River Jordan: African American Urban Life in the Ohio Valley

Ohio River Valley Series

by Joe William Trotter Jr.

Since the nineteenth century, the Ohio River has represented a great divide for African Americans. It provided a passage to freedom along the underground railroad, and during the industrial age, it was a boundary between the Jim Crow South and the urban North. The Ohio became known as the "River Jordan," symbolizing the path to the promised land. In the urban centers of Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Louisville, and Evansville, blacks faced racial hostility from outside their immediate neighborhoods as well as class, color, and cultural fragmentation among themselves. Yet despite these pressures, African Americans were able to create vibrant new communities as former agricultural workers transformed themselves into a new urban working class. Unlike most studies of black urban life, Trotter's work considers several cities and compares their economic conditions, demographic makeup, and political and cultural conditions. Beginning with the arrival of the first blacks in the Ohio Valley, Trotter traces the development of African American urban centers through the civil rights movement and the developments of recent years.

218 pages, Paperback

First published March 19, 1998

Reviews

[Ann Otto · Rating 4 out of 5]

River Jordan by Joe William Trotter, Jr. is helpful to anyone researching or wanting to know more about the African American experience in mid-America from the first pioneers to the early 1990's. The rich history he describes centers in the Ohio Valley, focusing on such cities as Pittsburgh, Louisville, Cincinnati and Evansville. The role of politics, government, African American churches and professional and cultural societies are all discussed. Negative influences such as the media, KKK and other types of discrimination are also covered. Of great interest is the inclusion of many little known community members who made differences in their respective times in history.