Building a Healthy Black Harlem: Health Politics in Harlem, New ...

example, Joe William Trotter, Jr., examined the ways in which black workers entered and negotiated the labor force as well as how their proletarianization—their entrance into the industrial working class—determined the character and nature of black communities in Ohio Valley cities.⁴ For Trotter, the migration of Southern-born blacks into the industrial sector and the subsequent formation of the black working class in the Ohio Valley allowed for the creation of a black business and professional class that catered to black workers; created fear, animosity, and violent reprisals from white workers; and stimulated the formation of progressive political agendas that fused race and class concerns among the black middle-class and working-class residents.

Richard Thomas' book, Life for Us Is What We Make It, looked at what Thomas called community-building processes, which suggested that the creation of community among black Northerners was the consequence of interactions between groups of individuals who, at times, possessed conflicting ideas concerning the nature of these communities. Using black Detroit as a model, Thomas illustrated how black urban communities were born from black class diversity, ideological diversity, and political networks and activities, which include but go beyond industrial work.⁵ More recently, Victoria Wolcott encouraged historians to use a gender perspective in examining interwar black urban communities.⁶ With interwar Detroit as her case study in Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit, Wolcott refined our knowledge of the Great Migration and black urbanization by focusing on black women; their participation in home life, public life, and social and religious organizations; and the informal economy that shaped the contours of black Detroit.⁷ She revealed that in Detroit, and perhaps other black urban locales, ideas of black empowerment, civic organization, and community growth were defined in masculine terms by trade organizations, the Garvey movement, the Great Depression and the New Deal, and the Communist Party.