Joe William Trotter

Trotter's early, fine-grained studies of Milwaukee's black proletariat and West Virginia's black coal miners were ground-breaking contributions to a field previously dominated by histories of enslaved workers and black sharecroppers. Trotter has provided both ambitious and incisive overviews of African-American labor that have brought to the fore cutting-edge scholarship and provided a voice to younger specialists in the field. A past president of the Labor and Working-Class History Association, he is a sought-after lecturer .Trotter is the Founder and Director of Carnegie Mellon's Center for African American Unban Studies and the Economy. His latest monograph, Black Labor in the Making of America, explores the movement of African American workers from the periphery of the preindustrial working-class before the Civil War to the center of the nation's industrial working-class during the 20th century. In addition to research on African Americans in the Urban Deep South during the industrial era, he is completing a study of Africans, Pittsburgh, work, and the National Urban League Movement from 1918 to the present.  Trotter is also President Elect of the Urban History Association.   It would be difficult to find an individual who has shaped African-American labor history, indeed American labor history in general, in such a powerful and enduring way.