deindustrialization in the late twentieth century. We see not only poor and working-class people but also educated business and professional people. And although scholarship has traditionally focused on the experiences of black men, this volume includes significant research on black women. Most important, this volume suggests a conceptual framework for a historical synthesis of the state's African American experience. In his introduction, Trotter assesses the strengths and limitations of existing scholarship, showing how it is built on the contributions of nineteenth-century pioneers as well as those of the first generation of professional historians, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard R. Wright, and Edward Raymond Turner. Chapters are grouped into four interlocking parts that correspond to important changes in Pennsylvania's political economy. Each part includes a brief substantive introduction that ties together the themes of the ensuing chapters. This format enables readers to develop their own synthesis of key socioeconomic and political changes in the state's African American experience over more than three centuries of time. African Americans in Pennsylvania shows how ordinary people have influenced the culture, institutions, and politics of African American communities in Pennsylvania. In the process, it documents the ways that black people have influenced, and continue to influence, the state as a whole. Contributors are Elijah Anderson, John F. Bauman, R. J. M. Blackett, John E. Bodnar, Carolyn Leonard Carson, Dennis C. Dickerson, Gerald G. Eggert, V. P. Franklin, Laurence Glasco, Peter Gottlieb, Theodore Hershberg, Leroy T. Hopkins, Norman P. Hummon, Emma Jones Lapsansky, Janice Sumler Lewis, Frederic Miller, Edward K. Muller, Gary B. Nash, Merl E. Reed, Harry C. Silcox, Jean R. Soderlund, and Joe W. Trotter, Jr.

Genres: History

536 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1997

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another gift from having a son in college, African Americans in Pennsylvania was assigned reading for his Pennsylvania History course at Edinboro University. I picked the book up off his shelf and began reading the introduction. The introduction functions as a survey of the approaches to research and writing of African American history in Pennsylvania from early works that sought to lay the foundation for full citizenship in American civic and political life to the late twentieth century techniques of feminist and post-modern historical criticism. The book then presents a series of essays, ordered according to their period of focus from colonial Pennsylvania to the second half of the twentieth century and the effects of post-industrial society on the African American communities of Western and Eastern Pennsylvania. The value of these essays is multiple, but for my money, the most important and interesting element of the book is that it breaks the binary opposition between slave states and free states in which African Americans were either victims of human bondage or indistinct and marginal characters outside of the few ex-slaves in the abolitionist movement.

The book portrays a history of a free state and those of African descent living in it as a part of a racist society in which the socio-political strategies of racist discrimination—disenfranchisement, economic stratification and accommodation of slavery—were resisted by Americans of African descent throughout Pennsylvania, and by extension, American history. From early studies examining the emergence of a working class African American community in Philadelphia, Erie and Pittsburgh during Pennsylvania’s colonial period in which slavery was phased out we see African Americans struggling to establish a place within American culture. While some essays use statistical analysis of census data to demonstrate how African Americans adapted to living under the burdens of official and unofficial racism, others tell histories of prominent African American individuals and families in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh who resisted through institutional settings of church, school and socio-political organizing.

As the essays progress through the civil war era and into industrial and post-industrial America, they continue to demonstrate how African American resilience and resistance manifested itself. From spontaneous uprisings where African Americans in Pittsburgh kidnapped slaves brought north from Virginia or Maryland; to riots against those sent to capture runaways; to African American participation in the Civil War; to the southern migration in the early industrial period; we see a dynamic, vibrant and active community striving to maintain dignity, integrity and economic self-sufficiency in the face of overt and covert discrimination.

At the end, the story remains mixed where some communities remain enmeshed in generational poverty, marginalized by a larger social system that both knowingly and unknowingly contributed to the class stratification of many Americans of African descent while others continue to emerge and integrate into the larger American story of economic self-determination. The book is a pleasurable read from beginning to end, revealing multiple untold stories of people who should be well known actors in American history but aren’t as well as people whose day to day struggles to sustain an economic and social foothold are the foundation of American economic, social and political life.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

a treasure for research

[Militantly Romantic · Rating 4 out of 5]

Useful in large part for the plumbing of census information. Interesting read in terms of getting a sense of AA-based scholarship in the late seventies and eighties.