African Americans in Pennsylvania: Shifting Historical Perspectives.

By Joe William Trotter and Eric Ledell Smith (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997. xv plus 519pp. $40.50/cloth $17.50/paper).

I would have bought this book simply for Joe Trotter's historiographic essay about African Americans in Pennsylvania during the last century and a half. But after reading the nineteen essays that comprise this work, I realized that any half dozen of them would have been worth the price. Eric Ledell Smith and Joe Trotter have fashioned an illuminating history of African Americans in Pennsylvania by bringing together a set of articles that, taken together, tell a larger story than any one of them attempts by itself. This book will accomplish its goals of making important work originally published in academic journals accessible to a wider audience and providing scholars a sense of the state-of-the-research in the field. African Americans in Pennsylvania: Shifting Historical Perspectives will also serve as an extremely useful research tool that the next generation of graduate students and scholars exploring the African American experience will exploit in their endeavors. But I am not so sure that this book will accomplish a third goal, that of facilitating "the writing of a new synthesis of the state's African American experience" (xiv). That uncertainty is not because of any shortcomings in this volume but the daunting nature of the project itself.

The essays are grouped into four sections: the commercial economy (16841840) during which Africans were transformed into African Americans; the industrializing era (1840-1870) in which the meaning of freedom was defined; the industrial epoch (1870-1945) in which class and ethnicity joined race as major factors affecting the African American experience; and the post-industrial era (1945-1985) during which deindustrialization entered the historical equation. They are preceded by Trotter's review of the literature investigating African Americans in Pennsylvania, which serves as a microcosm of the study of African Americans in the nation. Trotter analyzes and critiques this body of work with the special talent he has displayed in review essays elsewhere on labor and African American history. He shows how the writing of African American history evolved, where it has been most successful, and what remains to be done. Along with the essays, Trotter's introduction will be the jumping off point for many future studies. The endnotes and the rich sources they detail will save researchers countless hours of digging.

The first essay, Gary Nash's "Slaves and Slave Owners in Colonial Philadelphia," revises conceptions about the role of slavery in British North America's largest city. Urban slavery, he finds, was both more widespread and critical to the economy than previously thought. It was also part of a larger labor market that included both free and unfree, German and Scot-Irish, laborers and indentures. Jean Soderlund's "Black Women in Colonial Pennsylvania" and Emma Jones Lapsansky's "Since They Got Those Separate Churches" supplement Nash's study by describing the roles that African American women and the church played in this era. This section focuses on Philadelphia, as well it might, given the city's sizable black population (the biggest in the North in 1830) and its critical role as a center for white and black abolitionists.

Three of the six pieces in the second section also focus on Philadelphia; two of the remaining three are excellent surveys on the African American communities in Lancaster and Harrisburg, "No Balm in Gilead" by Leroy Hopkins and "Two Steps Forward, a Step-and-a-Half Back" by Gerald Eggert. Pennsylvania, which had the largest free black population in the North in 1850, was rocked by the Fugitive Slave Law. Read together, these six essays illuminate the status of black communities across the state before and after this political watershed. Theodore Hershberg's "Free Blacks in Antebellum Philadelphia," a model of social history methodology, offers a wealth of information about black Philadelphia as it traces the reversal of fortunes this community suffered from 1830 until the Civil War. Richard Blackett's "Freedom or the Martyr's Grave" captures the remarkable community that African Americans built in Pittsburgh prior to 1850 and underscores both the spirit and the means by which they resisted slavery and racial oppression. Harry Silcox's essay on Octavius Catto sketches the life of a respected educator, sportsman, and activist who received the martyr's grave in 1871 for his efforts to exercise his rights as a citizen. Janice Sumler-Lewis's article on "The Forten-Purvis Women of Philadelphia and the American Antislavery Crusade" both reinforces the theme of African Americans as actors instead of subjects that the other authors stress and highlights the ways in which black women took part in the social movements of the nineteenth century.

The third set of essays analyzes the substantial growth of northern black communities during late nineteenth century industrialization and what subsequently happened to those communities. Except for John Bodnar's essay examining "The Impact of the 'New Immigration' on the Black Worker: Steelton, Pennsylvania, 1880-1920," this section focuses on Philadelphia and, to a greater extent, Pittsburgh. Contrasts and comparisons among these articles bolster an understanding of the overall migratory experience but also reflect the particulars of different urban areas' histories. Peter Gottlieb's "Migration and Jobs: The New Black Workers in Pittsburgh, 1916-1930," places the great migration in a larger historical and geographical framework. He shows how this historic movement of people was built upon several decades of seasonal migration within the South and how that search for employment already began to transform the migrants' attitudes about work before their arrival in the North. Gottlieb turns employers' perspectives regarding their African American workers upside down by showing how temporary work often fit the needs and goals of black migrants. Frederic Miller's profile of "The Black Migration to Philadelphia" complements Gottlieb's study of Pittsburgh and redirects our attention from the workplace to the home and neighborhood. Bodnar, by examining the impact of Eastern and Southern European immigrants on the Steelton black community before the Great Migration, makes the post-war travails of that group more understandable. All three essays contribute to a fuller portrait of African American life during a period of intense industrialization and immigration.

V. P. Franklin's "The Philadelphia Race Riot of 1918" and Merl Reed's "Black Workers, Defense Industries, and Federal Agencies in Pennsylvania, 1941-1945" emphasize the significance of the two world wars on notions of equality, organizational efforts within the black community, and African Americans' prospects at work. Dennis Dickerson's "The Black Church in Industrializing Western Pennsylvania, 1870-1950" shows how deeply the region's employers were involved in supporting and manipulating black churches and what it took for black laborers to counter their influence. Carolyn Carson's case study of "Physicians, Childbirth, and Southern Black Migrant Women, 1916-1930" in Pittsburgh is both a revealing historical examination of life and death matters and an important piece for policy makers dealing with the continuing problem of inordinately high infant and maternal mortality rates in black Pittsburgh.

The concluding section contains three essays. Laurence Glasco's "Double Burden: The Black Experience in Pittsburgh," is perhaps the most ambitious piece in the volume in that it spans the city's entire history. The best single study yet of black Pittsburgh, this essay has been the foundation for most subsequent research on the topic. John Bauman, Norman Hummon, and Edward Muller concentrate on a smaller time frame and area, the Richard Allen Homes in North Philadelphia after World War II. They refocus the debate over the origins of the urban underclass by examining the emergence of a population in 1950s Philadelphia public housing which evinced many of the attributes associated with an underclass prior to when most scholars argued this underclass was formed. They show how federal housing policy and urban renewal efforts amidst industrial decline and a changing racial balance both "intensified social isolation and impeded the adaptive strategies that had historically facilitated survival in the depriving world of the inner city" (p. 444). This article, too, should be of interest to policy makers. The concluding essay, Elijah Anderson's "Race and Neighborhood Transition," will resonate with anyone who has lived, worked, or simply walked though a community in flux. His emphasis is on class as much as race and shows how people come to understand their neighborhood and each other. In a discussion of street etiquette, public space, and neighborhood memory, Anderson discusses how people interpret and make sense of their experiences and how they cope with the anxieties of life on a daily basis in communities stressed by transition.

This book should be of great interest and utility to students of the African American experience far beyond the boundaries of Pennsylvania. Given the significance of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh to the national black experience, these essays address trends relevant elsewhere. Its counter-intuitive findings provoke reexamination of assumptions about how African Americans fared and how they acted in different periods.

But should this work be the foundation for a new synthesis of Pennsylvania's African American experience? That begs the question: to what degree has the history of African Americans in Pennsylvania been the result of state history? Dynamics such as Quaker influence on the state constitution and subsequent redefinitions of the franchise mattered greatly, as do state politics today. But other, more enduring, forces transcended these 'Pennsylvania' factors. Black Pittsburgh's history, for example, has been more a function of the city's location at the headwaters of the Ohio River, its hilly topography, and the interplay of European and Southern migrations with the steel industry. Trotter's most recent book, River Jordan: African American Urban Life in the Ohio Valley, considers Pittsburgh with cities outside Pennsylvania. The authors of African Americans in Pennsylvania, by and large, eschew state for local, regional, federal, and international dynamics. I can only conclude that writing a coherent state history would be an imposing, if not an impossible, task. After reading this wonderful volume, I'm not sure it's even necessary.

University of Pittsburgh