Anthology Looks At African American Experience In Pennsylvania

1-21-98
University Park, Pa. --- From the onset of the modern civil rights and Black power movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s through recent times, scholarship on Pennsylvania's African American experience proliferated. Unfortunately, much of it is scattered in books and journals that are not easily accessible.

Penn State Press has published "African Americans in Pennsylvania," an anthology of recent scholarship on the African American experience in Pennsylvania that brings together an outstanding array of essays and makes them accessible to a wider audience, including general as well as professional students of the Black experience.

This volume, co-published with the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, offers the most comprehensive history of the state's Black history to date. Chapters emphasize the interplay of class and race from the origins of the commonwealth during the 17th century through the era of deindustrialization in the late 20th century. Represented are not only poor and working-class people but also educated business and professional people. And although scholarship has traditionally focused on the experiences of Black men, this volume includes significant research on African American women.

Chapters are grouped into four interlocking parts that correspond to important changes in Pennsylvania's political economy. Each part includes a brief substantive introduction that ties together the themes of the ensuing chapters. This format enables readers to develop their own synthesis of key socioeconomic and political changes in the state's African American experience over more than three centuries of time.

The book "African Americans in Pennsylvania" shows how ordinary people have influenced the culture, institutions, and politics of African American communities in Pennsylvania. In the process, it documents the ways that Black people have influenced, and continue to influence, the state as a whole.

The book's co-editor, Joe W. Trotter Jr. is the Mellon Bank Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University. His books include "Coal, Class, and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia, 1915-1932" and "The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gender." Co-editor Eric Ledell Smith is a historian at the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission and is the author of "Bert Williams: A Biography of the Pioneer Black Comedian" and "Blacks in Opera: An Encyclopedia of People and Companies, 1873-1993."

Contributors are Elijah Anderson, John F. Bauman, R. J. M. Blackett, John E. Bodnar, Carolyn Leonard Carson, Dennis C. Dickerson, Gerald G. Eggert, V. P. Franklin, Laurence Glasco, Peter Gottlieb, Theodore Hershberg, Leroy T. Hopkins, Norman P. Hummon, Emma Jones Lapsansky, Janice Sumler Lewis, Frederic Miller, Edward K. Muller, Gary B. Nash, Merl E. Reed, Harry C. Silcox, Jean R. Soderlund and Trotter.

Among the chapters are:

---"Free Blacks in Antebellum Philadelphia: A Study of Ex-Slaves, Freeborn, and Socioeconomic Decline";

--"Freedom, or the Martyr's Grave: Black Pittsburgh's Aid to the Fugitive Slave";

--"No Balm in Gilead: Lancaster's African American Population and the Civil War Era";

-- "Two Steps Forward, a Step-and-a-Half Back": Harrisburg's African American Community in the Nineteenth Century";

--"Migration and Jobs: The New Black Workers in Pittsburgh, 1916-1930";

-- "The Black Church in Industrializing Western Pennsylvania, 1870-1950"; and

"Public Housing, Isolation and the Urban Underclass: Philadelphia's Richard Allen Homes, 1941-1965."

Established in 1956, Penn State Press is a university press specializing in art history, Black studies, general interest, history, literary studies, philosophy, political science, religion, regional studies, sociology and women's studies. The Penn State Press home page is at http://www.psu.edu/psupress/

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Contacts:
Janet Armstrong Penn State Press (814) 865-1327 (phone)