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