About the Author

Joe W. Trotter Jr. is Mellon Bank Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University. His books include Coal, Class, and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia, 1915–1932 (1990) and The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gender (1991) (editor).

Eric Ledell Smith is a historian at the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. He is the author of Bert Williams: A Biography of the Pioneer Black Comedian (1992) and Blacks in Opera: An Encyclopedia of People and Companies, 1873–1993(1995).

Reviews

“Reading the whole collection is a powerful reminder of how much black Americans did in this one region to win their freedom and the flourishing cultural and institutional life which they built upon these foundations. . . . Though this is a collection of reprints, the publishers have done a valuable service in bringing them together in one place.”—Philip Jenkins Journal of American Ethnic History

“Eric Ledell Smith and Joe Trotter have fashioned an illuminating history of African Americans in Pennsylvania by bringing together a set of articles that, taken together, tell a larger story than any one of them attempts by itself.”—Rob Ruck Journal of Social History

“It (the book) was intended for the general reader and for aficionados of local history who wanted to find, in one place, a compendium of the large number of studies that have already been done Pennsylvania. It was for this latter group that the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission and the Pennsylvania State University Press joined forces to publish this highly creditable scholarly work.”—Ena L. Farley Journal of American History

“(T)his collection serves as the single most comprehensive treatment of the Pennsylvania’s Black history yet to appear in print.”—R. J. Lettieri Choice