On Black Milwaukee

While this doesn’t feel like a huge stride in the literature, Black Milwaukee is an interesting case study of the Great Migration in action. At the turn of the twentieth century, there were less than 100 black people in the city of Milwaukee, and they generally labored in domestic and personal service. However, throughout the first few decades of the twentieth century, increasing numbers of African Americans made their way to northern cities, and Milwaukee was no exception.

It seems that the critical moment for their “proletarianization” (or, shift to urban-industrial labor) was between World War I and the onset of the Great Depression. The First World War opened a great many jobs in factories, especially in sustaining the defense industry, while the hardening of nativist policies in the 1920s stopped the flow of immigrants to Milwaukee (which was fundamentally an immigrant city). In doing so, increasing numbers of black Americans shifted to urban-industrial jobs from both domestic service, as well as difficult agricultural labor in the South. Unlike white proletarianization, where artisans who owned their businesses and means of production “fell” to the position of prole with the coming of industrial capitalism, black people “rose” from jobs that were considered lower status than industrial labor. However, industrial labor was, in fact, far more difficult than their earlier work, and they generally were forced to take the most dangerous positions, which no whites wanted to accept.

Throughout the 1920s, racial tensions rose between Milwaukee’s whites and the black community, and they were often kept out of labor unions and other powerful organizations throughout the entirety of the inter-war era. The Great Depression, in particular, offered a new level of precarity to black industrial laborers. Yet, the racial tensions in Milwaukee never quite reached the levels that they did in other northern cities. While Trotter does not go so far to argue that Milwaukee was unique in the interwar years, he does believe that Milwaukee is a bit more distinct than other places. However, after the Second World War, Milwaukee did come to resemble other northern cities like Chicago and Detroit, largely due to racial resentment and backlash against the Civil Rights Movement.

Really interesting study, and I think Trotter’s arguments make a lot of sense. So interesting that Milwaukee had such a small black population at the turn of the twentieth century—today I think of Milwaukee simultaneously as a German and black city, but that does not seem to historically be the case.