Black Urban History at the Crossroads

Leslie M. Harris is professor of history at Northwestern University. She is the author of In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863 and coeditor of Slavery in New York and Slavery and Freedom in Savannah.

Clarence Lang is Susan Welch Dean of the College of the Liberal Arts and professor of African American studies at The Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Grassroots at the Gateway: Class Politics and Black Freedom Struggle in St. Louis, 1936–75 and Black America in the Shadow of the Sixties: Notes on the Civil Rights Movement, Neoliberalism, and Politics.

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.

Joe William Trotter Jr. is the Giant Eagle University Professor of History and Social Justice at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the author of Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America; Pittsburgh and the Urban League Movement: A Century of Social Service and Activism; and African American Workers and the Appalachian Coal Industry.