Liberal Arts dean co-edits book examining African American urban history

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Clarence Lang has plenty of day-to-day responsibilities in his role as Susan Welch Dean of Penn State’s College of the Liberal Arts.

That busy schedule, though, hasn’t prevented him from continuing his work as a scholar.

Lang served as one of the co-editors of the recently published book, “Black Urban History at the Crossroads: Race and Place in the American City,” published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in October of 2024. The anthology spotlights recent scholarship in the field of African American urban history, connecting and contextualizing “chronological, regional, topical and thematic perspectives on the Black urban experience” over the past three centuries of American life.

Broken into three parts and written by some of the field’s leading scholars, the book’s 10 essays examine how African Americans built their own communities in some of America’s largest cities, in the process improving their self-determination while heavily influencing the political, cultural and economic life of their cities and the nation as a whole in the process.

“This project is engaged in gaining a better understanding of that history and the development of Black urban history as a field,” said Lang, who edited and wrote the introduction for the book’s second section, which focuses on 19th- and 20th-century industrial Black urban communities.

Lang edited the book with fellow scholars Leslie M. Harris, professor of history at Northwestern University; Rhonda Y. Williams, professor and Coleman A. Young Foundation Endowed Chair in the African American Studies Department at Wayne State University; and Joe William Trotter Jr., Giant Eagle University Professor of History and Social Justice at Carnegie Mellon University.

The project arose from the group’s presentations at the 20th and 25th anniversary conferences for Carnegie Mellon’s Center for Africanamerican Urban Studies & the Economy, which was founded and continues to be led by Trotter. Long considered a pioneer in the field, Trotter’s scholarship, particularly his seminal book, “Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915-45,” has served as a touchstone for Lang since graduate school, he said.

“Joe is one of my academic heroes; it’s been a real honor to get to know and work with him,” Lang said. “His work shifted the emphasis in a very vigorous way to the Black working class, and how the creation of a Black working class through industry grew the community more broadly. He brought in actors who hadn’t been discussed — not just their experiences, but how their interests helped to fuel the growth of their communities.”

The essays cover a wide swath of the Black urban experience, from the Civil War-era working class of Charleston, South Carolina, to the anti-fascists of 1930s Chicago, to the women activists of post-Civil Rights Philadelphia. The point is to demonstrate how one era influenced the next, as well as how the field itself has evolved and stretched beyond its previous boundaries, Lang said.

For instance, he noted, the field’s beginnings in the 1960s and ’70s focused largely on Black communities in the Northeast and Midwest, and on “traditional historical actors,” especially elite and middle-class males.

“What’s happened since the 1980s and certainly since the 1990s, though, has been a greater emphasis on shifting the lens from Northeast and Midwest to the South and Border South and to the West, and pushing the timeline further back to before the first great migration in the early 20th century,” Lang said. “There’s also a growing focus on putting it in transnational perspective, in terms of thinking about the comparisons and connections between Black urban communities in the U.S. with similarly situated communities from abroad. And it has shifted from men and elites to a greater emphasis on the perspectives of women, sexual minorities and working-class people. This is the benefit of thinking more broadly about time periods and locations — it helps to disrupt the narratives we have and adds complexities.”

Trotter said Lang did an “extraordinary” job working with the scholars featured in his section of the book.

“He really helped them bring their essays into sharper focus and got them to think more about the implications of their work going forward,” Trotter said. “The truth is, Clarence’s research has been critical to my own thinking. He has had a real impact on African American urban history of the 20th and early 21st centuries and has helped lay the groundwork for this next generation of scholarship moving forward. I was very pleased with Clarence coming on board with us for this book project.”

A specialist in African American urban history and social movements in the Midwest and Border South, Lang is the author of two books, “Grassroots at the Gateway: Class Politics and Black Freedom Struggle in St. Louis, 1936-75,” and “Black America in the Shadow of the Sixties: Notes on the Civil Rights Movement, Neoliberalism, and Politics.” His current book project is “Malcolm X: A Political Biography of Black Nationalism and the African American Working Class.”

Lang’s research has been published in numerous peer-reviewed publications, including the Journal of Social History, the Journal of African American History, the Journal of Urban History, and the Journal of Human and Civil Rights. He’s also the co-editor of the books, “Anticommunism and the African American Freedom Movement: Another Side of the Story,” with Robbie Lieberman; and “Reframing Randolph: Labor, Black Freedom, and the Legacies of A. Philip Randolph,” with Andrew Kersten.

As Lang sees it, keeping an active research profile helps him be a more effective leader.

“It’s important for me as dean of a college, with so many active faculty and at a major research university no less, to remain as active as possible as a scholar,” he said. “It helps to recharge the batteries, and it’s good to be reminded of why I came into the academy in the first place. Plus, I enjoy it.”

Next, Lang and some of his “Black Urban History at the Crossroads” co-editors will collaborate on a special issue of the Journal of Urban History scheduled for publication this fall. In the meantime, he said he hopes the book finds an audience and does its part to advance an important and continually evolving field.

“I hope people read this as a commentary on the field, but also as a broader conversation on what it means to be a citizen, with the rights and responsibilities that come with that in a democratic society,” he said. “African American urban history still has much to tell us, not just about Black experiences, but about where we are in the United States in terms of the meanings of citizenship and democracy.”