The Philadelphia Negro. W. E. B. Du Bois
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.