Kimberley Phillips shows how migrants established complex networks of kin and Mends and infused the city with a highly visible southern African-American culture. She examines the wide variety of organizations black working-class migrants created and demonstrates how they prepared the way for new forms of individual and collective activism in workplaces and the city.

Giving special consideration to the employment patterns and experiences of working-class black women in Cleveland, AlabamaNorth reveals how migrants' expressions of tradition and community gave them a new consciousness of themselves as organized workers in the urban North and created the underpinning for new forms of black labor activism.