SACRPH is a one-of-a-kind community that brings together scholars and practitioners. We are excited to showcase our members’ work and what SACRPH means to them.
Todd M. Michney
Associate Professor in the School of History and Sociology, The Georgia Institute of Technology
What are you currently working on?
I’m at work on my new book, tentatively titled Black Builders: African Americans, Community, and Construction, 1865-1965. The project looks at African American experiences with construction in the pre-affirmative action era, not only in terms of work but also the financial and educational supports that enabled thousands of Black-built homes, churches, and institutions to be erected over this time interval. Due to the exclusionary practices of white-dominated building trades unions, scholars have paid scant attention to African American experiences with construction, assuming they were effectively shut out of work in the industry aside from common labor. However, looking at the South reveals quite a different picture: repositories of skill coming out of enslavement, training acquired at HBCUs during the Booker T. Washington era, and a less robust presence of trade unions well into the 20th century that allowed for a modicum of skilled job access. Turning the lens North, we can see Black entrepreneurs founding construction-adjacent enterprises in excavation, demolition, and hauling by the 1920s – not to mention the beginnings of a push toward what would later be called affirmative action, in the fight for jobs on 1930s Public Works Administration projects which attempted to enforce fair access based on racial quotas. Black financial institutions, notably life insurance companies, extended mortgage loans for numerous projects including churches, and in the 1950s financed the construction of apartment buildings and suburban-style subdivisions. A considerable portion of these projects were built by Black-owned construction companies, with FHA backing in many cases.
In short, I plan to tell a more complex and expansive story of the Black experience with construction that has the potential to broaden our understanding beyond the by now familiar Great Migration narrative of movement from rural sharecropper to ghettoized industrial proletarian – and at the same time position Black building trades workers, business owners, and investors within the larger social structures of local African American communities.
What most excites you about your field right now?
Being trained as a social historian – with a considerable focus on labor history in my graduate training as a student of Dave Roediger – I have appreciated the opportunity to return to these roots in my current book project. I’m excited by how social history in recent decades has inflected other fields of historical inquiry, seeing synergetic possibilities for the inclusion of planning history, policy history, business history, and financial history, as well as in analyzing the cultural significance of work and the built environment for the African American experience. This current project grew out of my earlier study of Black middle class identity and the fight for access to good-quality housing in Cleveland, Ohio from the turn of the 20th century into the 1970s. Works like Destin Jenkins’ recent study of bondholders’ influence on urban development and exacerbation of race-based inequality point the way toward new and more multifaceted approaches to the traditional topics that have interested city and planning historians.
Why did you join SACRPH?
I joined SACRPH for the camaraderie and in the interest of having conversations that could expand my understanding of urban and city planning in new and thought-provoking ways. Our colleagues in SACRPH are so very welcoming – I always look forward to the biennial conference, and see a lot of familiar faces from the Urban History Association to which I also belong (as many other SACRPH members do). In addition, several examples of my writing have found a home in the Journal of Planning History, whose board I recently had the honor of joining.
