Join Labor@Wayne in welcoming Dr. Joe William Trotter Jr. to Wayne State as he discusses his most recently released book, Building the Black City. Joe Trotter is the Giant Eagle University Professor of History and Social Justice as well as the past Chair of the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He serves as the founding director of Carnegie Mellon’s Center for African-American Urban Studies and the Economy (CAUSE). Trotter also served as President of the Urban History Association, the Labor and Working-Class History Association and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Trotter’s Building the Black City shows how African Americans built and rebuilt thriving cities for themselves, even as their unpaid and underpaid labor enriched the nation's economic, political, and cultural elites. Trotter’s prolific scholarship, including works like Race and Renaissance: African Americans in Pittsburgh since World War II and Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America, provide an astounding range of history spread across the country, all the way from the pre-industrial era to today.