Rhonda Y. Williams

Rhonda Y. Williams is professor and the Coleman A. Young Foundation Endowed Chair in the African American Studies Department at Wayne State University. She is the author of The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles against Urban Inequality and Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power in the 20th Century, as well as coeditor of the Justice, Power, and Politics book series at the University of North Carolina Press.

Black Urban History at the Crossroads

Race and Place in the American City

Edited By Leslie M. Harris, Clarence Lang, Rhonda Y. Williams, Joseph William Trotter Jr.

Drawing on significant recent scholarship on African American urban life over three centuries, Black Urban History at the Crossroads bridges disparate chronological, regional, topical, and thematic perspectives on the Black urban experience beginning with the Atlantic slave trade. Across ten cutting-edge chapters, leading scholars explore the many ways that urban Black people across the United States built their own communities; crafted their own strategies for self-determination; and shaped the larger economy, culture, and politics of the urban environment and of their cities, regions, and nation. This volume not only highlights long-running changes over time and space, from preindustrial to emerging postindustrial cities, but also underscores the processes by which one era influences the emergence of the next moment in Black urban history.