Like plantations, farms, and rural areas, cities significantly defined African American labor, life, and struggle.

In colonial and antebellum times, the city was a significant site of slaves and free blacks’ efforts for autonomy and liberty. Slaves, perhaps 5 percent of the population in New England and Middle Colonies by 1750, usually did small farm, domestic, or industrial work and lived in port hubs such as Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia. Frequently, they were hired out, like many bondmen and women in Baltimore, Richmond, and Charleston. Building families, churches, and communities in the North and South, they struggled for liberty by petition, flight, and joining the American or British armies during the Revolutionary War. Gradual abolition of northern slavery and its cotton-driven southern growth saw an increasing number of free and enslaved blacks in urban areas from Providence to New Orleans. They were segregated and exploited, but they built black institutions, embraced abolitionism, and helped execute the Civil War and emancipation.

Cities provided critical spaces for black aspiration and effort from Reconstruction to World War I. Increasingly, as freedmen became sharecroppers, wage workers, and voters, they moved their families cityward. From 1870 to 1890 blacks increased from 13 to 20 percent of the urban population nationally, from 10 to 15 percent in the South (home to 90 percent of all blacks). Blacks in Atlanta, Charleston, Montgomery, Nashville, New Orleans, Raleigh, and Richmond made notable civic and economic progress. They fought for equal citizenship against segregation; inferior housing, jobs and schools; disfranchisement; and lynching. Oppression and shared hope for decent employment fueled blacks’ rural–urban migrations within and out of the South.

The Great Migration (1910–70) catalyzed their urbanization. Some 6–7 million reached destinations in the North, Midwest, and West, including Boston, New York, Buffalo, Newark, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Chicago, St. Louis, Omaha, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland, and Seattle. They lived largely in ghettos. City dwellers rose from 27 to 80 percent of blacks ca. 1910–70, and from 46 to 74 percent for the nation. Unskilled jobs opened for blacks in industries (railway, stockyards, meat packing, steel, automobile, and shipyards). Competition with immigrant and native whites frequently erupted in violence, though comparably few blacks had skilled jobs before the rise of industrial unions in the 1930s. Their urban resources, however, crucially shaped African Americans’ freedom movements.