| This dissertation examines black working class protest politics in the urban landscape of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Through an intra-racial class analysis, it reveals how the community leadership dynamic between middle class and working class blacks shifted between 1920 and 1970. As a new Black elite began to rise and thrive after the First World War, it established itself as the community leadership as it formed businesses and professional practices, sought greater power and control of organizations such as the NAACP, and represented and defended the community. Black middle class leadership would go unchallenged until the post-World War II period.;This study argues that upon migrating to the urban north and entering industrial jobs, migrants were not only transformed into an urban industrial working class, but also politicized. By unapologetically exercising their freedom to pursue better jobs, using public space for protest, and filing discrimination complaints, they were concurrently asserting their power as workers and exhibiting early working class militancy. As class and racial tensions exacerbated during the postwar era, the working class looked to the Black middle class for leadership. Meanwhile, Black elites were concerned with the politics of respectability, promoting assimilation, and blaming migrants' behavior for the the community's troubles with law enforcement. Displeased with middle class leadership, the working class increasingly began to practice its own form of resistance. Although unorganized, early forms of working class resistance would serve as a precursor to the organized resistance of the 1960s.;Black working class protest peaked in the 1960s as organizations emerged in direct competition to the middle class- oriented NAACP. Embracing direct action methods such as picketing, boycotting, and marches, these groups utilized public space to protest inequality. By confronting police brutality, employment discrimination, and segregated housing, black working class leaders mobilized a community, and inspired a local Black freedom movement. |
