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ОглавлениеINTRODUCTION TO THE 1996 EDITION OF THE PHILADELPHIA NEGRO
Elijah Anderson
The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study by W.E.B. DuBois was originally published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 1899. One of the first works to combine the use of urban ethnography, social history, and descriptive statistics, it has become a classic work in the social science literature. For that reason alone it is an important study that deserves to be read by students of sociology and others interested in the development of the discipline in particular or in American intellectual history in general. W.E.B. DuBois is a founding father of American sociology, but, unfortunately, neither this masterpiece nor much of DuBoiss other work has been given proper recognition; in fact, it is possible to advance through a graduate program in sociology in this country without ever hearing about DuBois. It is my hope that this reprint edition will help rectify a situation undoubtedly rooted in the racial relationships of the era in which the book was first published.
This fine book, however, is no mere museum piece. Both the issues it raises and the evolution of DuBois's own thinking—which can be traced between the lines—about the problems of black integration into American society sound strikingly contemporary. Among the intriguing aspects of The Philadelphia Negro are what it says about the author at the time, about race in urban America at the time, and about social science at the time, but even more important is the fact that many of his observations can be made—in fact are made—by investigators today. Indeed, the sobering consequences of America's refusal to address the race problem honestly, which DuBois predieted almost a hundred years ago, now haunt all Americans with a renewed intensity 130 years after emancipation. The enduring relevance of DuBois's analysis would thus argue for a reexamination of his work.
DuBois himself was a complex, fascinating man whose background shaped his point of view for The Philadelphia Negro. To appreciate fully his perspective, it is necessary to understand his early life, particularly his sheltered childhood, the unconventional way—for a black child—he was raised, and his introduction as a young man into the social and racial realities of American life.
William Edward Burghardt DuBois was born on February 23, 1868, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, a small but prosperous mill town in the Berkshire Mountains. The few blacks in the area worked mostly as domestics in homes or summer resorts, while the factory jobs were held by Irish, German, and Czech Catholics. His father exited young DuBois's life before he turned two, and his mother supported the family with the help of well-to-do town residents, who provided both odd jobs and outright charity, eventually including a rented house much nicer than she could have afforded on her own. The opportunity to mix with the elite of the town, whose sons in general accepted him as their playmate, allowed DuBois to consider himself at least marginally a part of upper-class society while separating him from the children of immigrant mill laborers, whose social position was actually much nearer his own. He was thus able to grow up feeling more privileged than oppressed. By his own account a child of “keen sensitiveness,” he encountered relatively little discrimination, partly because he was able to avoid situations in which he sensed discrimination might occur and partly because his superior intellectual capabilities were genuinely admired. At the same time, he absorbed the culture of proper New Englanders and learned to be reserved in his thoughts and emotions and decorous in his comportment. This “habit of repression” later hampered his relations with more gregarious members of his own race.
DuBois attended the local high school, taking the college preparatory course as suggested by the principal, Frank Alvin Hosmer, who went on to become president of a missionary college in Hawaii; his school books, which had to be purchased, were, at Hosmer's request, paid for by the mother of one of his wealthy friends.1 And odd jobs were again found, for DuBois himself this time, enabling him to earn outside school hours some of the income he sacrificed by pursuing an education instead of a steady job. Upon graduating he had his heart set on going to Harvard, but neither the academic standards of his school nor his financial resources were quite adequate to enable him to go there. It is impossible to understand the exact role race feeling played in the college guidance he received. There was, however, enough feeling among the influential people of the town that DuBois should go on to college somewhere that, again at Hosmer's initiative, a scholarship was arranged through four Congregational churches to send him to Fisk University, an all-black Congregational school in Nashville, Tennessee.2
Fisk was a revelation to DuBois. He discovered among his fellow students, as well as among the poor people living in the surrounding area, the rich diversity of the black race. He was amazed at the different hues, the different kinds of black people. During the summers he went into the countryside to teach local black people reading and writing, on a mission of social uplift that grew out of the charitable orientation that was part of his upbringing. DuBois's image of himself when he arrived at Fisk sheds important light on his subsequent experiences in white society.3 For, although he was the son of a servant and had little money of his own, he had been socialized, through his education and his familiarity with upper-class people, to think of himself as part of the elite. He certainly felt himself to be far removed from the often destitute, illiterate blacks he encountered in his noble efforts to teach members of the local black community. The idea that anyone would consider him a part of that society, merely on the basis of his skin color, had not previously occurred to him. It was this introduction to life in the South that taught DuBois about racism and segregation, what it truly meant to be black in America. But in general this was largely an abstract education, for the segregation he encountered still did not result in blocked opportunity or any real personal hardship. On the contrary, he received his B.A. degree in three years, boldly applied to Harvard as a scholarship student, and was accepted as a junior.
At Harvard DuBois was faced with social but not academic discrimination. The white students did not accept him into their circles or clubs, but, coming from Fisk and his relatively new discovery of the pleasures of associating with members of his own race, DuBois was happy to socialize with other blacks and mostly did not seek out white companionship. His sensitivity continued to guide him in steering clear of situations that might have resulted in unpleasantness.
On the other hand, he was warmly received by many of the professors.4 There were many intellectual giants at Harvard at the time, figures who helped define American letters—William James, Josiah Royce, and George Santayana, among others. They befriended the young DuBois, invited him to their homes for supper, played chess with him, and advised him. So his intellectual experience at Harvard was rich and stimulating and his inferior social position, which was largely the result of his race, as well as his economic circumstances, still did not seriously interfere with his advancement.
After receiving his second B.A. (in philosophy), DuBois was encouraged to pursue a Ph.D. This he did, and in conjunction with his further studies, he arranged to spend two years in Germany studying with Max Weber, among others. This time was a wonderful interlude for him as it introduced him not only to the cultural delights of Europe but also to the satisfaction of social acceptance. His skin color was no hindrance in his relations with Europeans, either strangers or those he came to know personally. He even found himself declining the affections of the daughter of the professor in whose boarding house he lodged during his first summer in Germany. In intellectual terms, DuBois's studies in Germany were a profound influence on the course of his life's work. When he returned to the United States in 1894 he had been inspired by his academic and social experiences abroad, not to mention the work of sociologist Weber. He brought some of this inspiration to the study of the black community.
When he returned from Europe, DuBois completed his dissertation on the suppression of the African slave trade. This became Volume 1, Number 1, in the Harvard Historical Series and is still used by scholars today. With his Ph.D. pending, DuBois was now ready to look for a job. Arguably one of the most well-educated men in the country, ranked respectably in the middle of his class at the nation's most prestigious university, and with his European training as well, he felt ready to take on the challenge of teaching and working in a stimulating academic environment and had no doubt that he would obtain a suitable position. The job hunt turned out to be an education in American race relations; DuBois found that no white college was interested in hiring him, and this was a profound shock to him.
DuBois finally received an academic appointment at Wil-berforce College, an all-black school outside Dayton, Ohio, with strong evangelical underpinnings that DuBois deplored. (In fact, the emotional religiosity he experienced there seems to have so repelled him that he gave black churches very short shrift in The Philadelphia Negro, although they played an important role in the life of the community.) He taught Latin, Greek, German, and English there and also met and married Nina Gomer. He might have been obliged to stay at Wilber-force indefinitely, but after two years DuBois was invited to come to Philadelphia and undertake a social study of the black community.
The idea to commission such a study was that of Susan P. Wharton, whose family was one of Philadelphia's oldest and most influential. She marshaled the support of the provost of the University of Pennsylvania, Charles C. Harrison, and under his sponsorship Samuel McCune Lindsay of the Sociology Department enlisted DuBois to come to Philadelphia to carry it out. Like many upper-class women of the time, Susan Wharton was very much concerned with the social uplift of the poor and disadvantaged. Ostensibly, she was very interested in the plight of the Philadelphia Negro: why blacks in Philadelphia were not participating in the society at levels that would give them a decent standard of living and enable them to make positive contributions to the political and social world of the city. It appears, however, that she and her associates of the College Settlement Movement had more than this on their agenda. According to David Levering Lewis,
Harrison and Wharton, like many Progressives (especially older ones), were prey to eugenic nightmares about “native stock” and the better classes being swamped by fecund, dysgenic aliens. The conservative CSA [College Settlement Association] gentry thought of poverty in epidemiological terms, as a virus to be quarantined— “a hopeless element in the social wreckage,” as [Professor Samuel McCune] Lindsay had written in a report on municipal welfare, to be “prevented, if possible, from accumulating too rapidly or contaminating the closely allied product just outside the almshouse door.” Such was the virulence of this black plague that Lindsay urged that a promising young African-American scholar, a male, be given the direction of the Seventh Ward study, instead of one of Wharton's feminists. Not only was this dangerous work, but the deplorable findings would have greater credibility if they came from a researcher of the same race as his subjects. “I was the man to do it,” said the nine-hundred-dollar-a-year assistant in sociology whose findings would determine the nature and duration of the quarantine that the city's notables intended to impose….
Harrison drew up DuBois's charge: “We want to know precisely how this class of people live; what occupations they follow; from what occupations they are excluded; how many of their children go to school; and to ascertain every fact which will throw light on this social problem.” But DuBois knew his sponsors held a theory about the race to be studied. The city was “going to the dogs because of the crime and venality of its Negro citizens.” “Something is wrong with a race that is responsible for so much crime,” the theory ran, and “strong remedies are called for.” Another junior academic (and a minority scholar at that), given the chance to impress rich and pedigreed sponsors for future assignments and fellowships, might have been conscientious about fleshing out the data but neutral or even collusive about their implications. To believe DuBois, however, he “neither knew nor cared” about the agenda of the reformers. “The world was thinking wrong about race, because it did not know.” He would teach it to think right. The task was “simple and clear-cut” for someone with his cutting-edge training in sociology. He proposed to “find out what was the matter with this area and why,” and he would ask “little advice as to procedure.” It was an opportunity—a mandate, really—whose scientific and racial implications made the politics behind his appointment unimportant.5
DuBois arrived in Philadelphia in 1896 with his new bride, moved into a room over a cafeteria in the old Seventh Ward, where the black population of the city was concentrated—an area bounded by Spruce Street on the north, South Street on the south, Sixth Street on the east, and Twenty-Third Street on the west—and set out to do a thorough study of the Philadelphia Negro. He was given an appointment in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, but it was not a professorship; he was made an “assistant in sociology.” His title was symbolic of the rather shoddy treatment DuBois felt he received at Penn. In his autobiography he looks at the whole experience with a certain disdain:
The opportunity opened at the University of Pennsylvania seemed just what I wanted. I had offered to teach social science at Wilberforce outside of my overloaded program, but I was not allowed. My vision was becoming clear. The Negro problem was in my mind a matter of systematic investigation and intelligent understanding. The world was thinking wrong about race, because it did not know. The ultimate evil was stupidity. The cure for it was knowledge based on scientific investigation. At the University of Pennsylvania I ignored the pitiful stipend. It made no difference to me that I was put down as an “assistant instructor” and even at that, that my name never actually got into the catalogue; it goes without saying that I did no instructing save once to pilot a pack of idiots through the Negro slums.
The fact was that the city of Philadelphia at that time had a theory; and that theory was that this great, rich, and famous municipality was going to the dogs because of the crime and venality of its Negro citizens, who lived largely centered in the slum at the lower end of the seventh ward. Philadelphia wanted to prove this by figures and I was the man to do it. Of this theory back of the plan, I neither knew nor cared. I saw only here a chance to study an historical group of black folk and to show exactly what their place was in the community.
I did it despite extraordinary difficulties both within and without the group. Whites said, Why study the obvious? Blacks said, Are we animals to be dissected and by an unknown Negro at that? Yet, I made a study of the Philadelphia Negro so thorough that it has withstood the criticism of forty years. It was as complete a scientific study and answer as could have then been given, with defective facts and statistics, one lone worker and little money. It revealed the Negro group as a symptom, not a cause; as a striving, palpitating group, and not an inert, sick body of crime; as a long historic development and not a transient occurrence.6
DuBois began his study with a number of very interesting premises. As indicated above, his immediate purpose was to enlighten the powerful in the city about the plight of black people in an objective, social scientific way, so that those in power would know how to go about helping them. The powerful Philadelphians required a new way to think about race problems, and with such new knowledge and insights they could then work to improve conditions for blacks. Consistent with his approach, and contrary to the eugenics theories of the day, it is clear that DuBois believed that the Negroes’ problems were rooted not in their heredity but rather in their environment and the social conditions that confronted them. Prominent among these conditions were the historical circumstances and legacy of slavery, race prejudice, and competition with foreigners who had the experience of freedom and the advantage of white skin. His task was to throw light on how these factors related to the plight of the Philadelphia Negro and to put before the “better class” of whites the fruits of his social scientific labors. This would give the powerful a base of knowledge as well as a scientific rationale and an excuse for benevolent action.
While he considered this “better class” of Philadelphians despots, he also believed (with some reservations) that they possessed the capacity for benevolence. Although these rulers exploited people, including children, there was good to come from such exploitation. With gainful employment came the learning of the work ethic, and the ability to support families, churches, and schools. The recently freed slaves required these opportunities if they were to take their place as productive citizens of Philadelphia. To a relatively large degree, Native Americans (assimilated whites), Jews, Italians, and the Irish enjoyed these benefits of gainful employment, so why not the Negro? DuBois could not understand why the capitalist, rational and calculating by nature, with the capacity for benevolence, would use these various groups, but would discriminate against people of color. Why does the Negro fare so poorly in Philadelphia? Is it that the better class of Philadelphians are simply ignorant? This puzzle was at the heart of his study, but the answer as it evolved had an unexpected consequence: it forced DuBois to alter his original premise.
DuBois conducted the study personally. He alone gathered the data, organized it, analyzed it, and formed his conclusions on the basis of it. He walked the streets of the old Seventh Ward—and one can just imagine this stiff and proper Victorian gentleman in his suit and starched shirt moving through the hurly-burly of the noisy, congested neighborhood—and talked to people, listened to people, mapped the area, made ethnographic observations, and collected descriptive statistics. His observations as well as the tables he developed are still useful to social scientists studying the city today, and if we had more studies like this one, our knowledge of the nature of urban life and culture would be greatly advanced.
In this vein, but particularly with regard to methodology, The Philadelphia Negro anticipates the work of the “Chicago school of urban sociology” led by Robert E. Park in the 1920s through the 1950s.7 But, more important, his work was preceded by the works of Charles Booth8 and Jane Addams,9 writers concerned with similar issues but who were not academic sociologists. In fact, the work of these authors probably served as models for DuBois. DuBois uses the same methods as do Booth and Addams: maps, census data, descriptive statistics, and in-depth interviews.
Here is it necessary to note the great influence of Charles Booth, which spread far beyond London to New York, Pittsburgh, and Chicago. In turn, the works of the Westside Studies and the Pittsburgh Survey, sponsored by the Russell Sage Foundation in 1914, resemble those of Addams and Booth as well as those of DuBois. In this perspective, DuBois may be viewed as a link in an empirical chain engaged in the central social scientific, if not ideological, work of the Settlement Movement. Seen in this light, DuBois's work takes on seminal status not only for the study of the urban poor but also for the study of race in urban America. Indeed, it is in this sense that The Philadelphia Negro was truly the first work of its kind. It was the first to seriously address and profoundly illuminate what was then known as “the Negro problem.”
DuBois's argument was that the problems of black Phila-delphians stemmed largely from their past condition of servitude as they tried to negotiate an effective place in a highly competitive industrial urban setting in which the legacy of white supremacy was strong and their competitors were favored because of their white skin. Moreover, the European immigrants tended to be more able because of their experience of freedom, viewed as a powerful advantage over the recently freed slaves. Given this edge, they also benefited from positive prejudices of white employers who sought them out to the exclusion of blacks. To white employers white skin color was the sign of a good worker, while black skin color was indicative of a poor worker. In so many work settings, once the white workers were there in force, they collaborated against black labor, often making the settings off-limits to black workers. They sometimes threatened to quit if such people were hired. Hence the blacks were set up to be “the last hired and the first fired.” Their negative reputations preceded them in so many instances, thus setting in motion “the self-fulfilling prophecy.”
DuBois saw, too, that black entrepreneurship was similarly undermined in a white supremacist context. Through his research of the history of black business in Philadelphia, he discovered that at times middle-class blacks were doing fairly well. There were black doctors, lawyers, businessmen, caterers. In fact, in the mid-nineteenth century blacks dominated the catering business. Many of the barbers were black too, cutting white people's hair. But he saw that, whenever the blacks would begin to achieve middle-class status, a fresh wave of immigration from Europe would arrive and undermine the black middle class as it was emerging. This is what eventually happened to the black catering business: its members lost their dominant position to caterers with white skin color, who had an advantage because whites preferred dealing with whites.10 This scenario had devastating effects on the Negro Philadelphian. His family, his community, his church, and his very identity suffered. What was socially disorganized remained so, or became worse.
In these circumstances, DuBois distinguished four grades that comprised the class structure of the Negro community. Grade I was made up of the talented and well-to-do. Grade II was made up of the “laborers” who worked hard and were decent and law-abiding people. Grade III was made up of the working poor, people who were barely making ends meet. And Grade IV was made up of the “submerged tenth” of the Philadelphia Negro population. As DuBois notes, this stratification system was extremely volatile and precarious, primarily because of the interaction of racism and economics at the time. As noted above, DuBois's bias against the exuberant form of religion practiced by most blacks of the Seventh Ward served to discount the black church in his eyes as an integral institution of the black community.11
The influx of European immigrants was highly destabilizing to this community. The immigrant labor pool was not only used to depress wages of ordinary workers, it was very often exploited to the exclusion of blacks. The black community would feel the effect of every successive wave of European immigration. Prejudiced white employers would drop their black workers in favor of white immigrants or simply would not hire blacks. So a great many blacks who possessed skills and work experience were left unemployed or underemployed, sometimes dramatically so. A case in point was a college-educated engineer who worked as a waiter. And there were many other cases, such as a woman trained as a secretary but then denied employment. Even those who were in favor of educating or training blacks, it seemed, did not want to hire them.
Blacks appeared to find their “niche” in the occupations that were most consistent with their previous condition of servitude. Hence the servant jobs in the homes of the wealthy served as a relatively secure situation for many. DuBois roundly criticized this situation for many of the reasons mentioned, but also for the way it supported white prejudices toward blacks. But even this niche became endangered by white, generally Irish, immigration.12
This general situation contributed to a profound demoralization of the black community, a fact that expressed itself in the social life of the black community. With poverty of spirit as well as poverty of purse, the black community became increasingly disorganized. Family life suffered. To make ends meet, many families would take on single male boarders, who were often new arrivals from the South, and these men would serve as a destabilizing influence on the family and the household. Alcohol abuse, gambling, crime, and violence were persistent problems for the community. As these problems became worse, they presented whites with an ever greater rationale for their prejudices; a vicious cycle had been created.
After uncovering the way economic factors conspired with racism to keep the Philadelphia Negro down, DuBois looked for the role of the “benevolent despot,” who would presumably exert a positive influence. Instead, he found that the so-called benevolent despot, who so often appears to be a disinterested referee, often plays a very active role, looking out for his own interests and tolerating much of the prejudice toward blacks:
If now a benevolent despot had seen the development, he would immediately have sought to remedy the real weakness of the Negro's position, i.e., his lack of training; and he would have swept away any discrimination that compelled men to support as criminals those who might support themselves as workmen.
He would have made special effort to train Negro boys for industrial life and given them a chance to compete on equal terms with the best white workmen; arguing that in the long run this would be best for all concerned, since by raising the skill and standard of living of the Negroes he would make them effective workmen and competitors who would maintain a decent level of wages. He would have sternly suppressed organized or covert opposition to Negro workmen.
There was, however, no benevolent despot, no philanthropist, no far-seeing captain of industry to prevent the Negro from losing even the skill he had learned or to inspire him by opportunities to learn more.13
The truly benevolent despot was nowhere to be found.
Instead, DuBois encountered the self-interested capitalist and noted certain contradictions in his racial behavior. Such people would contribute to charities for the blacks but would not hire them in their businesses. It appeared that perhaps the white workers themselves had a significant hand in keeping black men out of the workplace. As indicated above, their threats to quit were often taken very seriously, so even if the capitalist wanted to do right by the black man, he was constrained by the thought of losing his workers. This might account for some of the ambivalence observed by DuBois. And to be sure, this was not the only scenario DuBois presented. In certain industries capitalists actively pitted black workers against the Europeans who were threatening to strike for higher wages by hiring the blacks as strikebreakers.14 In this regard, given their low living standard, black workers served as a direct threat to the living standards of white workers. This resulted in tremendous tension and greatly exacerbated race relations. One can only wonder how such antagonisms diffused through Philadelphia at the time, having an impact far beyond the initial contested work setting.15
At the same time, it is provocative to consider what part DuBois's own identity played in the contradictory perspectives he presents—that of the elite Victorian young gentleman committed to the ideas of meritocracy and universalism and that of a son of a people struggling to live in freedom after two hundred years of a bondage justified on racial grounds. DuBois's struggle to reconcile these two orientations is one of the fascinating aspects of The Philadelphia Negro. One gets the sense that it was very difficult for him to accept the idea that blacks were second-class citizens because at the time he wrote the book he still considered himself to be a full citizen of the United States, even a member of the elite. This tension may account for the ultimately ambivalent assessment of the Philadelphia Negro's situation with which DuBois leaves the reader.16
In general, capitalists flagrantly violated the attitude of noblesse oblige DuBois originally imputed to them, and the discovery of this truth disillusioned him. Anticipating Herbert Blumer17 and others, he came to feel that, although exacerbated by economic competition, the existence of racism and race prejudice in American society was very deep, particularly when the racial advantage of whites allowed them to prevail in the workplace. Moreover, such racial and ethnic feelings encouraged group identification for the purpose of furthering group economic interests. The capitalists, by exploiting these socioeconomic forces, were profiting from the low position of the blacks. When he uncovered this behavior as a young man, DuBois harbored the hope that the inherently noble, if opportunistic, American capitalist could eventually be persuaded to change his ways. Toward the end of his life, however, DuBois became profoundly disillusioned with America. Renouncing his American citizenship, he embraced pan-Africanism and moved to Ghana, where he died in 1963 just as a new and more militant generation of blacks was marching on Washington to demand redress of the injustices he was the first to chronicle.
The Philadelphia Negro is also a seminal work in the field of race relations.18 DuBois's discovery that race has caste-like implications for blacks in Philadelphia also anticipates the work of others many years later. The major themes of The Philadelphia Negro are replayed in such important works as Frazier's The Negro Family in the United States and Black Bourgeoisie;19 Drake and Cayton's Black Metropolis;20 and William Wilson's The Declining Significance of Race and The Truly Disadvantaged.21
In his comments on the twoness of American society, on the separateness and inequality of its white and black worlds,22 DuBois anticipated the work of Gunnar Myrdal,23 Daniel Patrick Moynihan,24 and the Kerner Commission Report.25 He saw the black community as being in danger of permanently separating from the mainstream white society, a state of affairs that both Myrdal and Kerner—and most recently Andrew Hacker26—saw as coming to pass over half a century later.
At the end of the book, DuBois discusses the responsibilities he attributed to white people and black people in the situation he presented. But, strikingly, he does not strongly revisit his economic arguments. Curiously, he seems to let these dogs lie. Could this have been due to the influence of the CSA and his desire and hope of positively influencing the capitalists? From whites he asked for greater understanding and tolerance. They should work to try to include the blacks, to reach out to them, train them, give them a leg up so they could recover from the experience of slavery. But at the same time, he considered the blacks to be at fault as well. They had not done all they should have been doing in terms of leadership. The talented and successful among the blacks should have been reaching out, setting examples, helping out their own brethren.27 In noting an absence of leadership, he encouraged people to take on such roles. He assumed that if they did the situation for blacks would improve.
DuBois's personal engagement in these problems, along with the unique background that informed his preconceptions, make the whole book provocative. He is not out to transform the system radically. He appears to be very clearly interested in reforming the system, his insights into the nonexistent benevolent despot notwithstanding. He feels that if blacks work hard and act decently, their lives will improve. And he hopes that in presenting the situation plainly in The Philadelphia Negro he will persuade the capitalists to support the forces that encourage the economic participation of black Americans and thus to make life better for all Americans. A hundred years after DuBois made these observations, an appraisal of his predictions reveals just how far-sighted a social scientist he was.
The Philadelphia Negro Today
What would DuBois find if he walked the streets of the Seventh Ward today? The area has certainly changed. The upper-class WASPs have mostly been routed and have moved to the suburbs. From DuBois's day through the middle of the twentieth century, the old Seventh Ward remained a major “Negro section” of the city. It continued to attract blacks from the South, and during the two world wars it swelled. But during the 1950s and early 1960s, a federal program known as “urban renewal” emerged. Through this program, large tracts of the black community were declared “slums” and thereby made eligible for formal “condemnation.” The local redevelopment authority thus obtained possession of these sections of the city and then made them available to developers who promised to “renew” the area in accord with its historical architecture. As this occurred, the social class and complexions of the residents changed. The general area has become increasingly well-to-do and white. It is now an upper-middle-class community increasingly made up of the present-day counterparts of the ethnic whites with whom the blacks of DuBois's day often clashed. The descendants of the ethnic whites are for the most part tolerant of the few blacks who remain, having in large part assimilated and divested themselves of their particularistic ethnic identities. However, in race relations, a strong caste line still exists.
Major changes have occurred in housing use. Physically, the neighborhood consists of spacious urban townhouses along the main streets, with much smaller houses, originally servants'quarters, on tiny streets behind them. The tangle of small streets and alleyways that DuBois found swarming with criminal and morally questionable activity now house mostly white young professionals and are characterized by real estate agents as “quaint” and “charming.” It is now fashionable for the professionals to live in these small houses. They cost considerably less to buy than the large houses, many of which have been subdivided into apartments or converted into offices for foundations or professional groups. The new occupants often spend considerable amounts on elegant interior decoration, sometimes making substantial structural changes as well.
South Street has changed greatly since DuBois's time but would be faintly recognizable to him today. At the heart of the western end is Graduate Hospital, which has recently built a new facility and continues to expand, spurring gentrification in the neighborhood. There are businesses catering to neighborhood residents, such as dry cleaners, pizzerias, and grocery stores, as well as refurbished homes or new houses built on the sites of demolished structures. There are also stretches of abandoned buildings awaiting demolition and empty lots awaiting rebuilding, especially between Twelfth and Sixteenth Streets. But this section also includes vestiges of its previous life, such as a former jazz bar and a former bank building already in use in DuBois's day and recently converted into an arts center.
The eastern end of South Street has become a business strip, including two chain drugstores and a supermarket between Ninth and Eleventh Streets. From about Sixth Street east to the Delaware River, South Street takes on a unique flavor as a bright lights district. At times, particularly on summer nights, a carnival atmosphere prevails. An astounding diversity of people—whites, blacks, Asians, gays, the conventional, and the openly nonconformist—can be seen walking up and down the street and patronizing stores. A wide assortment of eating and drinking establishments remain open late into the evening. There are gift shops; clothing stores offering a variety of styles, particularly punk; furniture stores; a large record store; jewelry stores; cheap restaurants and expensive restaurants; nightclubs; and some holdovers from days when the area was more residential, such as a store selling bedding. People, particularly young people, come here from all over, from the adjoining gentrified Society Hill neighborhood, from other parts of the city, from the suburbs. However, reminiscent of the area's earlier history, as the night wears on, trouble sometimes breaks out.
By contrast, Lombard Street has retained its essentially residential character, although the residents have changed. Many of the buildings have been extensively refurbished. They are obviously well-maintained, often with security bars on the ground-floor windows. At the same time, the streets are considerably emptier than they were in DuBois's day. The current residents remain indoors or in their small backyards when at home, conspicuously unlike the population DuBois found loitering, talking, playing cards, and generally carrying on an active social life on the streets. Some of the changes along Lombard Street are the result of technology. Buses, traffic lights, and service stations were certainly not around in DuBois's day, nor was the 24-hour convenience store.
No longer is this area the center of the black population, but reminders of the black past are in evidence. In particular, four black churches, including Mother Bethel African Methodist itself (the mother church founded by Richard Allen), remain on the street, drawing their congregations from other parts of the Philadelphia area. One may gain insight into the social forces that have buffeted the neighborhood by observing the activity at the recreation area at Sixth and Lombard Streets, in the shadow of Mother Bethel. While the area immediately surrounding it has undergone gentrification and is now home mainly to professionals, the recreation area itself brings in outsiders. Often whites (teenagers to young adults) can be observed playing softball on the field while blacks play on the basketball court. The two groups tend not to mix. Young whites play basketball, too, but if too many blacks arrive, they tend to leave. The scene thus provides a small vignette of “invasion-succession.”28
In another contrast with South Street, on Lombard Street a fair number of the buildings DuBois would have visited are still standing, and much of the new construction imitates the old, although modern styles are scattered throughout. Architecturally, both South and Lombard look somewhat the way they looked a hundred years ago. It's the social scene that is different. And the most striking difference is the lack of a black residential presence. The vibrant black community DuBois studied has moved completely away. The old Seventh Ward today includes, in addition to young—and older—professionals, students from the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, and other schools. While one does see black people here, they appear most often to be passing through; this neighborhood is not usually their destination.
What then has become of the “Philadelphia Negro”? The first thing to note is that any present-day study of the so-called Philadelphia Negro would encompass more than just one section of the city. Since DuBois's day, the black community has grown greatly and has dispersed widely throughout the modern Philadelphia metropolitan area. In 1890, the black population of the city of Philadelphia stood at only 39,371 (3.8 percent of the total population of 1,046,964); as of the 1990 Census, the black community numbered 631,936 (39.9 percent of the total population of 1,585,577). Heavy concentrations of the black population can now be found in West Philadelphia, North Philadelphia, South Philadelphia, and Southwest Philadelphia, but also in Germantown and Mount Airy. With the two world wars, Philadelphia's black community grew by leaps and bounds. After leaving the South, blacks arrived in Philadelphia and obtained jobs in various manufacturing industries, though many were still “the last hired and the first fired” on account of race. At first, black residents did cluster in certain ghetto areas, including the old Seventh Ward, partly because they felt comfortable in such places, but also because their presence was strongly resisted elsewhere.
In the 1950s, the Civil Rights movement began in earnest, and it certainly did not escape Philadelphia. Philadelphia experienced demonstrations and riots in some of the most concentrated ghetto areas. These forces spurred on a general national resolution to incorporate the black population into American society, and this had important effects on Philadelphia neighborhoods, especially with regard to “fair housing” laws.29 It was no longer legally permissible to deny blacks housing in areas outside the ghetto. Besides changing residential patterns, the Civil Rights movement also brought about important changes in black economic opportunity. “Affirmative action” laws were established,30 and American government, business, and academia went about the business of reaching out to blacks for “fuller participation” in American employment life, particularly the middle classes.
However, just when American society was beginning to witness the successes of the Civil Rights movement, the national economy began a fundamental transition. As blacks began to gain access to large-scale manufacturing jobs, the economy began to favor service and high-technology positions. As the global economy became increasingly prominent, many manufacturing jobs were sent to third-world countries where labor was cheaper.31 The traditional black working classes fell deeper into poverty, while the more educated were being absorbed into middle-class life.32 A split developed. As a result, the black middle classes began to move away from traditional black ghetto neighborhoods, or if they remained, they tended to socially disengage.33
As blacks attained a measure of wealth and moved into formerly white neighborhoods, the whites often fled. These blacks were often followed by their poorer brethren, and when property values declined these middle-class blacks often moved away themselves, leaving the working classes and the poor predominant. In turn, city services declined in these areas, and schools were often left to deteriorate. A general perception emerged, particularly among whites, but among middle-class blacks as well, of certain neighborhoods as poor, black, and undesirable. This assumption of decline, often mixed with danger, frightened still more whites into leaving and deterred others from moving into neighborhoods with a significant black presence. The old story of persistent and widespread segregation was the result.34 Through the years, these processes have continued, buffeted by the winds of political, economic, and social change.
These trends have continued unabated up to the present time. In 1983, Philadelphia elected its first African-American mayor, an event that would have astounded DuBois. During this administration, Philadelphia had black leadership on the City Council and the local school board and important, if token, black representation in the business, educational, and legal communities. Such developments indeed represented significant progress for the Philadelphia Negro and offered real hope to ordinary Philadelphians, particularly for blacks and other minorities, but also for the larger white community as well. Yet, strikingly, these political developments, as significant as they were, failed to fundamentally alter the economic situation of most local blacks. Presently, it is even clearer that the local Philadelphia occupational structure is undergoing profound change, from manufacturing to services and high tech, at the same time that the economy is becoming increasingly global. Over the past decade, the inner-city areas of Philadelphia have suffered from active disinvestment by major corporations and by the federal government. As a result, great numbers of jobs have left the city for the suburbs, for non-metropolitan America, and for the third world. At the same time, local corporations are downsizing. These lost job opportunities are leaving an increasingly nervous black middle class and a decimated black poverty class. A kind of social strip mining of the city has occurred. And a great many Philadelphians, but particularly poor blacks— people DuBois referred to as “the submerged tenth”—are not making an effective adjustment to this situation.
For, presently, the very social programs that once aided so many and gave them hope for the future have been slashed. The Philadelphia public schools that serve so many of the black poor and working classes have been allowed to deteriorate to the point that many are not educating neighborhood children to function in today's world. With widespread joblessness, families cannot form, and social breakdown prevails in many inner-city black neighborhoods, leading to a class of street-oriented “desperate poor” who have little hope for the future and whose moral sense is sometimes lost to mere survival. For some of the most desperate people, the underground economy picks up the slack. In impoverished communities, this economy, with its cottage industries of drugs, vice, and crime, has become a major source of employment among young streetwise males, providing apparent opportunity where the regular economy provides none. This situation has become all the more widespread with the introduction of the drug “crack” cocaine. The “crackhouse” and the “carry-out” have become pervasive features of so many of these neighborhoods, proliferating as outposts of the underground economy. Moreover, rampant street crime and violence attends this economy, becoming ever more prevalent and at times purely random.
The result of all this is that a great many inner-city black Philadelphia neighborhoods are experiencing a lost sense of security. As neighborhood resources decline, as residents become ever poorer, the social breakdown spreads. Among the most desperate people, competition for available resources increases, and the drug culture becomes more pervasive. In these circumstances, the police, when summoned, may not respond, and they often tolerate obvious drug dealing and disrespect for the law, thus encouraging cynicism by many black residents toward both the police and the criminal justice system. Such feelings are consistent with the general belief that the police are indifferent toward crime in the black community, for black residents “know” that such blatant violations of the law would not be tolerated for a minute in the white neighborhoods of the city.
Given their heightened concerns with crime and public danger and their lack of faith in the police, many residents take personal responsibility for their safety, at times arming themselves. This reality has given rise to a “code of the streets,” observed by numerous inner-city black people, “street-oriented” or “decent.”35 As indicated above, living in such circumstances brings one in contact with potential danger on a daily basis, and living by the “code” is a cultural adaptation to this reality. As poverty becomes ever more widespread in the inner city, the social ills of drug trafficking, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, teenage pregnancy, and violence all become more acute.
Although DuBois identified many similar social ills, he associated them mainly with “the submerged tenth” and the “working poor.”36 Today these problems are much more deeply entrenched in the inner-city black community because of the way major economic changes are affecting that community, but also because of the social impact of a legacy of racial discrimination—identified by DuBois so long ago. As these problems worsen, black and white middle-class people flee to the suburbs. There we witness the emergence of “satellite cities,” with their vast industrial parks, that compete effectively with Philadelphia, drawing residents and more jobs, undermining the city's tax base, and creating a “spatial mismatch” between available jobs and black workers, who remain concentrated in the inner city37 The situation has contributed to a decline in city services that directly affects the quality of life in inner-city neighborhoods, thus increasing the undesirability of the city.
Much of what has happened to the Philadelphia Negro is largely a result of the interaction of racism and market forces. It might be said that the youthful DuBois's greatest failing in The Philadelphia Negro was in not having appreciated how wedded the capitalist enterprise was and is to exploiting market forces to their fullest without regard for human casualties. Although DuBois approaches this conclusion as he proceeds with the study, he does not fully pursue it. DuBois seems imbued with the idea of benevolent authority and convinced that the capitalists wanted to do right by their workers while at the same time, of course, exploiting their labor; he felt that was the only rational course of action, and he was certain the capitalist was rational.38 Before doing the study, his only explanation of the capitalists’ behavior—their failure to use black labor—was that they were ignorant. They needed a new way to think about race, and his purpose was to enlighten them and thus provide increased economic opportunities for the black population of Philadelphia. Over time, however, DuBois came to realize that the capitalists’ problem was not so much ignorance, but rather unbridled self-interest within the context of white supremacy. The capitalists were in fact benefiting from the competition between immigrants and blacks; the resulting tensions kept the workers divided and their wages down. Eventually he concluded that the “better class” of whites had no real interest in improving the lives of blacks when doing so might impose a hardship on themselves.
Strikingly, these themes are still applicable to the task of understanding the plight of the Philadelphia Negro of today. Presently, the business and industrial elite appear even less directly involved with the local community, and in fact might often be fairly described as itinerant. Increasingly, they possess a national, even a global, orientation, moving from city to city, from country to country. The benevolence of the individual, personally known capitalist was always held suspect, but this proposition is even more questionable today, in the era of impersonal, global capitalism, than it was in DuBois's time.
Nearly a hundred years have passed since W.E.B. DuBois wrote The Philadelphia Negro. Have his insights contributed to the amelioration of the conditions he studied? Is the African-American of today, in Philadelphia or anywhere in the United States, free of the forces DuBois chronicled? Despite undeniable progress, the answer must be no. By considering the status of blacks then and now, the entrenched nature of the forces of both white racism and black victimization can be seen in even sharper relief than was visible to DuBois.39 DuBois's keen observations should make it clear to all that much additional effort will be needed before our society approaches real equality of opportunity or the rational benevolence envisioned by this eloquent, humane, and seminal thinker.
Acknowledgments
The inspiration for this essay grew from the experience of “team teaching” a survey course on the work of W.E.B. DuBois with Arnold Feldman and James Pitts when I was a graduate student at Northwestern University. I would like to acknowledge as well the helpful comments of James Kurth, Antonio McDaniel, Michael Katz, Thomas Sugrue, Nancy Anderson, and Victor Lidz, and the able research assistance of Christine Szczepanowski.
SEVENTH WARD
[Taken Jrom publications of the American Academy, No. 150, July 2, 1895. The large figures refer to voting precincts.]
1. See DuBois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (New York: Schocken, 1968; originally published 1940); and David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. DuBois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919 (New York: Henry Holt, 1993).
2. Ibid.
3. See Dusk of Dawn, pp. 30-32; and The Souls of Black Folk, reprinted in W.E.B. DuBois: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1986), Chapter 4, pp. 405-10.
4. See Dusk of Dawn, pp. 35-45.
5. Lewis, W.E.B. DuBois, pp. 188-89.
6. Dusk of Dawn, pp. 58-59.
7. See Robert E. L. Faris, Chicago Sociology: 1920-1932 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967); James F. Short, ed., The Social Fabric of the Metropolis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971).
8. Booth, Life and Labor of the People of London, 9 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1882-97).
9. Addams, Hull House Maps and Papers, by Residents of Hull House, a Social Settlement. A presentation of Nationalities and wages in a Congested District of Chicago, Together with Comments and Essays on Problems Growing Out of Social Conditions (Boston: Crow-ell, 1895); Twenty Years at Hull House (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1910).
10. The Philadelphia Negro, 1996 edition, pp. 119–21. All page references below are to this current edition.
11. See Roger Lane, William Dorsey's Philadelphia and Ours: On the Past of the Black City in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 231-52.
12. The Philadelphia Negro, pp. 136-46.
13. The Philadelphia Negro,-p. 127.
14. For observations of similar patterns in Chicago, see Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).
15. See Allen F. Davis and Mark H. Haller, eds., The Peoples of Philadelphia: A History of Ethnic Groups and Lower-Class Life, 1790-1940 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1973).
16. Of course, he revisits this theme a few years later in The Souls of Black Folk (1903).
17. Herbert Blumer, “Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position,” Pacific Sociological Review 1,1 (1958): 3–7.
18. See Thomas Pettigrew, ed., The Sociology of Race Relations (New York: Free Press, 1980).
19. E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939); Black Bourgeoisie (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957).
20. St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York: Harper and Row, 1962).
21. William J. Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
22. See The Souls of Black Folk.
23. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma (New York: Harper, 1941).
24. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington, DC: Office of Policy Planning and Research, U.S. Department of Labor, 1965)-
25. U.S. National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Kerner Commission), Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York: Bantam Books, 1968).
26. Andrew Hacker, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1992).
27. DuBois considers this group in more detail in an essay entitled “The Talented Tenth,” reprinted in The Negro Problem (New York: Arno Press and New York Times, 1969), pp. 31-75.
28. See Ernest Burgess and Robert E. Park, The City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925); Gerald Suttles, The Social Order of the Slum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); Elijah Anderson, Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
29. See Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
30. See Gertrude Ezorsky, Racism and Justice: The Case for Affirmative Action (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).
31. See Theodore Hershberg et al., “A Tale of Three Cities: Blacks, Immigrants, and Opportunity in Philadelphia, 1850-1880,1930,1970,” in Theodore Hershberg, ed., Philadelphia: Work, Space, Family, and Group Experience in the 19th Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 461-91.
32. See Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie, Bart Landry, The New Black Middle Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
33. See Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race, The Truly Disadvantaged; Anderson, Streetwise.
34. See Massey and Denton, American Apartheid.
35. See Elijah Anderson, “The Code of the Streets,” Atlantic Monthly (May 1994).
36. The Philadelphia Negro, pp. 302-3.
37. See John D. Kasarda, “Urban Industrial Transition and the Underclass,” in William Julius Wilson, ed., The Ghetto Underclass: Social Perspectives (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1993), pp. 43-64; and David T. Ellwood, “The Spatial Mismatch Hypothesis: Are There Teenage Jobs Missing in the Ghetto?” in R. B. Freeman and H. J. Holzer, eds., The Black Youth Employment Crisis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 147-85.
38. The Philadelphia Negro, pp. 355-58.
39. See Gerald D. Jaynes and Robin M. Williams, Jr., A Common Destiny: Blacks and American Society (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1989), and Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged.
