"When you have two generations where 95 percent of the hotel workforce was African American, then how does this town ever develop as a regional, national resort unless you have the black experience?
"Intellectually this really bothered me," he said. "I knew a single chapter wasn't going to do it."
The resulting book, The Northside: African Americans and the Creation of Atlantic City (Plexus Publishing, $24.95), appeared late last year and has sold about 2,500 copies. It is now in its second printing. Boardwalk Empire, published in 2002, has sold close to 100,000 copies, said Plexus publisher John Bryans.
Johnson said that when the resort was being created in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Philadelphia job market was strong enough that most white workers were happy to take employment in that thriving economy and visit the new seaside resort on their days off.
As a result, he writes, Atlantic City's developers recruited freed slaves and the children of slaves from the upper South to build the railroad to Absecon Island and then to staff the boardinghouses and hotels.
Until the economy worsened in the 1930s, virtually every hotel worker in Atlantic City was African American.
"It definitely became part of the appeal of the resort," Johnson said. "What you had was obliging black people in uniform doting over white people, even in the boardinghouses. When you came here, you really felt like you were somebody special."
