Arriving as early as 1639 with the Delaware Valley’s earliest European settlers, the region’s first African residents were few in number and worked as slaves for Swedish, Dutch, and Finnish settlers. Their population grew in 1684 when the ship Isabella brought 150 African slaves to Philadelphia. But with European immigrants available to do the bulk of the region’s manual labor, the slave trade brought only a few Africans each year until the 1750s, when the Seven Years’ War limited German and Scotch-Irish immigration. At that point, the slave trade spiked and anywhere from 100 to 500 Africans came to Philadelphia each year in the 1750s and 1760s. Most new arrivals came on ships from Africa but some fugitive slaves entered the city from Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. By the Revolutionary era, slaves accounted for some one-twelfth of Philadelphia’s population of roughly 16,000 people.

As Philadelphia’s Black population grew, it both encountered social problems and developed community institutions that endured for generations. The law often limited Black immigrants’ advancement, with, for example, Black Codes in the 1720s defining Africans as “an idle, slothful people” and emancipation legislation in the 1780s providing only for gradual manumission, which meant the state still held a few slaves as late as the 1840s. Schools, except for those run by concerned citizens such as the Quaker abolitionist Anthony Benezet (1713-84), seldom accepted Black children. And adults–slave or free–generally found themselves relegated to menial labor, which meant lifelong poverty.

The Free African Society

Black Philadelphians countered these problems in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by building institutions such as the Free African Society (America’s first independent Black organization), founded by Richard Allen (1760-1831) and Absalom Jones (1746-1818), and Allen’s Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church (later known as Mother Bethel), and by supporting Freedom’s Journal (the nation’s first Black newspaper). Such activity made Philadelphia a center of abolitionism, especially after James Forten (1766-1842), one of the richest Black men in America, gained fame for funding the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison’s (1805-79) Boston-based newspaper, The Liberator.

In the half century leading up to the Civil War, Philadelphia attracted the largest Black population outside the slave states even though the city’s acceptance of African Americans was mixed at best. The number of Black Philadelphians stood at 15,000 in 1830, grew to nearly 20,000 by 1850, and topped 22,000 in 1860. The population clustered in South Philadelphia near what is today Center City, but smaller concentrations also developed in Kensington, Northern Liberties, and Spring Garden. African Americans came because of the Black community’s reputation as a vibrant political, cultural, and economic center, and Philadelphia, true to its antislavery reputation, became a major stop on the Underground Railroad, especially for slaves making their escapes through Maryland and Delaware. But jobs–the great lure for most immigrants–were mostly physically demanding and low-paying, with only a few people managing to secure positions as barbers, caterers, doctors, ministers, and teachers. Competition for work, coupled with antiabolitionist sentiment, fired conflicts between African Americans and working-class whites, especially Irish immigrants. Between 1828 and 1849 Philadelphia experienced five major race riots that destroyed Black homes, businesses, and abolitionist halls, leading one observer to call the city “illiberal, unjust and oppressive.” Such sentiment was not limited to the city: In 1838, Pennsylvania ratified a new constitution that officially disfranchised African Americans.

Despite the problems confronting Black Philadelphia, the community continued to attract migrants in the second half of the nineteenth century. The population grew to nearly 32,000 in 1880 and almost doubled to some 63,000 in 1900. Black Philadelphia was large enough to muster eleven regiments to serve in the Civil War, and in the ensuing decades it supported approximately 300 Black-owned businesses, including the Philadelphia Tribune (established in 1884) and Douglas Hospital (opened in 1895). By the 1890s, the community had the size and vitality to command sociological investigation, which took the form of W.E.B. Du Bois’s (1868-1963) classic study The Philadelphia Negro (1899).

The Civil War experience plus Black Philadelphia’s size led to greater activism on the “race question.” African Americans, led by Octavius V. Catto (1839-71), pushed to regain the right to vote, end segregation of the city’s schools, and desegregate the streetcars. Feeling the pressure, the Pennsylvania state legislature passed a law requiring street railways to carry passengers regardless of color in 1867 and ended legal segregation of the education system in 1881 (although the city’s schools remained segregated by custom for decades afterwards).  The Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution compelled Pennsylvania to grant African Americans the franchise in 1870, but, signaling Philadelphia’s continuing racial difficulties, Catto was shot and killed attempting to vote in 1871.

Black Migration North

The greatest wave of Black migrants in Philadelphia’s history to that point came during World War I when the conflict overseas choked off European migration and Northern businesses across the United States looked to the South for labor. This massive population movement, known as the Great Migration, changed the face of American cities from Boston and New York City to Detroit, Chicago, and beyond. Philadelphia’s Black population more than doubled, rising from 63,000 in 1900 to 134,000 in 1920, with most of the migrants coming from the Eastern seaboard. Other industrial cities in the area, such as Camden, Chester, and Norristown, also saw their Black communities grow, but the great bulk of the immigrants moved to Philadelphia.  Women played a critical role in the migration, helping establish communal and kin networks that brought migrants to Philadelphia.

Most newly arrived African Americans were best described as the “working poor” and they sought employment at the area’s major companies such as the Pennsylvania and Reading Railroads, Baldwin Locomotive, Midvale Steel, Cramps Shipyard, and the Philadelphia Rapid Transit Company. White Philadelphians, many from families only recently arrived in the United States as immigrants, regarded African Americans as competitors for jobs and decent housing. Their consternation about Blacks in their workplaces and neighborhoods led to a number of racial conflicts that mirrored events across the nation. Philadelphia and Chester, Pennsylvania, both had riots in 1918 that killed five people in each city, and Coatesville (45 miles west of Philadelphia) a few years earlier in 1911 witnessed the lynching of a steelworker named Zachariah Walker. Surveys showed that Philadelphia was so inhospitable that many new residents contemplated returning to the South. Some formed the Colored Protective Association or supported the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to assert their rights.

Philadelphia’s in-migration continued in the ensuing decades, tapering off only during the Great Depression. By the end of the 1920s, Philadelphia’s Black population grew to 220,000 people and the community established a much larger presence in North and West Philadelphia.  Enough African Americans enjoyed the era’s prosperity that some critics accused better-off Black Philadelphians of shirking their responsibilities to the poor and working class. Such criticisms diminished in the 1930s when the Depression devastated the city, especially its Black community where unemployment exceeded 50 percent. Across Philadelphia, at textile mills, metal shops, and other places of employment,  African Americans faced the age-old problem of “last hired, first fired.”  For many working-class Blacks, like the city’s white ethnic groups, economic hard times led them to support Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, a sea change in a city dominated by the Republican Party for a century.  Only with the coming of World War II and its attendant federal military supply contracts did the situation improve. African Americans, although some of the last people to gain employment, got jobs at Sun Shipyard, the Philadelphia Transportation Company, and elsewhere.  Still, they faced discrimination as Sun Ship created a segregated yard and the transit company endured one of the costliest hate strikes of World War II.

Migration Despite Discrimination

Despite the continued workplace discrimination, Philadelphia attracted tens of thousands of migrants during the war and the numbers continued to rise for decades afterwards.  The city’s Black population stood at 250,000 in 1940, grew to 375,000 in 1950, and peaked at some 655,000 residents in 1970. By that year, African Americans represented one-third of the population. Unfortunately for Black Philadelphians, their numbers grew just as the city’s economy declined. For generations a national industrial leader, especially in smaller craft occupations, Philadelphia lost textile, metal manufacturing, and electronic production jobs by the tens of thousands from the 1950s-1970s. Some of the jobs moved to the South and foreign countries while others migrated to the suburbs. African Americans found that because of discriminatory housing practices they could not follow the jobs to suburban Bucks and Montgomery counties, and they increasingly became locked in poor inner-city neighborhoods shorn of jobs and resources. These circumstances led to a more radicalized civil rights movement championed by Cecil B. Moore (1915-79) as well as activism by women who demanded the support of public institutions for their families.

In the last three decades of the twentieth century, Philadelphia’s Black population stabilized at between 630,000 and 655,000 people. As white Philadelphians moved to the suburbs, African Americans became a larger portion of the overall population, 43 percent in 2000. The changing population mix created tense political contests, with law-and-order candidate Frank Rizzo (1920-91) serving two mayoral terms from 1972 to 1980. Wilson Goode (b. 1938) finally secured a representative share of political power for the Black community when he served as mayor from 1984 to 1992, although his first term was marred by an infamous conflict with the Black liberation group MOVE.

Goode’s emergence along with that of Judge Leon Higginbotham, Reverend Leon Sullivan, and others showed the vitality of Philadelphia’s African American community that continued into the first decade of the twenty-first century. The 2010 census demonstrated that Philadelphia remained attractive to Black migrants: the total population stood at 1,526,000, with African Americans comprising 43.4 percent of that total (662,000 residents) and whites comprising 41 percent (626,000 residents). Philadelphia attracted more Hispanic and Asian immigrants in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century (12 percent and 6 percent of the population, respectively in 2010), but it remained a magnet mostly for African American migrants who continued to find opportunities as well as stony ground in the city. John Street (b. 1943) and Michael Nutter (b. 1957) were elected mayor and Congressman Chaka Fattah emerged as a senior member on the House Appropriations Committee. Unemployment, high public school dropout rates, and other problems persisted, but the vibrancy of Philadelphia’s Black community continued, a vibrancy built by migrants over nearly four centuries.

James Wolfinger is associate professor of history and education at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois.  He is the author of numerous articles on Philadelphia’s history as well as the book Philadelphia Divided: Race and Politics in the City of Brotherly Love. (Author information current at time of publication.)

When President John Adams (1735-1826) assumed office in 1797, relations between France and the United States had deteriorated, leading to the Quasi-War of 1798-1800. Though the U.S. in 1793 had taken a position of neutrality in France’s war with Great Britain, the French seized American shipping and rejected Adams’s efforts to negotiate peace. In what became known as the XYZ Affair, the revolutionary French government demanded a large loan, bribe, and official apology from Adams before negotiations could begin. The American mission rejected these terms and news of the XYZ Affair created a political firestorm across the United States, especially in Philadelphia.

In response to concerns about invasion by the revolutionary French government, the Federalist-dominated Fifth U.S. Congress enacted legislation in 1798 to shore up national defense from both foreign and domestic threats, including an increase in military spending for the army and navy. In addition, the Federalists passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, four laws dealing with perceived domestic threats, including criticism by Democratic-Republicans that the Federalists thought undermined national security.

Naturalization Act

The first of the Alien and Sedition Acts was the Naturalization Act, which increased the residency requirement for American citizenship from five to fourteen years. The Federalists intended to stop newly arrived immigrants from voting because they were a major constituency for the Democratic-Republican Party. The second law was the Alien Act, which allowed the president to imprison or deport aliens considered dangerous to the United States at any time. The third was the Alien Enemies Act, which allowed the president to deport any male citizen of a hostile nation during times of war.

The last of these laws, the Sedition Act, was perhaps the most controversial. The Sedition Act outlawed actions or conspiracies against government policies and banned false or malicious publishing against federal officials, including members of Congress and the president. This represented one of the strongest attacks on the First Amendment in American history and created a major political backlash against President Adams and the Federalists in Congress. Notably absent from the protections of false or malicious publishing was the vice presidency, at the time occupied by Vice President Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), the leader of the Democratic-Republican Party.

The Sedition Act, despite attacking the First Amendment rights of newspaper editors and contributors, substantially liberalized the law of seditious libel. Under English common law, the truth of a published allegation was no defense from accusations of sedition, indeed, it could be worse if it was true. Under the new Sedition Act, the truth could be used as a defense against the charge of sedition. Regardless of this liberalization, the Sedition Act was wildly unpopular to Americans.

Sedition Act

The Sedition Act was particularly important to the Federalists because it allowed them to clamp down on rival political newspapers. Throughout the 1790s, newspapers were by far the most important political battleground particularly in Philadelphia, the nation’s capital. The Democratic-Republican press, spearheaded by editors such as the grandson of Benjamin Franklin (1706-90), Benjamin Franklin Bache (1769-98) at the Philadelphia Aurora, had been gaining on their Federalist rivals. Indeed, by 1800, Democratic-Republican-leaning newspapers far outnumbered Federalist newspapers despite the Sedition Act. Bache was one of seventeen publishers jailed under the provisions of the act; he died of yellow fever in 1798 awaiting trial. Bache’s successor at the Aurora, William Duane (1760-1835), was tried but acquitted. Matthew Lyon (1749-1822), a Democratic-Republican member of the House of Representatives from Vermont was also jailed under the Sedition Act. He was later reelected from jail by his constituents.

The Alien and Sedition Acts helped incite Fries Rebellion in rural Pennsylvania counties northwest of Philadelphia. With passage of the 1798 war program, including new taxes and the Alien and Sedition Acts, German-Americans of the region protested. President Adams declared the area in rebellion and sent troops to arrest the insurgents.

Democratic-Republican leaders James Madison (1751-1836) and Thomas Jefferson opposed the Alien and Sedition Acts by authoring, respectively, the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions passed by the Virginia and Kentucky legislatures in 1798. The Virginia Resolutions called upon other states to declare that the Alien and Sedition Acts violated the First Amendment while the Kentucky Resolutions went further and asked the states to declare “these acts void and of no force.” None of the other state legislatures agreed. Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey discussed but rejected the resolutions, which are widely seen as precursors to later nullification principles espoused during the antebellum period.

As home to the federal government and a large, partisan press corps, Philadelphia in the 1790s stood at the center of political and legal battles over the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Democratic-Republicans gained support in the city and state as Federalists used severe tactics against publishers Bache and Duane, and sent troops to arrest the protesters of Fries Rebellion. This Federalist overreach in southeastern Pennsylvania and Philadelphia in large part hastened the splintering and decline of the Federalist Party before the election of 1800.

Nathaniel Conley is a doctoral student at the University of Arkansas whose research focuses on the border between Maryland and Pennsylvania with emphasis on the lower class and the border between slavery and freedom. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Philadelphia’s connections with the Atlantic predated William Penn’s founding of the city in 1682. Imperial rivalries among European powers in the seventeenth century made the Delaware Valley a site of colonization, conflict, and diplomatic wrangling. In 1638, the powerful Swedish monarchy established the colony of New Sweden in the area that later became portions of Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. The colony survived until 1655, at which point the Dutch Republic conquered it and incorporated New Sweden into New Netherland. Less than ten years later, in 1664, the English took over New Netherland (renaming New Amsterdam as New York in the process), although the Dutch recaptured the colony during the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672-74). The Treaty of Westminster (1674) relinquished New Netherland to the English. Such contests among European monarchies and republics gave the Delaware Valley a cosmopolitan hue. Before Penn arrived, Lenape people lived alongside Swedes, Dutch, Finns, and Germans; enslaved African people have been documented around the Delaware region from 1639.

Within a few decades of the city’s founding, Philadelphia had become a bustling port city and a center of transoceanic trade. Commercial networks bound Philadelphia to the Atlantic World. By the 1750s, Philadelphia had outgrown Boston to become the busiest port in British America. Its shipping carried flaxseed exports to Ireland and sugar grown by enslaved people in the Caribbean for refining along the Delaware waterfront. Philadelphia, in other words, quickly became integrated into the dense web of connections stretching across the Atlantic and beyond. From the beginning, pirates took advantage of these connections as they preyed on vessels. William Penn discovered to his dismay in a 1699 visit to his city that pirates thrived in Philadelphia, where they received significant support from some of the city’s well-to-do residents and royal officials, and from whence they ventured to target Muslim pilgrims in the Indian Ocean.

Religious Freedom, Economic Opportunity

Transatlantic migration peopled early Philadelphia and its surroundings. Irish, English, Welsh, and German Quakers accompanied Penn across the ocean, drawn—like other dissenting groups—by Penn’s promise of the religious freedom denied to them in the Old World. Other newcomers in the eighteenth century, frequently from the British Isles and Germany, flocked to the rich agricultural land to the west of the city. Their small farms offered better economic opportunities than could be found in Europe, giving the region a reputation as “the best poor man’s country.”

But that land belonged to other people and, consequently, European immigration to the Delaware Valley assumed a settler colonial character marked by diplomacy and conflict. Negotiations between Lenape people and Europeans in Greater Philadelphia became an important, if much mythologized, part of the early history of the region. Some Native Americans appear to have preferred dealing with pacific Quakers and established productive relationships with them. At least in the beginning, Penn and Quakers seemed to negotiate in good faith. However, as time passed, more and more Europeans arrived in the region, eyed Native American lands covetously, and plotted to appropriate further territory for themselves. By the mid-eighteenth century, Scots Irish settler colonials to the west of Philadelphia blamed the colony’s Quakers for checking further conquest. In 1763, a marauding band known as the Paxton Boys massacred the residents of a Susquehannock settlement in Lancaster County that had been on good terms with the colony. Such instances reveal how voluntary European migration across the Atlantic led to the violent expropriation of the region’s Native peoples.

Not all passages across the ocean, though, were voluntary. Indentured servitude and African enslavement—the first a temporary form of unfree labor, the second a permanent one—also crossed the Atlantic. Some European immigrants could pay their fare, but those who could not traded up to seven years of their future labor for passage to the Americas. Conditions indentured servants experienced varied wildly across different times and places, but most did not have easy lives. The German schoolmaster Gottlieb Mittelberger sought to discourage such emigration from his homeland. His Journey to Pennsylvania (1756), based on his voyage from Rotterdam to Philadelphia and his subsequent sojourn in Lancaster County, did not pull any punches about the misery and exploitation that indentured servants and other immigrants often faced.

Trafficked African people, assigned by their captors with the inheritable status of enslavement, also arrived in Philadelphia, sometimes on ships outfitted in the city. In the early years of the colony most came from the Caribbean. However, when that supply became more fraught, as it did during Seven Years’ War, Philadelphian traffickers turned to direct importation from Africa. At the beginning of the American Revolution, Philadelphia contained roughly seven hundred enslaved people, who brought with them elements of African and Caribbean culture like pepper pot soup. Philadelphia and its hinterland—where enslavers held over two thousand more people as property—never developed the export-oriented plantation economy that flourished in Virginia, the Carolinas, and the Caribbean. That said, enslaved people served in households, craft industries, and aboard ships. Furthermore, Philadelphians who did not enslave people themselves often purchased the products of enslaved labor, invested in slaving voyages, and facilitated the buying and selling of their fellow human beings.

Clashes Abroad Reverberate in Philadelphia

A region scarred by Black enslavement became a cradle of white liberty over the middle decades of the eighteenth century. As the foremost port in British North America, Philadelphia played a critical role during the Seven Years’ War, the Imperial Crisis, and the American Revolution. Each of these upheavals had Atlantic origins and ramifications. The struggle between Great Britain and France in Europe reverberated in the Americas. Similarly, events that occurred in the Americas, like George Washington’s military encounter with Joseph Coulon de Jumonville in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, rippled across the Atlantic as well. For Philadelphians, the backdrop of conflict among great powers intensified existing transatlantic connections and created opportunities for new ones. Benjamin Franklin spent considerable time in Great Britain in the 1760s and 1770s trying to prevent war between Great Britain and the thirteen colonies, as well as securing jobs for his friends and associates. Franklin had long been an Atlantic celebrity and his growing disillusionment with Great Britain represented the fraying political and intellectual links between Parliament and its American possessions.

Over these years Philadelphia and its surrounding region became a key battleground in the age of Atlantic Revolutions. Between 1770 and 1833, violent upheavals transformed France, Haiti, and vast colonized regions of North and South America into republics. In 1776 the Second Continental Congress, composed of delegates who were often born and educated in Europe, met in Philadelphia to sign the foundational document of the new United States. The Declaration of Independence reverberated across the ocean and reflected the influence of transatlantic thought. Its authors presented facts to the candid world and addressed a much broader audience than the residents of the thirteen colonies. The draft of Thomas Jefferson also revealed the western drift of Enlightenment ideas. He adapted, for instance, the claim of the seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke that men had the right to “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property.” But the declaration, and the new republic it announced, were also shaped by Atlantic World slavery. As scholars have demonstrated, ideas about white freedom and liberty developed in tandem with racialized ideas about Black enslavement and submissiveness. Jefferson’s initial draft of the declaration placed the onus for slavery solely on Great Britain. From London, it prompted the lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson to wonder why the loudest cries for liberty emanated from the mouths of enslavers.

The Imperial Crisis and the American Revolution severed links to Britain. For some in the Delaware Valley the divorce proved hard to imagine. By no means did all residents in the region flock to the Patriot cause, and “Loyalists” who wanted to maintain relations with the mother country could be found among both the economic elite and ordinary people. The Delaware Valley’s Atlantic merchants confronted a difficult dilemma. Ties to the British Empire granted local merchants access to imperial markets, not least in the Caribbean, where food grown in Philadelphia’s fertile hinterland had been exchanged for sugar and cash crops. War cut off such long-established trading routes and led to the questioning of loyalties. Quaker merchants like Henry Drinker often had deep ties to Great Britain. Drinker and his wife Elizabeth faced the challenge of trying to thread the needle between making concessions to revolutionaries while maintaining their Atlantic connections. Revolutionaries eventually arrested him for treason, imprisoning him in Virginia, while Elizabeth navigated life in British-occupied Philadelphia during 1777-78. After regaining control of the city, Patriots held 638 “Tory” collaborators as suspected traitors. The Drinkers, embedded in Atlantic World networks, suffered as they attempted to navigate the complex politics of the Revolutionary era. Other Philadelphian merchants turned their gaze to the west, looking for new markets in China and the Pacific.

Ripples of the American Revolution

The Revolutionary War, like the Seven Years’ War before it, recalibrated Atlantic relations in other ways, too. At Valley Forge in 1777-78 the Prussian officer Baron von Steuben helped to drill George Washington’s army. The British evacuated Philadelphia in June 1778 and retreated to New York. Around three thousand Philadelphian loyalists left the city with the British military forces, joining a wider exodus of Tories and their allies (including enslaved Black Americans who had been promised freedom in exchange for military service) to Canada and Britain. Von Steuben’s work at Valley Forge helped Washington fight the British to a draw at Monmouth. A few months before Patriots retook Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin, having been dispatched to Paris, steered the rebel colonies into a crucial alliance with France that helped to determine the outcome of the war. The decision to use Franklin as a diplomat proved a sound one. He fascinated the French, who saw him as the premier example of American genius, and he played his role with aplomb.

In the decades following the American Revolution, Philadelphia remained closely connected to the political currents of the Atlantic World. The ideas of the American Revolution were carried east and south. Revolutions erupted elsewhere—in France, in other parts of Europe, in Haiti, and in Spanish America. The career of Thomas Paine indicates their entangled paths. Paine, who was born in Norfolk, England, had been convinced by Franklin to go to the Americas. Arriving in Philadelphia in late 1774, his influential pamphlet Common Sense made the case for revolution in plain language that appealed to a wide readership. In the doldrums of 1776, Paine’s The American Crisis helped buoy Patriot morale. After the American Revolution ended, Paine traveled to France and served as a member of the National Convention, where he narrowly avoided the guillotine after falling out of favor with leading Jacobins. Paine’s career as an Atlantic revolutionary, with Philadelphia at its center, demonstrates how ideas easily crossed oceans.

As a major port city and an Atlantic World hub, Philadelphia often welcomed revolutionaries like Paine, while selectively supporting revolutions elsewhere. French Minister Edmond-Charles Genêt, also called Citizen Genêt, arrived in Philadelphia to a rapturous welcome in 1793. Genêt angered George Washington by attempting to subvert Washington’s proclamation of U.S. neutrality in the brewing conflict between Great Britain and France. Another figure to become embroiled in partisan battles of the early republic was the Polish nobleman Tadeusz Kościuszko. Having fought with the colonials during the American Revolution and then for Poland against Russia and Prussia, in 1797 he returned as a political exile to the United States, where he lived briefly in Philadelphia until leaving for Europe in 1798. Kościuszko wrote a will that named Thomas Jefferson as the executor, dedicating his estate to purchasing the freedom of enslaved people and providing them with an education.

Exiles Find a Home

Whether as a place of refuge from revolution and reaction or as a source of support for insurgents, the Delaware Valley became enmeshed with tumultuous upheavals across the Atlantic. When revolution erupted in Haiti in 1791, French masters fled the island, forcing many of the people they enslaved to join them. The exiles who arrived in Philadelphia brought firsthand accounts of the hemisphere’s first Black-led revolution, which energized both abolitionist and anti-abolitionist politics. Another Francophone uprooted by revolutionary wars was Joseph Bonaparte, who fled to the United States after his brother Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. Following a short sojourn in Philadelphia he moved out to an estate in nearby Bordentown, New Jersey, where he spent most of his remaining years. Supporters of the Greeks in the Greek War for Independence from the Ottoman Empire raised money for the cause and even tried to persuade the United States to intervene. And in 1848, citizens gathered on Independence Square to welcome the proclamation of a new French Republic. People did not always like the direction foreign revolutions took, but Philadelphians, both Black and white, recognized their city’s place in a revolutionary Atlantic World.

Black Philadelphians insisted that those Atlantic revolutions had to reckon with enslavement—the cry of liberty rang hollow if new republics were built on the back of forced labor. Finding allies, however, did not prove easy; abolitionism was never more than a minority sentiment among white people in the eighteenth century. That said, some of the region’s Quakers, African Americans, and other friends of liberty raised their voices in favor of ending enslavement and emancipating enslaved people. Connections to the Caribbean and Europe shaped antislavery activism in the Delaware Valley. An extraordinary individual named Benjamin Lay, a Quaker immigrant, became one of the region’s earliest abolitionists. Born in England the same year as Philadelphia’s founding, Lay spent years traversing the Atlantic as a sailor, left for Barbados, and from there migrated to Philadelphia. Lay’s abolitionism sprang from his ardent Quaker faith, as well as his experiences in Barbados, where he witnessed enslavement’s brutality firsthand. While in Barbados, Lay and his wife Sarah held meetings at their house and served meals to enslaved people, which infuriated white slaveholders. After he and Sarah relocated to Philadelphia, Lay tried to convince fellow Quakers in the region to emancipate enslaved people. While some Friends had rejected enslavement before Lay’s arrival, his activism led to his disownment, and he retreated to a cave he converted into a cottage in Abington, Pennsylvania. From there Lay continued to urge the region’s Friends to acknowledge Atlantic enslavement as apostasy. By the end of his life more Quaker voices in the region had begun to proclaim the abolitionism gospel, including the New Jersey merchant John Woolman, a member of the Chesterfield Friends Meeting, who died in Britain on an antislavery mission, and the French-born religious refugee Anthony Benezet, who played an important role in founding the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage in 1775. The first abolition society in the Americas, it was later reorganized as the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage (usually referred to as the Pennsylvania Abolition Society) in 1789.

The AME Church Goes Global

In the decades that followed, Black abolitionists in Philadelphia built institutions and cultivated connections that reached across the Atlantic. By doing so they recognized that the struggle against enslavement in the United States was part of a wider battle for rights that extended to Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa. Richard Allen, building on his efforts in establishing Philadelphia’s Free African Society in 1787 and Mother Bethel Church in 1794, founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1816 and became the church’s first bishop. AME churches subsequently sprang up all over the globe. By the end of the nineteenth century they had reached Bermuda, West Africa, and South Africa. An African American institution that began in Philadelphia therefore shaped the global spread of Black Christianity. Bishop Allen supported abolition, as did James Forten, a self-made sailmaker who after an initial flirtation with the idea of “colonizing” formerly enslaved Americans in Africa or Haiti became a fierce opponent of such schemes and an ardent advocate of an immediate end to enslavement. But the Atlantic connections of Philadelphia’s Black abolitionists are perhaps most evident in the career of Robert Purvis. Born free in Charleston, South Carolina, to parents of British, Moroccan, and Jewish roots, Purvis migrated to Philadelphia, where he helped found the American Anti-Slavery Society. Like many of his fellow abolitionists, Purvis sought to rally support in the United Kingdom, which had put enslavement on the path to extinction in its own colonies, and he traveled back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean on fundraising missions while corresponding with prominent British figures in the antislavery movement. When, on August 1, 1842, Black abolitionists marched through the southern wards of the city to mark the eighth anniversary of abolition across the British empire, a rampaging white mob threatened to burn down Purvis’s house.

The Lombard Street Riot of 1842, as it became known, proved just one of a series of riots that pitted rival immigrant and racial groups against one another in the “turbulent era” of the 1830s and 1840s. Tensions over religion, enslavement, and politics that reached across the Atlantic Ocean played out on the streets of Philadelphia. Immigration from Europe continued in the decades after the Revolution, with British, Germans, and Irish (especially after the beginning of the Potato Famine in the 1840s) the most heavily represented. Old World experiences shaped their politics. British Chartists, veterans of the struggle for the vote in the United Kingdom, welcomed the political rights denied to them in their country of origin. Irish Catholics gravitated toward the Democratic Party, in part due to the hostility of prominent Democrats like Andrew Jackson toward Britain. Indeed, the frequency with which Irish Catholics participated in anti-abolitionist violence owed something to their equation of abolitionism with support for the British crown. Germans, on the other hand, often backed the new antislavery Republican Party in the 1850s, and many of them saw the fight against enslavement as a continuation of the revolutions of 1848 in Europe. Catholic immigration in particular met a nativist backlash. The Philadelphia Nativist Riots of 1844, which saw the county placed under martial law, sprang from rumors that Irish newcomers wanted to replace the Protestant King James Bible in the city’s public schools. Philadelphia became a battleground in a conflict that stretched back to the English colonization of Ireland and break with Rome.

Movement across the ocean brought epidemics as well as people. Diseases rarely remained within the borders of one country; they spread rapidly across an increasingly connected world. Philadelphia’s status as an Atlantic port increased its vulnerability. A yellow fever epidemic in 1793, possibly carried on ships transporting French enslavers fleeing the Haitian Revolution, killed at least five thousand Philadelphians and sent tens of thousands fleeing from the city. Yellow fever recurred on a less destructive scale for decades. After the epidemic in 1793, the city decided to build new waterworks and engaged British-born architect Benjamin Latrobe to design them. Latrobe built the waterworks in a neoclassical style that evoked Athens. Cholera too crossed the Atlantic and caused epidemics in 1832, 1849, and 1866. By the late nineteenth century, Philadelphia’s sanitarians were learning from the hygiene measures that had begun to control such diseases in Europe.

The Arts and Sciences Flourish

Such exchange of knowledge had long been a feature of the region. The arts and sciences flourished in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Philadelphia. Benjamin Franklin and John Bartram’s establishment of the American Philosophical Society in 1743 marked the first of many efforts for Philadelphians to demonstrate leadership in the arts and sciences. Philadelphia was the first city to lay claim to the mantle of the “Athens of America,” although some people later argued that Boston also deserved the title. The Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia was founded in 1812, in part to impel the creation and diffusion of knowledge about the sciences and in part to place science in the United States on a par with its status in Europe. While Atlantic World rivalries proved important, the flourishing of the arts and sciences in Philadelphia also sprang from cultural exchange and connection, with leaders in fields as diverse as medicine (Benjamin Rush), botany (John Bartram), and history (Henry Charles Lea) all maintaining close links through either education or correspondence to their European counterparts. The French, in particular, had a powerful influence on the city, not least through the career of the merchant Stephen Girard, an immigrant who became one of the richest men in the United States and left most of his estate to his adopted city. Such figures cultivated and affirmed Atlantic World relationships.

If Philadelphia’s intellectual connections to the Atlantic remained a constant across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the region’s significance to the transoceanic economy eventually started to wane in the 1800s. In contrast to Washington, D.C., which foreign observers and even many people in the U.S. derided as a miasmic swamp or a sleepy, provincial village, Philadelphia remained an Atlantic financial hub well into the 1830s. The Second Bank of the United States, based on Chestnut Street and boasting a federal charter from its foundation in 1816 to 1836, maintained transatlantic financial ties between the U.S. and Europe, particularly Great Britain. Its demise at the hands of President Jackson strained those relations, which suffered further when Pennsylvania defaulted on its debt payments to European creditors in 1842, prompting the English Lake poet (and out of pocket “surly creditor”) William Wordsworth to rail against the commonwealth’s “degenerate Men.” Furthermore, Philadelphia lost ground to New York City as an Atlantic port, as the Erie Canal (among other factors) fueled Manhattan’s ascent as the financial capital of the United States. The source of Greater Philadelphia’s wealth shifted from commerce to manufacturing, as the Athens of America transformed into the workshop of the world, which increased local support for high protective tariffs to protect home industry. These higher tariffs, however, made it harder for the city to cultivate European markets. Some Philadelphians nevertheless found overseas clients. Joseph Harrison Jr., for example, built locomotives for Russia and Czar Nicholas I awarded him a gold medal for completing the St. Petersburg-Moscow Railway. After his return to Philadelphia, Harrison amassed an impressive art collection, which he displayed at his mansion off Rittenhouse Square. Harrison, like some of his contemporaries, remained connected to the Atlantic World and prioritized connections and cultural exchange.

Philadelphia’s reputation as an Atlantic center of politics, finance, and commerce may have declined over the course of the nineteenth century but its links to its nearest ocean persisted in other respects. Immigration, which had slowed during the Civil War, accelerated again in the decades that followed. These arrivals increasingly came from eastern and southern Europe— especially Italy—rather than the western and northern reaches of the continent. Their children and grandchildren then often made the Atlantic crossing in reverse to fight in that continent’s wars. U.S. intervention in European conflict left a marked impact on the region’s economy and society. World War I and World War II stimulated ship production along the Delaware. During the latter, the Philadelphia Navy Yard employed over fifty thousand workers, whose labor made Philadelphia a vital part of the “Arsenal of Democracy.” Europe and Africa continued to exert an influence in art, design, and politics, too. Jacques-Henri-Auguste Gréber, a French landscape architect, designed and built the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Marcus Garvey, the founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and a proponent of Pan-Africanism, had a following in Philadelphia. Garvey is not the only example of Philadelphia’s connections to Africa. After the loosening of federal restrictions on immigration in the 1960s, Ethiopians, Ghanaians, Liberians, and Nigerians were prominently represented in the new African diaspora of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to Philadelphia.

Bonds of Culture Persist

Philadelphia’s Atlantic connections remained evident in spaces and civic life of the twenty-first century region. The Irish Memorial near Penn’s Landing, dedicated in 2003, sought to remind visitors about the migrants who built the city. The Mummers Parade could trace its roots back to older immigrant traditions from England, Germany, and Sweden. Annual Columbus Day celebrations testified to both the strength of Italian-American pride and the contested legacy of European colonization. Founders of the ODUNDE Festival, held the second Sunday in June, sought to celebrate the history and heritage of African peoples around the globe and created one of the longest-running and largest African American street festivals in the United States. Philadelphia’s historical connections to the Atlantic—forged in cultural exchange, revolutionary conflict, and the movement of peoples and revolutionary ideas—helped make the twenty-first century city a mecca for tourists. Yet such connections have sometimes underpinned a resurgent nativist politics that echoed an earlier era, as some residents used the region’s European cultural heritage to question the place of new immigrants from the Americas and Asia in the city. Philadelphia connections by the twenty-first century were global rather than primarily Atlantic. But the ocean the Delaware River empties into made the city a political and economic hub and the links it enabled remained lodged in civic memory.

Evan C. Rothera is Assistant Professor of History at Sam Houston State University. He is author of Civil Wars and Reconstructions in the Americas: The United States, Mexico, and Argentina, 1860–1880 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022) and coeditor, with Brian Matthew Jordan, of The War Went On: Reconsidering the Lives of Civil War Veterans (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020). (Author information current at time of publication).

Philadelphia’s Chinatown had its roots in the “great driving out” of Chinese from the American West in the 1870s and 1880s, when Chinese migrants fled racist backlash and violence. During these decades Chinese merchants and laundry men established a small enclave along the 900 block of Race Street, on the outskirts of the central business district. At a time when Philadelphia was the “Workshop of the World” and European immigrants’ lives were structured around the proximity of home and work, Chinese immigrants were restricted to domestic service, laundry work, and small commercial ventures such as import/export gift shops, groceries, and, later, restaurants. Although many Chinese men lived and worked in laundries across the city, they were not integrated into these neighborhoods; Chinatown functioned as their true home and the center of Chinese community in the city.

Life in Chinatown at the turn of the twentieth century was structured around the spaces of shops, restaurants, communal boarding houses, and common rooms (or fongs). Social life largely focused on the many family and business associations, later consolidated under the umbrella of the Chinese Benevolent Association. Restrictive U.S. immigration laws such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prevented all but merchants from bringing families, creating a hierarchical “bachelor society” of men living as single in extended kin arrangements. From the 1910s to the 1940s Chinese Americans expanded their presence around 900 Race, occupying adjacent blocks amid a multiethnic population, making a home amidst the city’s Skid Row to the east and “Tenderloin” district to the west. This community publicly manifested its ethnic character in enactments of Chinese identity such as funeral processions, political demonstrations, and New Year celebrations, all of which provided exotic spectacle for non-Chinese Philadelphians. On the other hand, Chinatown also gained visibility as a “nuisance” and deviant vice-ridden area. It was frequently raided by police in the early 1900s during the so-called “tong wars.” Tongs were traditional Chinese associations adapted to serve business and social needs in America, but they gained a criminal image informed by negative Orientalist stereotypes.

Community Transformation

Liberalized immigration policies after World War II allowed Chinese Americans to bring wives from China. This initiated a new wave of immigration to Philadelphia that transformed Chinatown into a family-oriented community. Churches, businesses and social/cultural organizations were established to improve neighborhood life, preserve Chinese culture, and provide services to the growing number of new immigrants. Holy Redeemer Chinese Catholic Church at Tenth and Vine Streets dates to this period, as does the Chinese Christian Church and Center at Tenth and Spring Streets. From 1940 to 1980, the boundaries of Chinatown expanded greatly north to Wood Street, south to Arch Street, and east-west from Eighth to Twelfth Street as this area became more or less exclusively Asian in character.

This growth of Chinatown coincided with emerging city plans, as early as 1945, for a crosstown expressway and other urban redevelopment projects in and around the neighborhood core. From the mid-1960s through the 1980s, urban renewal projects laid waste to each of Chinatown’s borders. An expansion of Independence Mall closed off the eastern boundary, The Gallery/Market East mall the southern. Later in the 1980s the construction of the Convention Center occupied a western border on Eleventh Street. Most significantly, in 1966, Chinatown residents learned that the construction of an expressway along Vine Street would entail the destruction of the beloved Holy Redeemer Chinese Catholic Church and School. A young widow, Cecilia Moy Yep (b. 1929), began organizing residents to fight the expressway plan. With George Moy (b. 1925), Yep founded the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation (PCDC) in 1969. PCDC was joined in the fight by the more traditional Chinese Benevolent Association and a radical student group, Yellow Seeds, whose Maoist and Black Power-influenced activism embraced the fight to save Chinatown as well as providing community services including a health clinic, newspaper, and breakfast programs. Yellow Seeds’s slogan, “Same Struggle, Same Fight,” linked the fight in Chinatown to the struggles of “Third World peoples” throughout the city and worldwide.

A turning point in the expressway battle came on July 1973, when a group of young people defied the demolition cranes and climbed up onto a pile of rubble at Tenth and Winter Streets to protest the destruction of houses in their neighborhood. The homes had been claimed through eminent domain to make way for the expressway. The incident drew the attention of the local media (one television reporter joined the youth atop the pile) and spurred the city’s interest to redevelop the area. Using a variety of tactics, including enforcement of the recently enacted federal Environmental Protection Act (1970), which mandated environmental impact studies for communities affected by the expressway route, activists delayed the project for over a decade, allowing for modifications of the plan. Their success saved the church and launched new and more inclusive leadership in Chinatown.

Progress in the 1970s

The fight against the expressway also transformed Chinatown’s relationship with the City of Philadelphia. In the mid-1970s PCDC collaborated with the City Planning Commission on a study for Chinatown (the Chadbourne Report) that outlined redevelopment activities including new housing, streetscape improvements, and a senior center. Working through private/public partnerships from the 1970s to the present, PCDC systematically targeted land previously claimed by demolition, secured special zoning for Chinatown, and worked as a developer to obtain Redevelopment Authority-controlled lots. It completed various housing and mixed residential-commercial structures, and an “authentic Chinese” Friendship Gate. Under the leadership of Reverend Yam Tong Hoh (1898-1987), of the Chinese Christian Church and Center, the community created On Lok House, a senior citizen residence and center. The Friendship Gate became the most visible external symbol of the community. At the same time, housing projects articulated a vision of a “living community” that emphasized housing, family, and community institutions “beyond the restaurants” and the neighborhood’s status as a tourist destination.

To protect this vision of a “living community,” Chinatown residents and supporters continued to draw on this history of activism to mobilize against urban renewal schemes that threatened the residential character of the neighborhood. In 1993, residents organized to push back against a proposal for a federal prison near Holy Redeemer. In 2000, a complex coalition including PCDC, Asian Americans United, the Chinese Benevolent Association, new immigrant businesses, and other individuals and organizations across the city–Asian and non-Asian–organized to oppose a proposal for a baseball stadium at Twelfth and Vine Streets. This opposition aimed to protect Chinatown housing and community spaces adjacent to the stadium site and reaffirmed the cultural and historical significance of the neighborhood for the region as a whole.

The stadium fight also highlighted the importance of the area north of Vine Street−dubbed “Chinatown North”−for Chinatown’s future. Chinatown North emerged as a site of neighborhood expansion beginning in the late 1990s, when PCDC located its offices and a housing development on Ninth Street north of Vine. The Chinese Christian Church and Center opened a new congregation on Vine Street in 2007. Other organizations such as Asian Americans United and the Asian Arts Initiative located their facilities north of Vine Street. Also in 2007, Asian Americans United also opened the Folk Arts and Cultural Treasures Charter School, or FACTS, the first public school in Chinatown, in an empty factory at 1023 Callowhill Street.. Chinatown North continued to be home to small-scale manufacturing and product warehousing ventures, serving as a “back end” for the Chinatown retail and restaurant sectors. Plans called for a new high-rise community center, known as Eastern Tower, for the historic corner of Tenth and Vine Streets, solidifying the historical significance of this area for the Chinatown community.

Chinatown Expands and Diversifies

Chinatown continued to be a destination and launching point for new immigrants. After the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, when U.S. immigration law removed restrictions on immigration from Asia, the greater Philadelphia area incorporated ongoing waves of immigration from China and other Asian nations. An influx of immigrants from Hong Kong led to the growth of Chinatown in the 1970s. In the 1980s, resettled refugees from Vietnam, many of them ethnic Chinese, diversified the population of Chinatown and created many new businesses. Most of the newcomers to Chinatown after the 1990s were Mandarin- or Fujianese-speaking immigrants from Fujian. Differences of language and custom presented challenges for local churches and organizations seeking to help or represent new immigrants. Many recent immigrants retained a strong connection to their country of origin. Among them, entrepreneurs brought significant capital to start businesses and invest in the neighborhood economy. They also reanimated traditional customs and celebrations such as Chinese New Year and the Mid Autumn Festival, celebrated each year in Chinatown. A new annual parade for the Hoyu Folk Culture Festival, sponsored by the Philadelphia Hoyu Chinese American Association, honored the founder of Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian Province in southeastern China.

In the twenty-first century, Chinatown embodied a pan-Asian identity, serving as a central touchstone for a larger cultural community of Asians around the greater Philadelphia area. Organizations such as Asian Americans United and the Asian Arts Initiative reflected this new pan-Asian focus. According to the 2010 Census, the bulk of Chinatown residents were still Chinese, although the area was also 4.4 percent Asian Indian, 4 percent Korean, 2 percent Vietnamese, and 1 percent Filipino and Japanese, with smaller numbers of Indonesian, Malaysian, Cambodian, Pakistani, and Burmese residents. Chinatown also housed Vietnamese, Burmese, Korean, Japanese, and Malaysian businesses. This diversity reflected larger immigration trends. The 2000 Census reported 17,390 Chinese in Philadelphia (31,663 in the five-county region), and this figure rose to 29,396 in 2010 (with 53,133 in the five-county region).  In 2011 the Metro Chinese Weekly estimated that more than 150,000 Chinese lived in the Greater Philadelphia metropolitan region, most of them outside Chinatown. The larger Asian population likewise grew exponentially in the last few decades. In 2011, Asian immigration accounted for 39 percent of Philadelphia’s foreign-born population and Asians were 6.3 percent of the city’s population. Chinese and other Asians lived in South Philadelphia, West Philadelphia, the Northeast (particularly Mayfair), and suburban areas, with a large percentage in Montgomery County.

Despite this dispersed settlement, by the first decades of the twenty-first century Philadelphia did not develop a “second Chinatown” like New York’s Queens, and Chinatown remained a primary entry point for immigrants and a symbol of Asian American history, struggle, and resilience in the region. New immigrants used Chinatown as a base, traveling to and from New York’s Chinatown, an important source of labor and migration for greater Philadelphia. Local and regional immigrants from New Jersey and Pennsylvania came to Philadelphia’s Chinatown on the weekends to shop, dine, attend events, and, on Sundays, go to church. Family banquets and other significant gatherings continued to occur in Chinatown, and a majority of traditional family, regional, and business associations remained located there. Many aging or retired Chinese Americans expressed a desire to retire in Chinatown, if affordable housing were available. Younger or second-generation immigrants continued to open businesses in Chinatown, some of which catered to their demographic, and Chinese students attending local universities attended Chinatown’s churches and shopped in neighborhood businesses. Others considered Chinatown a haven for all immigrants (regardless of national origin) in the city, a “safe space” from discrimination or harassment. In addition, Chinatown’s workforce extended beyond those of Asian origin. Many restaurant workers, for example, hailed from Mexico or Central America, and Spanish became as common in Chinatown’s kitchens as Cantonese once was.

Chinatown’s small size and strong sense of history and community made it resilient in the face of historic challenges. Nevertheless the community remained vulnerable to larger outside forces. In the twenty-first century, gentrification presented an ongoing threat, both in the Chinatown core and Chinatown North. Approximately 74 percent of the businesses located in Philadelphia’s Chinatown were small or local businesses, including a core group of family-owned restaurants. But despite increasing immigration to Philadelphia region, the foreign-born population in Chinatown decreased from 42 to 33 percent between 2007 and 2011 and family households also declined (from 61 to 46 percent between 1990 and 2010, a significant change). New condominium developments occurred at a brisk rate, adapting old hotels and factories and leading to a dramatic threefold increase in home values. Chinatown’s residents and advocates continued to draw on a legacy of activism and struggle to develop the community and secure a future “beyond the restaurants.”

Kathryn Wilson is an Associate Professor of History at Georgia State University. She previously worked at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and is the author of Ethnic Renewal in Philadelphia’s Chinatown: Space, Place and Struggle. (Author information current at time of publication.)

White Americans were the most active in promoting colonization, but many Black people desired opportunities outside North America in places that appeared to offer greater self-determination and economic gain. The first colonizationists, Black and white, envisioned various territories for expatriates. The West Indies, which after 1776 seemed separate from the mainland to most citizens of the United States, were a possibility. Haiti was the most commonly mentioned island. In West Africa, Sierra Leone, a British colony (first proprietary, then Crown), also seemed a possibility, since its residents included Black settlers from England, North America, and Jamaica. By the early 1820s, American colonizationists focused on Cape Mesurado in Africa, where Monrovia (named for President James Monroe) was established in a territory soon called Liberia (after the Latin word for freedom). Some also proposed removing free Black people to the American western frontier, where they might be distant from white Americans as well as useful as a buffer against Native Americans.

Although often considered an American colony, Liberia was a territory initially purchased by American settlers from African chiefs in several transactions in the 1820s with financial support from the American Colonization Society, a national organization founded in Washington, D.C., in 1817. The Americo-Liberian settlement expanded from the coastal town of Monrovia along the banks of the St. Paul and Mesurado Rivers. Settlers declared Liberia an independent nation, with its own constitution, in 1847. It was then home to about 3,000 Americo-Liberians, a number sufficient to establish political dominance over native Africans but far fewer than the number of free Black individuals that colonizationists had hoped to resettle from the United States.

In Philadelphia, members of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society discussed colonization in the 1810s as a response to the growing number of freedpeople or runaways coming to Philadelphia from Southern states. At that time, leaders of Black Philadelphia including Richard Allen (1760–1831) and James Forten (1766–1842) endorsed colonization. But soon, in Philadelphia and elsewhere, colonizationist sentiment was attacked from several angles. In 1817 a gathering of Black Philadelphians at Mother Bethel Church denounced colonization as an insult to African Americans and a forced removal hidden behind a thin veil of voluntary emigration.

Reversal of Views

Allen and Forten modified their earlier views although at times they articulated lukewarm support for colonization. Allen declared: “This land which we have watered with our tears and our blood, is now our mother country, and we are well satisfied to stay where wisdom abounds and the gospel is free.” Similarly, in an 1818 address to white Pennsylvanians, Forten stated the desires of free Black persons to remain in their homes and to assist in the abolition of slavery and the improvement of Black life in the United States. In 1818, the Pennsylvania Abolition Society moved firmly against colonization by noting that most free Black people were committed to remaining in the country of their birth, that progress for free African Americans was most likely to occur in the United States, and that Sierra Leone had failed to thrive, after two decades, as a home for Black emigrants from Canada and England. Still, the Pennsylvania Abolition Society expressed belief that resettlement might be salutary in some circumstances.

Despite these mixed opinions, the American Colonization Society enjoyed strong support in the Greater Philadelphia region. Robert Finley (1772–1817), who led the committee that established the American Colonization Society, was born in Princeton, New Jersey. Like most states beginning in the 1820s, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland had local colonization societies that identified likely settlers and drummed up financial support for travel and the needs of the Liberian settlements. Often these societies raised funds for the national organization as well. A settlement at Cape Palmas was known as “Maryland in Africa,” then the Republic of Maryland, until it was annexed by Liberia in 1857. Baltimore was a common point of embarkation for emigration to Liberia. Delaware politicians joined with their counterparts in Southern states in the call for colonization.

Even after the Pennsylvania Abolition Society condemned African colonization in 1818, Philadelphians were involved in the movement of free Black people to Liberia. Episcopal Bishop William White (1748-1836) became a vice president of the American Colonization Society in 1819. Philadelphia Quaker Roberts Vaux (1786-1836) became a colonizationist in the 1820s, when he decided that a Liberian settlement would help suppress the African slave trade as well as provide a home for victims of the slave trade (known as recaptives) who were seized by the American government, sometimes at sea, from illicit slave-traders. Other Quakers including Joseph Hemphill (1770-1842) and Sarah Moore Grimké (1792-1873) adopted the colonizationist cause. Philadelphia luminaries such as Mathew Carey (1760-1839) and Elliott Cresson (1796-1854) also supported colonization.

Colonization Societies Emerge

The Pennsylvania Colonization Society formed in 1828 to promote Black emigration from Pennsylvania as well as to fund transportation of freedpeople from other states to Liberia. It was followed in 1834 by the Young Men’s Colonization Society of Pennsylvania, which, in cooperation with the national society and the Colonization Society of the City of New-York funded the travel of 126 freed Afro-Virginians from Norfolk to a new settlement in Liberia called Bassa Cove. In 1835 this settlement was attacked by the dominant local slave trader, King Joe. Although the new settlers were routed in the first battle, they were able, with the assistance of the Monrovian settlers, to force King Joe to cede territory to the United Colonization Societies of New-York and Pennsylvania. However, the Young Men’s Colonization Society of Pennsylvania could not maintain itself as a separate organization and was absorbed into the American Colonization Society in 1838.

A Philadelphia Ladies’ Liberia School Association formed in 1832 under the leadership of Quaker Beulah Biddle Sansom (1768-1837). The Young Men’s Colonization Society of Pennsylvania had been calling for women to support the work of colonization, and in the early 1830s Philadelphia women began raising money to support schools in Liberia. Such charitable support was part of a larger pattern of women’s benevolence in antebellum America. Missions and schools were considered natural interests of middle-class Christian women. The enthusiasm of the Ladies’ Liberia School Association remained high throughout the 1830s, as its members funded construction of schoolhouses and selected teachers for its schools in Liberia. This enthusiasm declined in the 1840s as the funds raised by the association proved inadequate to maintain the Liberian schools and as the growth of the American Anti-Slavery Society (always opposed to colonization) dimmed the association’s Liberian hopes. Indeed, one of the association’s teachers, Massachusetts-born Ishmael Locke, left Liberia in despair over the state of the schools and ultimately settled in Philadelphia, where he became principal of the Institute for Colored Youth in the 1850s. His grandson, born in Philadelphia, was Alain Leroy Locke (1885-1954), proponent of the arts and thought of the Harlem Renaissance.

Some of the early Americo-Liberian settlers were Black Philadelphians. By 1822, about fifty-four Black Philadelphians had emigrated to Liberia (a tiny number compared to about 10,000 free Black individuals in Philadelphia, but significant in the settlement). One of the folk heroes of early Liberia was Matilda Newport, a young woman who emigrated from Philadelphia in 1820 around age twenty-five and, according to the legend, stood her ground singlehandedly with a rifle in a battle with local people in 1822.

Both Black and white residents of the Philadelphia region thus participated in a resettlement effort that would have momentous implications in the modern world. Although colonization’s advocates and its foes expressed mixed sentiments about the resettlement, and Philadelphians’ initiatives were mostly limited to the 1820s and 1830s, the repercussions of colonization both in the United States and in West Africa made it a crucial phase in Philadelphia’s history.

John Saillant is Professor of English and History at Western Michigan University. He is the author of the monograph Black Puritan, Black Republican: The Life and Thought of Lemuel Haynes. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Observed on the second Monday in October, Columbus Day in the Philadelphia region gained prominence as Italian immigrant communities grew in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By commemorating the 1492 arrival of Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) in the New World, Italian-Americans embraced the navigator as their countryman, celebrated Italian culture, and called attention to their American loyalty and identity. While the practices and places for observing Columbus Day changed over time, the holiday in Philadelphia and its suburbs retained a distinctively Italian flavor even as Columbus became a controversial figure in American history.

The first major anniversary of Columbus to be celebrated in the United States, 1792, passed quietly in Philadelphia although not without notice. While Boston and New York hosted public events, in Philadelphia the nationally circulated Daily American Advertiser published an oration about Columbus delivered earlier at Princeton College in New Jersey.

The reputation of Columbus as an American hero grew during the nineteenth century following the 1827 publication of The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, by Washington Irving. It was not until the 1860s, however, that Columbus Day emerged as an annual celebration among Italian immigrant communities, first in New York in 1866 and in Philadelphia by 1869. That year, the Societá di Unione e Fratellanza Italiana, a mutual aid society in South Philadelphia, held the first in a series of annual balls on October 12 and made honoring Columbus one of its central activities. In 1876, Italian-Americans dedicated a monument of Columbus in Fairmount Park as their contribution to the Centennial celebration of the United States.

Italian-Americans embraced Columbus because of the place of his birth, the city-state of Genoa, within the region that became part of the Italian nation formed in 1861. Although Columbus’s birthplace has at times been debated by scholars and others, nineteenth-century immigrants to the United States did not question their shared heritage with the “discoverer” of America. They also identified with Columbus on the basis of shared religion, and the Catholic Church became a major proponent of commemorating Columbus for his role in extending Catholicism to the New World.

The ethnic and religious character of the holiday was clear in Philadelphia in 1892, the four-hundredth anniversary of the first Columbus voyage, which came in the midst of a surge of Italian immigration. In addition to celebrations in Italian neighborhoods, the Columbus commemoration activities that year included a torchlight parade of Catholic organizations on Broad Street, a Solemn Pontifical Mass at the Cathedral on Logan Square, and a performance by parochial schoolchildren at the Academy of Music.

As an expression of American identity, Columbus Day had a patriotic spirit that combined with its ties to religion and ethnicity. As state governments began to grant legal status to the holiday in the first decades of the twentieth century, participation widened to include public officials, office-seekers, and military units. Patriotic overtones were especially apparent in Philadelphia during the Cold War era as parades and ceremonies at Independence Hall from the 1950s through the 1970s symbolically linked the arrival of Columbus in America with the founding of the republic.

Monuments to Christopher Columbus have anchored and sometimes shifted the location of Columbus Day observances. The Columbus monument dedicated in Fairmount Park in 1876 served as a focal point for commemoration for the next century, until the statue was moved to Marconi Plaza in South Philadelphia during the bicentennial year of 1976. Following its dedication there by Mayor Frank Rizzo (1920-91), the monument’s new location in the city’s traditionally Italian neighborhood became the destination of the annual Columbus Day parade. In Camden, a Columbus monument erected in 1915 by the Sons of Italy in Forest Hill Park (later renamed Farnham Park) played a similar role as a site of commemoration in the first half of the twentieth century. A Columbus monument in Norristown, Pennsylvania, dedicated in 1992 after years of effort, from that point forward became the centerpiece for celebration each year in the Montgomery County seat.

By the time of the five-hundredth anniversary of the first Columbus voyage in 1992, celebrating the navigator became more controversial and contentious. When the Philadelphia City Council voted in 1989 to rename a portion of Delaware Avenue as Columbus Boulevard, Native Americans protested that Columbus represented conquest of their land and neighborhood groups resisted the loss of a familiar street name. In 1992 Penn’s Landing gained a new, modern obelisk to honor Columbus, but on the day of its unveiling a group dressed as Native Americans splattered the monument with red paint and painted over “Columbus Boulevard” street signs.

While the history and reputation of Columbus became a matter of national and international debate, the region’s tourism promoters sought to draw visitors with a year of events called “Neighbors in the New World,” to emphasize multicultural unity and progress. Many museums and organizations embraced the theme, but others such as the annual American Indian Arts Festival at the Rankokus Reservation in Burlington County, New Jersey, stressed the cultural traditions that Columbus’s arrival endangered.

Adding to the layers of layers of multiculturalism and conflict attached to Columbus Day by the early twenty-first century, monuments to Columbus became flashpoints of controversy during the social justice uprisings of 2020. Camden removed its Columbus monument from  Farnham Park, and demonstrators converged on the monument in South Philadelphia to protest its presence while others assembled to protect it. The City of Philadelphia enclosed the monument in a box until its future could be determined. Defenders of the monument echoed the continuing tradition of Columbus Day in South Philadelphia as a celebration of Italian heritage and the contributions of immigrants to Greater Philadelphia and the nation.

Charlene Mires is Professor of History at Rutgers-Camden and Editor-in-Chief of The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Duffy’s Cut takes its name from Irish railroad contractor Philip Duffy (1783-1871), who came to the United States in 1798, the year of the United Irishmen rebellion. He was among the contractors to gain work from the Pennsylvania Canal Commission, created by the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1825 to oversee construction of what came to be called the Main Line of Public Works, which was projected to cut travel time between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh to three to four days instead of the three to four weeks travel time by Conestoga wagons. In 1828, the Canal Commission approved construction of two rail lines—the P&C (eighty-two miles) and the Allegheny Portage (thirty-six miles). Duffy’s mile 59 contract was the second of his six contracts with the P&C in the period 1829 to 1849, and the most expensive contract along the entire system, at $23,500. Duffy also obtained contracts with the West Chester Railroad and the Reading Railroad.

Duffy lived in a rented house in Willistown Township, south of the P&C line, with ten non-naturalized Irish laborers who worked with him on mile 9 of the West Chester Railroad (which was intended to link up with the P&C). The bulk of Duffy’s crew for his mile 59 contract arrived in Philadelphia from Derry in late June 1832 aboard the bark John Stamp. Their average age was 22, and most of them were desperately poor. The lure of labor opportunities in canal and railroad construction in the United States drew progressively more Irishmen across the Atlantic in the 1830s.

Duffy brought forty-seven men and at least one woman from the John Stamp to mile 59 to work with the ten already living with him, making a crew of fifty-seven to work on the P&C cut and fill. As the work commenced, cholera arrived in Philadelphia and an epidemic gripped the Delaware Valley. In July and August, perhaps 1,000 people perished in the epidemic in the Philadelphia region. By early August, cholera had reached the workers’ camp in Chester County and sources indicate that some of them tried to flee. Quarantines of food and also of humans were employed throughout the United States during the 1832 epidemic, and evidence suggests that a quarantine of the workers was attempted at mile 59, perhaps imposed by the East Whiteland Horse Company (some of whose members lived adjacent to the work site). By the end of August, all fifty-seven workers had perished.

Archaeological excavations and forensic analysis of seven sets of remains from within the railroad fill in 2009-2012 revealed that those workers sustained blows to their skulls at the time of their deaths and one had a bullet shot into his skull at close range, but none had defensive wounds. Railroad records indicate that locals shunned the workers when cholera struck the camp, and it is likely that fear of cholera and perhaps even nativist sentiment contributed to the deaths of the work crew. Five of the excavated remains were reburied at West Laurel Hill Cemetery in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, in March 2012, and one was reburied at Holy Family Cemetery in Ardara, Donegal, Ireland, in March 2013. The events at Duffy’s Cut provide an example of the pervasive fear of contagion and of what historian Alan Kraut has called “the immigrant menace” in early America.

William E. Watson received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Pennsylvania and is Professor of History at Immaculata University. He is author of several books, and coauthor of The Ghosts of Duffy’s Cut and Irish-Americans: The History and Culture of a People. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The Dutch played an important, though little recognized, role in the early European colonization of the region. From 1614 until the English seized the province in 1664 the Dutch colony of Nieuw Nederland (New Netherland) included parts of the future states of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Connecticut, New York, and Maryland. Settlement and trade along New Netherland’s Zuyd (South) River—the Delaware River—was limited compared to activity around the seaport city of Nieuw Amsterdam (later New York), but nevertheless significant to the region’s development.

The first director of New Netherland, Cornelius Mey (c.1580–?), originally envisioned the Delaware Bay as the ideal location for the colony’s capital. As a sea captain, Mey was one of the first Europeans to explore the New Jersey coast, and in 1624 he oversaw an initial settlement of two families and eight men on an island in the Delaware River. Known as Mattennecunk by the original Lenni Lenape inhabitants and Hooghe Eylandt (High Island) by the Dutch, the capital that Mey envisioned was short-lived. In 1626, then-director Peter Minuit (c.1580–1638) decided that the Noort (North) River (Hudson River) would provide a better hub for Dutch trade, and he relocated the capital to Manhattan Island. Hooghe Eylandt—later renamed Burlington Island— has sat uninhabited since the mid-twentieth century. The legacy of Cornelius Mey continued in place names: Cape May, Cape May County, and the city of Cape May, New Jersey, were all named in Mey’s honor.

In 1626, the Dutch built a factorij (trading post) on the eastern shore of the Delaware, near the future site of Gloucester City, New Jersey. Since the most productive Lenape fur traps were located on the other side of the river, the success of Fort Nassau—named in honor of the Dutch noble family of Orange-Nassau—was limited from the outset. These problems were exacerbated after 1638 by the arrival of the Swedes, who primarily settled on the Delaware’s western banks (later the site of Wilmington, Delaware). In 1651, intent on reasserting Dutch control of the Delaware Valley, Petrus “Peter” Stuyvesant (1612–72) dismantled Fort Nassau and built a new factorij, Fort Casimir, immediately downriver from New Sweden. Captured briefly by the Swedes in 1654, Casimir—and indeed the entirety of Swedish North America—was recaptured by Stuyvesant and his troops in September 1655.

Seeking to reinforce the Dutch position in the Delaware Valley, Stuyvesant also established the village of New Amstel near Fort Casimir. While this settlement was more successful than earlier efforts in the region—the ill-fated 1631 patroonship of Swaanendael (Swan’s Valley, later Lewes, Delaware) lasted just one year—Stuyvesant’s efforts to fortify the region for the Dutch ultimately proved unsuccessful. In 1664, New Amstel—thereafter known as New Castle—changed hands once again with the surrender of New Netherland to the English.

Colonial Philadelphia

The legacy of early Dutch settlement remained apparent by the time William Penn (1644–1718) received a charter for the Province of Pennsylvania in 1681, even though the English had controlled the region for almost two decades. Penn arrived in North America in October 1682 through New Castle (formerly New Amstel) and the city, with its Dutch urban planning and mixed Dutch, Swedish, and English population, served as Penn’s capital until the founding of Philadelphia. Penn located his new city between the Delaware River and the Schuylkill, a Dutch name meaning “hidden creek.” Penn also had personal connections to the Dutch and the Netherlands. While scholars disagree as to whether Penn’s mother Margaret Jasper (?–1682) came from a Dutch family or if her Irish-Protestant father was merely a merchant based in Rotterdam, her first husband, Nicasius van der Schure (?–before 1643) was a Dutchman. Penn also traveled to the Netherlands twice between 1671 and 1677 to spread Quaker teachings and recruit migrants to his new colony.

Penn’s recruiting proved successful, drawing several hundred Dutch Quakers to Pennsylvania in the 1680s and 1690s despite otherwise minimal emigration from the Netherlands to British colonial America. In 1683, approximately two hundred of these migrants founded the borough of Germantown. Understandably thought of as a German settlement, Germantown was in fact predominantly Dutch through the early eighteenth century.

As Philadelphia developed into a major Atlantic seaport, the Dutch emerged as an important—if illicit—trading partner. While British mercantilist policies officially limited most trade to within the empire, colonial American merchants regularly subverted these protectionist rules and widely participated in Atlantic smuggling networks. As committed free traders, Dutch merchants played a prominent role in facilitating this unsanctioned trade. Philadelphia-based merchants and their Dutch colleagues exchanged a variety of goods in the colonial period, from molasses to gunpowder. The lead-up to the American Revolution was a particularly lucrative period for American-Dutch illicit trade; in response to colonists’ boycotts of British goods, thousands of chests of Dutch tea were smuggled through Philadelphia and sold throughout North America.

During and after the Revolutionary War, the relationship between Philadelphia—the capital of the nascent United States until 1800—and the Netherlands continued to strengthen. Despite pressure from Britain and an official Dutch position of neutrality, thousands of barrels of gunpowder were shipped to the revolutionaries through the Dutch-Caribbean island of St. Eustatius. After independence, the Netherlands became the first nation to recognize and salute the American flag and was the second foreign power to establish diplomatic relations with the United States.

Netherlands Society of Philadelphia

The next major wave of Dutch migration to the United States began in the 1840s, spurred by a sluggish economy and tightening agricultural market in the Netherlands. Although Philadelphia served as an important port of arrival for these immigrants, few remained on the East Coast, opting instead to settle in the Midwest and Dutch enclaves such as Holland, Michigan. Nevertheless, an appreciation for the historical and contemporary ties between the Netherlands and the greater Philadelphia region remained strong. In 1892, Dr. Peter Dirck Keyser (1835–97), a Civil War veteran and prominent ophthalmologist, founded the Netherlands Society of Philadelphia. With full membership open to any man with Dutch ancestors who arrived in America before 1776, the Society sponsored talks on Dutch history, culture, and politics.

In addition to highlighting the historical role of the Dutch in shaping U.S. institutions, the Philadelphia Society also endeavored to foster friendly ties between Philadelphia and the Netherlands. Dutch-Philadelphians raised thousands of dollars on behalf of Dutch refugees during World War II, contributed to the Holland Flood Relief Fund following the devastating North Sea flood of 1953, and helped sponsor the Drexel Glee Club’s 1963 tour of Europe. The Society also played an active role in facilitating and planning two visits from the Dutch Queen Juliana (1909–2004) to Philadelphia in 1952 and 1982.

U.S.-Netherlands Relations and Philadelphia

Dutch investors and corporations have long been drawn to the economic opportunities of the greater Philadelphia region. In the nineteenth century, Dutch capital was one of the largest sources of international investment in American banking and infrastructure projects, which included several loans made to the Second Bank of the United States in Philadelphia. With the globalization and the growth of multinational corporations in the twentieth century, a number of Dutch-owned businesses have also established their North American headquarters in the Philadelphia area. While not limited to any one industry, Dutch companies have been particularly active in banking, chemical, and technological industries. The Amsterdam-based chemical company Akzo Nobel, whose coatings are used on buildings, ships, cars, and other consumer goods, established a location in Malvern, Pennsylvania. Another major Dutch chemical company, DSM—which began in 1902 as a government-sponsored coal-mining venture in the Southern Netherlands province of Limburg—located a branch of its biomedical-manufacturing arm nearby in Exton. The Dutch also found a market for their expertise in flood control and environmental engineering. The design and consultancy company Arcadis, which began as the land reclamation company Nederlandsche Heidemaatschappij in 1888, established offices in Center City Philadelphia and Newtown, Pennsylvania. Overall, the Embassy of the Netherlands estimated that in the second decade of the twenty-first century Dutch-U.S. investment and trade supported almost one hundred thousand jobs in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware.

While membership in the Netherlands Society of Philadelphia dwindled at the end of the twentieth century, groups such as the Netherlands-America Association of the Delaware Valley (NAADV) continued to preserve and promote Dutch and Dutch-American culture in the region. Founded in 1957 by Dutch immigrants living in the area, the NAADV sponsored educational events, hosted language groups, and celebrated holidays like Koninginnedag (King’s Day) and Sinterklaas. In 2017, the Philadelphia Flower Show celebrated the world-renowned Dutch floral industry, working with floriculturists, designers, and sustainability experts from the Netherlands for the exhibition “Holland: Flowering the World.”

Through both permanent settlement and ongoing international connections, the greater Philadelphia region and the Netherlands have enjoyed close connections since the seventeenth century. Although the colony of Nieuw Nederland was short-lived, the legacy of early Dutch settlement in the Delaware Valley remained evident in place names and the efforts of groups such as the Netherlands Society of Philadelphia. With the Dutch as steady diplomatic and economic partners, Philadelphia has benefited from economic and cultural exchange with the Netherlands for more than four centuries.

Laura Michel is a Ph.D. student in History at Rutgers University—New Brunswick. She studies issues surrounding crime, poverty, and philanthropy in the early modern Atlantic World. (Author information current at date of publication.)

Before Pennsylvania state legislators passed the Reorganization Act of 1905 and Martin G. Brumbaugh (1862-1930) became Philadelphia’s school superintendent in 1906, corrupt budgetary and hiring practices plagued the School District of Philadelphia. Under Brumbaugh’s guidance, the board of education replaced its ward-based governance system with one that gave the superintendent the power to systematize and standardize the public schools. As superintendent, Brumbaugh obtained public funds to build additional primary and secondary schools, reform academic programs in the high schools, and raise teacher salaries. These policies increased access to educational institutions for Philadelphia youth, particularly those living in West Philadelphia, Frankford, and Germantown—beyond the city’s core—and alleviated overcrowding and part-time attendance patterns in the city’s primary schools. At the same time, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia expanded its school system to attract families who wanted their children to attend Catholic schools.  These policies increased racial segregation in the city’s schools as white ethnics—primarily Italians and Irish—enrolled their children in parochial schools. African American families never enjoyed the same educational opportunities. For decades, the School District of Philadelphia maintained specific policies and informal practices that segregated Black and white youth and discriminated against Black teachers.  African American leaders and concerned residents challenged these racist practices by forming grassroots organizations, such as the Educational Equality League, and mounting fundraising campaigns through the city’s Black newspaper, the Philadelphia Tribune.

The Great Depression brought new challenges to Philadelphia and suburban communities. As men and women lost their jobs and homes, the tax revenues for education plummeted. The School District of Philadelphia had faced fiscal difficulties before, but the Great Depression brought unprecedented challenges. To reduce costs, the board of education eliminated positions, cut salaries, and slashed programs.

During the 1930s, the region’s schools, like others in the nation, witnessed a dramatic increase in student enrollment. The Great Depression decimated the nation’s labor market, forcing thousands of working-class youth to enroll in school. As economic conditions worsened, some of Philadelphia’s upper class families had to transfer their children to the local public schools because they could no longer afford the tuition charged by private schools. As a result, students poured into public schools in the city and surrounding communities, creating overcrowded classrooms and underfunded schools. Both educational opportunity and inequality increased simultaneously.

World War II boost

World War II brought Philadelphia’s economy back to life—at least temporarily. The School District of Philadelphia created accelerated secondary school programs so that students could earn their diplomas before enlisting in the nation’s armed services or securing employment in a variety of wartime industries. As families moved to the region to find work and as youth returned to the labor market, student enrollment decreased at the secondary level even as it increased in elementary schools. The School District of Philadelphia did not have the budget or the resources to build new schools during the war, and thus primary school children, particularly African Americans, found that racial segregation in the region’s housing market barred them from the best schooling options.

When the war ended, Black leaders such as Floyd L. Logan (1901-78) and Cecil B. Moore (1915-79) urged local governments to provide Black children with greater access to educational opportunities by desegregating the region’s public schools. In the postwar period, boroughs and townships on the edge of Philadelphia and Camden expanded as GIs returned from duty and used their benefits to purchase suburban homes for their young families. Communities such as Levittown, Pennsylvania, were transformed from rural outposts to planned neighborhoods.  These suburban communities provided young families with many advantages—sprawling landscapes, new schools, and modern shopping centers. But real estate agents and local homeowners routinely refused to sell homes to Black buyers and thus created suburban communities that were reserved almost exclusively for white upper- and middle-class residents.

As this suburban expansion and white flight from the city occurred, urban public schools systems like Philadelphia’s lost the tax revenues that white families had contributed. They also witnessed a dramatic increase in the number of Black youth in the public schools. This combination, coupled with the Philadelphia City Council’s failure to raise the revenues the schools actually needed, created an untenable situation. The school district could not hire enough teachers or build enough new schools. When they did find the land and money to build new schools, these new institutions often reinforced inequality by creating distinct schools for Black children in North Philadelphia and white children in predominately middle-class white communities such as Mount Airy and Overbrook. The school district’s policies and practices often left African American children in schools that were much more crowded than those attended by their white counterparts. School choice played a role, as well, as white Catholic families sent their children to parochial schools rather than their local public schools.

Desegregation Pressures

The pressure to desegregate mounted after the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which stipulated that separate but equal educational institutions were unconstitutional. Civil rights activists in Philadelphia and suburbs like Abington, Pennsylvania, and Mount Holly, New Jersey, called for the desegregation of public schools. But those in charge of those schools routinely replied that the conditions were beyond their control. In 1959, Philadelphia’s Board of Public Education passed a resolution stating that the school district did not discriminate against anyone on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin. Civil rights leaders pressed the board to do more, and in the mid-1960s, the school district finally admitted that Philadelphia’s public schools were indeed segregated. It commissioned several studies, such as the Report of the Special Committee on Nondiscrimination (sometimes referred to as the “Lewis Report” for the committee’s chairman, board Vice President Ada H. Lewis) whose findings the district’s leaders largely ignored. In 1967, Philadelphia youth staged a demonstration to urge the district to adopt Black history and a more Afrocentric curriculum. When Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo ordered his officers to use brutal force to quash this peaceful demonstration, it became more apparent than ever that equal educational opportunity was not a reality in Philadelphia.

In 1983, a commission convened by President Ronald Reagan issued A Nation at Risk, a report that emphasized the failures of the American educational system and ushered in a wave of local, state, and federal efforts to improve the nation’s schools. While it raised new concerns about the economic viability of American schoolchildren, the report did little to change the educational opportunities in the region despite the efforts of some civic leaders, concerned residents, and urban youth. Public schools in Philadelphia; Camden, New Jersey; and Wilmington, Delaware, still lagged behind their suburban counterparts with regard to per capita funding, academic achievement, and extracurricular activities. The racial segregation that had existed in the City of Brotherly Love since the beginning of the twentieth century had spread beyond Philadelphia. In 1997, Camden had a student population that was 57.7 percent Black and 38.1 percent Latino while most school systems in its adjoining suburbs were predominately white. The court-ordered reorganization of the public schools in Delaware’s New Castle County led to the creation in 1981 of four school districts that encompass Wilmington and its suburbs. The racial segregation in these school districts was not so blatant. For example, the Christina School District to the south was 33.4 percent Black and 4.2 percent Latino in 1997. The Red Clay School District to the north was 29.7 percent Black and 12.7 percent Latino.

In the first decades of the twenty-first century, some of these urban school systems welcomed charter management organizations in the hopes that market-driven solutions could alleviate inequities that had existed for decades. Educational opportunity is clearly greater today than it was at the beginning of the twentieth century, but along with these changes, the level of educational inequality has also increased, creating gross economic, political, and social inequities between youth who have access to first-rate educational institutions and those who do not.

Erika M. Kitzmiller is a historian of race, social inequality, and education who served as an assistant clinical professor at Drexel University and is currently the Caperton Fellow at Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute.  She received her Ph.D. in History and Education and Master’s in Public Policy from the University of Pennsylvania and her B.A. from Wellesley College. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Penn sought to attract individuals who would settle the colony, or send servants or tenants to do so, and who had the capital or expertise to establish commercial and agricultural foundations for the province. Penn’s first promotional tract, Some Account of the Province of Pennsylvania, set out the terms for obtaining land and promised to clear all Indian titles. In July 1681, he refined these terms in the document titled “Conditions or Concessions,” issued during a meeting with several First Purchasers. In this agreement, Penn promised to reserve ten acres of land in Philadelphia for each 500 acres purchased, planning a “greene country towne” that would extend for miles along the Delaware River. In order to promote the settlement of the colony and hinder speculation, Penn stipulated that purchasers seeking 1,000 acres or more would have to settle a family on each 1,000 acre lot within three years. He also encouraged purchasers to bring servants by offering a bonus of fifty acres, with an annual quitrent (rent due to Penn) of four shillings, for each servant settled in the colony. Upon completion of the term of service, each servant would receive fifty acres at an annual quitrent of two shillings.

This agreement proved quite effective. Three key groups of investors immediately involved themselves in the project. In 1681, a group of Welsh Quakers purchased a 30,000-acre tract in the hopes of ensuring their religious freedom and preserving their language, customs, and laws. Settling in the area of Merion, Bryn Mawr, and Haverford, these settlers began arriving in advance of the proprietor. Penn granted the Free Society of Traders 20,000 acres and three seats on the Provincial Council in exchange for its investment in developing the province’s economy. Composed of Quakers and other wealthy merchants, landowners, and Penn’s personal contacts, this group fell into bankruptcy within a couple of years. In 1683, the Frankfort Land Company, a group of German investors represented by Daniel Francis Pastorius (1651-c. 1720), received 15,000 acres. Since the members of this group did not emigrate, thirteen Quaker families acquired its acreage and settled under the guidance of Pastorius.

Three Hundred Purchasers

Within four months of issuing the “Conditions or Concessions,” Penn sold more than 300,000 acres to about 300 purchasers, and sales continued assiduously. By 1685, Penn had sold over 700,000 acres to roughly 600 purchasers, which earned him about £9,000. After that, sales slowed somewhat, and, by 1700, he had sold approximately 800,000 acres. Although Penn did not earn as much as he expected from these First Purchasers, they provided the project with a solid foundation. Thomas Holme (1624-95), Penn’s surveyor general, in his Map of the Improved Part of the Province of Pennsilvania in America (1687), delineated lands taken up by First Purchasers during the first years after settlement in the region that became Philadelphia, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery, and southern Bucks Counties.

While Penn’s fellow Englishmen comprised most of the First Purchasers, his advertising efforts in continental Europe also attracted individual investors from Germany, Holland, and France. Within England, most of the First Purchasers resided in the areas around London and Bristol, where the Society of Friends had met with considerable missionary success and Penn was well known. Quakers of various economic backgrounds took advantage of the opportunity that he created to worship free of the persecution persistent in England. While those purchasing larger tracts hailed from the Quaker mercantile elite, Penn’s offerings to sell plots as small as 125 acres attracted people of more humble circumstances.

The majority of the First Purchasers came from the urban middling ranks of English society, primarily artisans and shopkeepers. These individuals, with entrepreneurial ambitions, played a vital role in developing Philadelphia as a major commercial center. That at least one-half of the First Purchasers eventually settled in Pennsylvania also contributed significantly to the speedy establishment and development of the colony. Although Penn would face multiple financial challenges, from nonpayment by some purchasers and refusal of settlers to pay quitrents, to inflated demands by his business agent Philip Ford (c. 1631-1702) for payment of debts, the First Purchasers supplied the impetus needed to get the “Holy Experiment” started.

Matthew A. Zimmerman earned his Ph.D. in History at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of History and Political Science at Middle Georgia State University in Macon, Georgia. (Author information current at time of publication.)