{"id":5314,"date":"2013-03-18T15:06:51","date_gmt":"2013-03-18T19:06:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/philadelphiaencyclopedia.org\/?p=5314"},"modified":"2024-02-10T20:51:08","modified_gmt":"2024-02-11T01:51:08","slug":"philadelphia-negro-the","status":"publish","type":"egp_essays","link":"https:\/\/philadelphiaencyclopedia.org\/essays\/philadelphia-negro-the\/","title":{"rendered":"Philadelphia Negro (The)"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 1899, the University of Pennsylvania published The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study<\/i>, the first scholarly race study of an urban place in what became a growing trend of Progressive-era social surveys. The massive report about Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward became a distinctive (and still relevant) landmark in the annals of sociological study and social advocacy.<\/p>\n

\"Title:<\/a>
William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois. (Library of Congress<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Four years earlier, the publication of Hull-House Maps and Papers<\/i><\/a> (1895)\u2014a pioneering local study of immigrant, labor, and living conditions in and about the Chicago settlement run by Jane Addams<\/a>\u2014signaled opportunity in the minds of Philadelphia progressives. In spring 1896, at the suggestion of leading citizen Susan P. Wharton, the University of Pennsylvania and Philadelphia\u2019s own College Settlement sent for the rising African American scholar William E. Burghardt Du Bois <\/a>\u00a0(1868-1963), then a professor at Ohio\u2019s Wilberforce University, to conduct a study of the city\u2019s black community, which many critics held responsible for a post-depression (1893-96) rise in crime and disorder. Accepting the invitation, even at the lowly title of \u201cAssistant Instructor,\u201d Du Bois began in August 1896 to \u201cascertain something of the geographical distribution of this race, their occupations and daily life, their homes, their organizations and, above all, their relation to their million white fellow-citizens.\u201d The massive report that followed went far beyond the Hull-House model, and far beyond what its patrons anticipated or perhaps desired.<\/p>\n

Despite its title, The Philadelphia Negro<\/i>\u2019s subject was both larger and smaller than the term \u201cPhiladelphia\u201d connotes. It is really a neighborhood study, focusing on the central Seventh Ward <\/a>running north-south from Spruce to South Street and east-west from Seventh Street to the Schuylkill River. Site of the city\u2019s oldest African-American community, dating to the colonial era, the Seventh Ward by the 1890s was home to nearly a quarter (roughly 9,700) of Philadelphia\u2019s 40,000 blacks (the largest such population in any northern city).\u00a0Incredibly diverse, the ward mingled affluent whites (including Wharton) on its western fringe, one of the nation\u2019s densest concentrations of black elites at its center, along Lombard Street (west of 9th), and multitudes of the poor of both races on the ward\u2019s eastern front, where lay the city\u2019s most notorious black ghetto.<\/p>\n

Du Bois Lived in Seventh Ward<\/h3>\n

For more than a year (1896-97) Du Bois and his wife resided within the poorer quarters surrounding College Settlement on Saint Mary Street. To many Seventh Ward blacks, the Harvard- and Heidelberg-educated Du Bois looked the part of his genteel sponsors, who hoped to use his analysis to justify sweeping reforms in the black community. Du Bois, meanwhile, preferred to demonstrate that blacks <\/b>possessed their own internal class structure and should not be judged solely by the lowest rung (the \u201csubmerged tenth\u201d). Likewise, the imagined \u201cNegro problem,\u201d he argued, was \u201cnot one<\/i> problem, but rather a plexus of social problems\u201d having less to do with a monolithic black<\/i> \u201csocial pathology\u201d than with whites\u2019<\/i> enforcement of racial discrimination and provision of unequal opportunity.<\/p>\n

\"Philadelphia<\/a>
W.E.B. Du Bois created this map of Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward during his research for The Philadelphia Negro<\/i>.(University of Pennsylvania Archives<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Pioneering sociological methods, Du Bois and his lone appointed assistant (College Settlement\u2019s Isabel Eaton<\/a>, who herself published a trail-blazing study of domestic labor as an appendix to the larger work) employed archival research, descriptive statistics, and questionnaires compassing occupations, health, and education as well as religious, social, and family life. Most crucially, they conducted a door-to-door canvass of the ward, amassing over 5,000 personal interviews. The findings revealed a heterogeneous and accomplished community, a portion of which affirmed the reality of poverty, crime, and illiteracy. Addressing this imbalance, Du Bois emphasized socioeconomic and historical causes, notably the exclusion of blacks from the city\u2019s premier industrial jobs and single-family homes and the formidable legacy of slavery and checkered race relations.<\/p>\n

In stressing circumstance and contingency, Du Bois demonstrated structural<\/i> inequities of which many whites were largely unaware, in the process leveling a powerful rejoinder to then prevalent arguments that used race theory, evolutionary science, and scriptural interpretation to justify discrimination. Du Bois hoped this work would be supplemented by similar studies of other cities, yet <\/b>what began as a local study came, by default, to <\/b>stand for all of urban Black America. <\/b>Most of Du Bois\u2019s methods lay dormant, re-emerging only in the 1920s\u2014in Chicago again, with the rise of the Chicago School of Sociology. A fair hearing for his forthright and formidable conclusions, meanwhile, waited longer still. Du Bois\u2019s study has enjoyed a renaissance in contemporary scholars\u2019 investigations of poverty, race, and political economy, and <\/b>The Philadelphia Negro<\/i> continues to inform readers with its poignant representation of one of the great forgotten communities in modern American history, whose\u00a0 vitality, diversity, and challenges still linger in its pages.<\/p>\n

Steven McGrail<\/strong><\/a>, Ph.D. Candidate in U.S. History, Rutgers University \u2013 New Brunswick, specialty: cultural history and national identity; advisors: Jackson Lears, David Foglesong, Ann Fabian.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1899, the University of Pennsylvania published The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study<\/i>, the first scholarly race study of an urban place in what became a growing trend of Progressive-era social surveys. The massive report about Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward became a distinctive (and still relevant) landmark in the annals of sociological study and social advocacy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"template":"","egp_featured_subjects":[1991,1992],"class_list":["post-5314","egp_essays","type-egp_essays","status-publish","hentry","egp_featured_subjects-activism","egp_featured_subjects-african-americans"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/philadelphiaencyclopedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/egp_essays\/5314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/philadelphiaencyclopedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/egp_essays"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/philadelphiaencyclopedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/egp_essays"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philadelphiaencyclopedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/philadelphiaencyclopedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/egp_essays\/5314\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39956,"href":"https:\/\/philadelphiaencyclopedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/egp_essays\/5314\/revisions\/39956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/philadelphiaencyclopedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"egp_featured_subjects","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philadelphiaencyclopedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/egp_featured_subjects?post=5314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}