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