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