This double session explores the centrality of illicit work to the urban economy in American cities throughout the twentieth century. Panelists interrogate the relationship between criminalized forms of work and processes of racialization while examining the boundaries--both heavily policed and surprisingly porous--separating licit and illicit spheres of work. The papers attend to how vice has shaped working-class politics across different ethnic groups in the nation’s cities. Finally, our collective goal is to forge connections between scholars of the Prohibition Era and those working on the contemporary War on Drugs to build new understandings of illicit work within the twentieth-century urban experience.

The second session asks how drug workers have shaped working-class experience and racial formation in late twentieth-century American cities. Smith shows how deindustrialization in Philadelphia’s most racially segregated neighborhoods was managed through drug war policing that targeted alleged drug houses. Stauch examines the political economy of the urban crisis in Detroit from the perspective of black adolescent boys working in the city’s heroin economy. Finally, Singhal explores how the politics of anti-imperialism and Third World solidarity movements during the late Cold War were shaped by Black and Asian drug trafficking organizations. These papers interrogate the materiality of drug work as well as its embeddedness in historical processes more typically studied by urban historians, such as deindustrialization, racial inequality, and immigration.