The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study

By W. E. B. Du Bois, Elijah Anderson and Isabel Eaton

In 1897 the promising young sociologist William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868–1963) was given a temporary post as Assistant in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania in order to conduct a systematic investigation of social conditions in the seventh ward of Philadelphia. The product of those studies was the first great empirical book on the Negro in American society.

More than one hundred years after its original publication by the University of Pennsylvania Press, The Philadelphia Negro remains a classic work. It is the first, and perhaps still the finest, example of engaged sociological scholarship—the kind of work that, in contemplating social reality, helps to change it.

In his introduction, Elijah Anderson examines how the neighborhood studied by Du Bois has changed over the years and compares the status of blacks today with their status when the book was initially published.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Feb 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9781512824377

W. E. B. Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) was an African American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, and socialist. Born in Massachusetts, he was raised in Great Barrington, an integrated community. He studied at the University of Berlin and at Harvard, where he became the first African American scholar to earn a doctorate. He worked as a professor at Atlanta University, a historically black institution, and was one of the leaders of the Niagara Movement, which advocated for equal rights and opposed Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta compromise. In 1909, he cofounded the NAACP and served for years as the editor of its official magazine The Crisis. In addition to his activism against lynching, Jim Crow laws, and other forms of discrimination and segregation, Du Bois authored such influential works as The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and Black Reconstruction in America (1935). A lifelong opponent of racism and a committed pacifist, Du Bois advocated for socialism as a means of replacing racial capitalism in America and around the world. In the 1920s, he used his role at The Crisis to support the artists of the Harlem Renaissance and sought to emphasize the role of African Americans in shaping American society in his book The Gift of Black Folk (1924).

Book preview

INTRODUCTION TO THE 2023 EDITION OF THE PHILADELPHIA NEGRO

Elijah Anderson

The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study, by W. E. B. Du Bois—originally published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 1899—is widely considered to be the first real case study of a Black community in America. As such, it has become a classic text in the social science literature.

Du Boiss work deserves its seminal status not only for the study of race in urban America but also for the study of the urban poor generally. By combining urban ethnography, social history, and descriptive statistics, it reflects the methodology and rigor of Charles Booth’s studies of poverty in London (1902) and the Chicago School of urban sociology, led by Robert E. Park and others, in the 1920s through the 1950s.¹ Viewed in this context, The Philadelphia Negro was truly the first study of the social life of Black people in American cities in an empirical manner, and it provided a framework for the sociological studies that followed.

This fine book, however, is no mere museum piece. Both the issues it raises and the evolution of Du Bois’s own thinking—which can be traced between the lines—concerning the problem of Black integration in American society are strikingly contemporary.

The problems facing the Black Philadelphians of Du Bois’s day were essentially the results of White supremacy, which prompted White employers to favor in their hiring practices not only native Whites of Philadelphia but also successive waves of immigrants from Europe: people who had the advantage not only of White skin but also the experience they brought with them from Europe of having worked and lived in an urban industrial environment.

This favoritism relentlessly undermined the position of the emerging Black middle class as well as that of the Black poor. The White people then blamed the Black population for their own subjugation, resulting largely from the discrimination Black people experienced at the hands of employers who favored White immigrants over formerly enslaved people. Accordingly, the principle of White over Black was institutionalized and passed on from one racist generation to the next and is manifested, albeit indirectly, in the rampant discrimination many Black people of Philadelphia experience to this day.

Du Bois observed that capitalists were despots who were capable of benevolence. But ultimately his search for the benevolent despot who he thought would surely take steps to resolve social problems created by racial discrimination and exclusion of Black people once he was made aware of them—if for no other reason than rational and enlightened self-interest—was in vain; such a person was not to be found. This was a disappointment to Du Bois who believed that if he as a sociologist could investigate and learn about the conditions in which Black people lived and then inform the powerful capitalists of the day, being rational and somewhat benevolent people, they would then work to alleviate the problems of the Black population. But no, the capitalist typically looked after his own financial interests and at times worked to divide and conquer the ethnic working peoples, setting Whites against Blacks and exacerbating race relations for profit.

Indeed, among the intriguing aspects of The Philadelphia Negro are what it says about the author, social science at the time it was written, and the implications it has for race in urban America today. Equally important, many of Du Bois’s observations can be and in fact are made by investigators today. Indeed, the sobering consequences of America’s refusal to address the race problem honestly, which Du Bois predicted more than a hundred years ago, now haunt all Americans with a renewed intensity. The enduring relevance of Du Bois’s analysis would thus argue for a reexamination of his work.

In his now-classic book The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois pioneered the use of descriptive statistics, history, and ethnography, or what we would call today mixed methods. He was the first sociologist to conduct such an empirical study of an American city, of Black people in particular, and he was, literally, a founding father of American sociology (Lewis 1993; Anderson 1996; Morris 2015).

It is provocative to consider what part Du Bois’s own identity played in the apparently contradictory perspectives he presents—that of the elite New England gentleman committed to the ideas of meritocracy and universalism, and that of the son of a people struggling to live in freedom after two hundred years of bondage justified on racial grounds. Du Bois’s struggle to reconcile these two orientations is one of the fascinating aspects of The Philadelphia Negro. One gets the sense that it was difficult for him to accept the fact that Blacks were considered second-class citizens because at the time he wrote the book, he still thought himself to be a full citizen of the United States, even as a member of the elite. This tension may account for the seemingly ambivalent assessment of the Philadelphia Negro’s situation with which he ends the book.

Du Bois was a complex, fascinating man whose background shaped his point of view in The Philadelphia Negro. To appreciate his perspective fully, 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.

Early Days

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born on February 23, 1868, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, a small but prosperous mill town in the Berkshire Mountains—and in the midst of White New England. The few Blacks in the area worked mostly as domestics in homes or at summer resorts, while the factory jobs were held by Irish, German, and Czech Catholic immigrants. His father exited young Du Bois’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 (if perhaps not their daughters) accepted him as their playmate, allowed Du Bois to consider himself at least marginally a part of upper-class society and separated him from the children of the immigrant mill laborers, whose social position was actually much nearer his own.

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.

In high school, Du Bois attracted the attention of certain leaders of the local community, including the minister of the Congregational church and members of the economic elite in Great Barrington, who wanted to sponsor his education. Du Bois attended the local high school, taking the college preparatory courses as suggested by the principal, Frank Alvin Hosmer; his schoolbooks were, at Hosmer’s request, paid for by the mother of one of his wealthy friends.

It is impossible to understand the exact role that race played in the college guidance Du Bois received. On graduating, he had his heart set on attending Harvard, but neither the academic standards of his high school nor his financial resources were quite adequate to enable him to do so. At Hosmer’s initiative, a scholarship was arranged through four Congregational churches to send Du Bois to Fisk University, an all-Black Congregational college, in Nashville, Tennessee.

Fisk was a revelation to Du Bois. He discovered among his fellow students, as well as among the people living in the surrounding area, the rich diversity of Black people. It was in this setting that he began to find his calling. During the summers, he went into the countryside to teach local Black people to read and write, on a mission of social uplift that grew out of the charitable orientation that was part of his upbringing.

Du Bois’s image of himself when he arrived at Fisk illuminates his subsequent experiences in White society. 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.

In short, Du Bois was a gentleman and a scholar, but he was also an elitist in his early days. His experience growing up in Great Barrington encouraged him to place a premium on letters and book learning, so, quite naturally, he wanted to reach out to these people. This desire was fueled not only by the obvious limitations of the local Great Barrington community where he grew up but also by the fact that he was imbued with the New England value of noblesse oblige, the so-called obligations of the nobility: in order to claim the label nobility, one had to provide aid or support to those less fortunate than oneself. Indeed, to provide such support was a means of proving oneself worthy of regard, as a proper gentleman.

Du Bois’s introduction to life in the South taught him about racism and segregation—what it truly meant to be Black in America. But, in general, this education was still largely abstract, because the segregation he encountered still did not result in blocked opportunity for him or any real personal hardship. On the contrary, he received his bachelor’s degree in three years, boldly applied to Harvard as a scholarship student, and was accepted as a junior.

At Harvard, Du Bois faced social but not academic discrimination. The White students did not accept him into their circles or clubs; however, as young people of wealth and high social class, they were generally unaccepting of most. But Du Bois was happy to socialize with other Black members of the community—students, women, and intellectuals—and mostly did not seek out White companionship.

At the same time, he was warmly received by many of the professors. 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 Du Bois, 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 Blackness as well as his economic circumstances, still did not seriously interfere with his advancement.

After receiving his second bachelor’s degree (in philosophy), Du Bois was encouraged to pursue a doctorate. This he did, and in conjunction with his further studies, he arranged to spend two years in Germany, where he met Max Weber and other European intellectuals. This 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 of little or no hindrance in his relations with Europeans. His studies in Germany had a profound influence on the course of his life’s work (Morris 2015). He returned to the United States in 1894.

With his PhD pending, Du Bois was now ready to look for a job. Arguably among 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 a deeper education in American race relations. He found that no White college was interested in hiring him, and this was a profound shock to him. He finally received an academic appointment at Wilberforce College, an all-Black school outside Dayton, Ohio, with strong evangelical underpinnings. He felt that ministers generally played an important role in the community. He acknowledged and appreciated that the church contributed hugely to the executive ability of Black communities to organize and get funding in spite of the caste-like system under which they lived. In fact, he wrote an entire section on churches in The Philadelphia Negro, in which he discusses the church’s role in relation to the community.

Du Bois also discusses, in depth, concepts that include education, poverty, and the Black class structure—in particular, his idea of the four classes and the talented tenth, who were the most successful Black folk. He believed that the talented tenth had an obligation to reach back and educate other Black people, to support them and serve as examples, or role models. He knew that many Black people were formerly enslaved, and to some extent he appreciated that their limitations related their former bondage and servitude. But he desperately wanted to see them do better, to improve themselves, suggesting that it would take the best people to teach the masses and show them a better way, a role he expected the talented tenth to play.

After two years at Wilberforce, Du Bois was invited to Philadelphia to 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 Du Bois to carry out the study in Philadelphia.

Like many upper-class women of the time, Wharton was concerned with the social uplift of the poor and disadvantaged. Ostensibly, she was also interested in the plight of the Philadelphia Negro and, more specifically, why Blacks in Philadelphia were not participating in 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 Mrs. Wharton and her associates in the College Settlement Association 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 ninehundred-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 Du Bois’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 Du Bois 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 Du Bois, 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 clearcut 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. (Lewis 1993, 188–189)

A Philadelphia Negro

Du Bois arrived in Philadelphia in 1896 with his new bride, Nina Gomer Du Bois. They moved into a room over a cafeteria in the Seventh Ward, a section of Philadelphia where the Black population of the city was concentrated, and he 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 he felt he received at the University of Pennsylvania.

In his autobiography Dusk of Dawn, Du Bois viewed 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. (Du Bois 1968, 58–59)

Du Bois began his study with interesting premises. As already indicated, his immediate purpose was to enlighten the powerful capitalists in the city about the true plight of Black people in an objective, social scientific way, so that those in power would know how to go about helping them. He assumed that they were ignorant and that his work could inform them, and being rational and benevolent despot[s] (The Philadelphia Negro, 127), they would then do the right thing. Hence, the elite Philadelphians required a new way to think about race, and with such new knowledge and insights, they could then work to improve conditions for Black citizens. Consistent with his approach, and contrary to the eugenics theories of the day, it was clear to Du Bois that the Negroes’ problems were rooted not in their heredity but in their environment and the social conditions that confronted them (Vigue and Vigue 1982).

Prominent among these conditions were the historical circumstances, including the legacy of slavery, race prejudice, and competition with immigrants who had the experience of freedom and the advantage of White skin. His task was to throw light on how these factors complicated the plight of the Philadelphia Negro and to put before the better class of Whites the fruits of his social scientific labors. This would provide the powerful with a base of knowledge as well as a scientific rationale and an excuse for benevolent action.

Du Bois believed (with some reservations) that these despots, as he referred to White people in power, possessed the capacity for benevolence. Although these rulers exploited people, there was good to come from such exploitation. With gainful employment, he assumed, came the learning of a work ethic and the ability to support families, churches, and schools. Formerly enslaved people, who had been recently freed required these opportunities if they were to take their place as productive citizens of Philadelphia. To a relatively large degree, assimilated White immigrants, including Jews, Italians, and the Irish, enjoyed these benefits of gainful employment, so why not the Negro? Du Bois could not understand why the capitalists—rational and calculating by nature, with the capacity for benevolence—would employ these other groups but discriminate against Black people. Why does the Negro fare so poorly in Philadelphia? Is it that the better class of Philadelphians is simply ignorant? This puzzle was at the heart of his study, but the answer as it evolved had an unexpected consequence: it forced Du Bois to alter his original premise.

Du Bois conducted the study personally, with the assistance of Isabel Eaton, who contributed an appendix to the study focusing on domestic service. Together, they gathered the data, organized it, analyzed it, and formed conclusions on the basis of it. Du Bois walked the streets of the old Seventh Ward—and one can just imagine him as a 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. He used the methods that were similar to those used by Charles Booth and Jane Addams, writers who were concerned with similar issues but were not academic sociologists: maps, census data, descriptive statistics, and in-depth interviews. 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 no doubt be greatly advanced and improved.

Du Bois’s argument was that the problems of Black Philadelphians 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 recent bondage of Black people.

Given this edge, Whites also benefited from the 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. White workers sometimes threatened to quit if Black people were hired. Hence Black people 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 of failure.

Du Bois 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 had been doing fairly well. There were Black doctors, lawyers, businessmen, caterers. In fact, in the mid-nineteenth century, Black people dominated the catering business. Many barbers were Black, too, with a White clientele. But he saw that whenever Black people began to achieve middle-class status, a fresh wave of immigrants from Europe would arrive and undermine the Black middle class as it was emerging. This scenario had devastating effects on the Negro Philadelphian. The Negro’s family, community, church, and very identity suffered. What was socially disorganized remained so, or became worse.

The influx of wave after wave of European immigrants was highly destabilizing to this community. The immigrant labor pool not only was used to depress wages of ordinary workers but also very often was exploited to the exclusion of Blacks. Prejudiced White employers would drop their Black workers in favor of White immigrants or simply would not hire Black people at all, so a great many Blacks who possessed skills and work experience were left unemployed or underemployed, sometimes dramatically so. This is what eventually happened to the Black-dominated catering business: its members lost their dominant position to caterers with White skin color who had an advantage because Whites preferred dealing with other White people. Even those employers who, in theory, seemed to be in favor of educating or training Black people did not want to hire them.

Black people appeared to find their niche in the occupations that were most consistent with their previous condition of servitude. Hence servant jobs in the homes of the wealthy provided a relatively secure situation for many. Du Bois roundly criticized this development because of the way it was consistent with the Negroes’ previous servitude, and for the way it supported White prejudices toward Black people. But even this niche came to be endangered by White, generally Irish, immigrants (Ignatiev 1995).

This employment situation contributed to a profound demoralization of the Black community, a fact that expressed itself in the community’s social life. Marcus Hunter would later explore the relationship between economic and cultural factors in Black urban communities, particularly in light of Du Bois’s work (Hunter 2013). 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 took on single male boarders, many of whom were new arrivals from the South and could become 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.

In these circumstances, Du Bois distinguished four grades constituting the class structure of the Negro community. Grade 1 was the talented and well-to-do. Grade 2 was the laborers, who worked hard and were decent and law-abiding people. Grade 3 consisted of the working poor, people who were barely making ends meet. And Grade 4 was what Du Bois called the submerged tenth of the Philadelphia Negro population. As he notes, this stratification system was extremely volatile and precarious, primarily because of the interaction of racism and economics at the time.

After uncovering the ways economic factors conspired with racism to keep the Philadelphia Negro down, Du Bois looked for the benevolent despot who would presumably exert a positive influence on the plight of Black Philadelphians. Instead, he found that the so-called benevolent despot often played an active role in the oppression of Black people, 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. (The Philadelphia Negro, 127)

The truly benevolent despot was nowhere to be found. Instead, Du Bois encountered the self-interested capitalist and noted certain contradictions in his racial behavior. Such people would contribute to charities for Blacks but would not hire Black workers in their businesses. Moreover, White workers themselves had a significant hand in keeping Black men out of the workplace. As indicated, 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 most of his workers. This might account for some of the ambivalence Du Bois observed. And to be sure, this was not the only scenario he presented.

In certain industries, capitalists actively pitted Black workers against European immigrants who were threatening to strike for higher wages by hiring Blacks as strikebreakers. 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.

In general, capitalists flagrantly violated the attitude of noblesse oblige that Du Bois had originally imputed to them, and this discovery disillusioned him. Anticipating the sociologist Herbert Blumer (1958) and others, he came to feel that the existence of racism and race prejudice in American society, although exacerbated by economic competition, was deep and was most onerous 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. Capitalists, by exploiting these socioeconomic forces, were profiting from the low position of Black people. When Du Bois uncovered this behavior as a young man, he 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, Du Bois became profoundly disillusioned with his own country. 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, DC, to demand redress of the injustices he was among the first to chronicle.

Conclusion

The Philadelphia Negro is a cornerstone work in the field of race relations. Its pioneering concerns and methods establish its author as a founder of the discipline of sociology. Du Bois’s discovery that race had caste-like implications for Blacks in Philadelphia anticipated the work of others many years later, and we all stand on his shoulders. The major themes of The Philadelphia Negro are replayed in such important works as E. Franklin Frazier’s works The Negro Family in the United States and Black Bourgeoisie, St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton’s Black Metropolis; and William Julius Wilson’s works The Declining Significance of Race and The Truly Disadvantaged.

In his comments on the twoness of American society, on the separateness and inequality of its White and Black worlds, Du Bois anticipated the work of Gunnar Myrdal, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and the Kerner Commission report. 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 the Kerner Commission—and most recently Andrew Hacker—saw as coming to pass decades later.

At the end of the book, Du Bois discusses the responsibilities he attributed to White people and Black people regarding the situation he studied and analyzed. But, strikingly, he does not strongly revisit his economic arguments. This may have been a practical matter: like many intellectuals, he needed to earn a living, so he couldn’t castigate his wealthy benefactors too strongly and expect to retain their favor.

From Whites, Du Bois asked for greater understanding and tolerance. They should work to try to include those in the Black community—to reach out to Black citizens, train them, and provide them with opportunities that would enable them to recover from the experience of slavery. But he considered Blacks to be at fault as well. The talented and successful among them should have reached out, setting examples, and helping their brethren. In noting this lapse in middle-class Black society, Du Bois encouraged people to take on such roles, assuming that if they did, the situation for all Black people would improve.

Du Bois’s personal engagement in these problems, along with the unique background that informed his preconceptions, make the whole book provocative. He was not out to transform the system radically but was clearly interested in reforming it, his insights into the nonexistent benevolent despot notwithstanding. He felt that if Black people worked hard and acted decently, their lives would improve, and he emphasized the duty of all people—Black and White—to do better. He called on Black people to work hard and keep themselves out of that submerged tenth. Meanwhile, he did not castigate capitalists but urged them to act with noblesse oblige by supporting the communities that provided their wealth. Finally, he hoped that in presenting the situation plainly in The Philadelphia Negro, he would persuade capitalists to support the forces that encouraged economic participation by Black Americans and thus to make life better for all Americans.

Writing The Philadelphia Negro was a powerful learning experience for Du Bois and one that brought much disillusionment. It taught him that direct activism was a more powerful tool for effecting policy change than academic studies. He began his work with the assumption that simply informing the benevolent despots of the problems facing Philadelphia’s Black population would inspire them to act to solve these problems, only to see his hopes dashed by those selfsame capitalists. They did not do what Du Bois saw as the right thing to do out of self-interest—exploiting Blacks as they had exploited others—as Du Bois had expected them to do. In short, the capitalists were not what he thought.

After The Philadelphia Negro was published, Du Bois became more of an activist scholar and moved away from academic work. The Souls of Black Folk, for example, included poetry, music, and even a bit of fiction, as well as essays. Despite being less strictly academic, the book was a vivid account of the situation of Black people in America, which made it immensely powerful and popular—not only at the time of its publication but also today. After completing The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois moved to Atlanta, where he continued to engage in social research of the Black community, but he also turned more directly to activism and social leadership. He was one of the founders of the NAACP, in 1909, serving on its board of directors from 1910 to 1934, and he led racial protests following World War I.

A hundred years after Du Bois made his observations, an appraisal of his predictions reveals just how farsighted he was as a social scientist. What he failed to understand, however, was that academic books, regardless of how accurate their information is, or how skillfully and persuasively they are written, seldom influence public policy in direct ways. When The Philadelphia Negro was first published, for the most part it was not recognized or appreciated as a pathbreaking, pioneering study. Park later used ethnography to represent the worlds of various people, primarily immigrants, but another major study of the Black community did not appear until Black Metropolis, in 1945, by Drake and Cayton, two Black sociologists associated with the Chicago School of urban sociology.

Park, who helped to found the Chicago School, encouraged his adherents to follow the example of Franz Boas and collect people’s stories—to get out into the field, get their hands dirty in real research. These were all techniques Du Bois pioneered in The Philadelphia Negro, but the Chicago School did not take Du Bois seriously and implicitly steered future scholars away from Du Bois’s pioneering contributions to urban sociology.

Part of the reason for this may have been that Park had worked as a secretary to Booker T. Washington, who was the preeminent Black leader of the day. Washington believed that Black people should make accommodations with dominant White society, to accept and work within their segregated status, while Du Bois believed that they should claim their place as full American citizens. Du Bois emphasized Black people’s need for education, while Washington emphasized their becoming skilled in industrial work. Much of the country felt the same way as Washington, but Du Bois had higher aspirations, owing to his own education and connection with the upper classes. This led to a great deal of tension between the two leaders. Because Park had worked with Washington, this conflict may explain why Park avoided giving any major recognition to Du Bois.

In fact, when sociology is taught, Park generally receives greater credit than Du Bois. Introduction to the Science of Sociology (1925), by Robert Park and Ernest Burgess, includes only scant acknowledgment of Du Bois’s contributions. Douglas S. Massey and I make this point in our introduction to the book we coedited: Problem of the Century. See also the work of Kevin Loughran, including "The Philadelphia Negro and the Canon of Classical Urban Theory" and his review of José Itzigsohn and Karida L. Brown’s 2020 book The Sociology of W.E. B. Du Bois: Racialized Modernity and the Global Color Line. This elevation of Park over Du Bois is changing now, as more Black scholars enter the field and associate themselves with Du Bois (Hunter 2015).

Du Bois’s work remains highly relevant today—he would definitely recognize the despots of nineteenth-century Philadelphia in twenty-first-century capitalist moguls. But although his work was rejected by White leaders of the day, who steadfastly refused to engage with it, he laid the foundation on which other social scientists have built to begin changing public perception of the systemic economic challenges that poor urban Black Americans face and to draw attention to the structural causes of poverty.

References

Anderson, Elijah. 1996. Introduction to The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study, by W. E. B. Du Bois, ix—xxxvi. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Blumer, Herbert. 1958. Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position. Pacific Sociological Review 1, no. 1: 3–7.

Booth, Charles. 1902. Life and Labour of the People in London. New York: Macmillan.

Du Bois, W. E. B. 1968. Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept. New York: Schocken Books. Originally published 1940.

Du Bois, W. E. B. 1996. The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Hunter, Marcus Anthony. 2013. "A Bridge over Troubled Urban Waters: W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro and the Ecological Conundrum." Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 10, no. 1: 7–27.

Hunter, Marcus Anthony. 2015. "W. E. B. Du Bois and Black Heterogeneity: How The Philadelphia Negro Shaped American Sociology." American Sociologist 46, no. 2: 219–233.

Ignatiev, Noel. 1995. How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge.

Lewis, David Levering. 1993. W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919. New York: Holt.

Lewis, David Levering. 2009. W. E. B. Du Bois: A Biography, 1868–1963. New York: Holt.

Loughran, Kevin. 2015. "The Philadelphia Negro and the Canon of Classical Urban Theory." Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 12, no. 2: 249–267.

Loughran, Kevin. 2021. Review of The Sociology of W.E.B. Du Bois: Racialized Modernity and the Global Color Line, by José Itzigsohn and Karida L. Brown. Social Forces 99, no. 4: e8.

Morris, Aldon D. 2015. The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Vigue, Charles L., and Lynne C. Vigue. 1982. The Eugenics Movement in America. Essays in Arts and Sciences 11 (September): 1–12.

¹ Some scholars believe that the Chicago School began in 1892 when a sociology department was established and led by Albion Small, Charles Henderson, Ernest Burgess, and W. I. Thomas. Park was recruited and published a seminal piece, Suggestions for the Study of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment, in 1917, introducing the concept of qualitative fieldwork. As a result, the Chicago School is widely associated with Park.

This essay is adapted from and expands upon Anderson’s introduction to the 1996 edition of W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (University of Pennsylvania Press, ix-xxxvi).

[Taken from publications of the American Academy, No. 150, July 2, 1895.

The large figures refer to voting precincts.]

THE PHILADELPHIA NEGRO.

CHAPTER I.

THE SCOPE OF THIS STUDY.

1. General Aim.—This study seeks to present the results of an inquiry undertaken by the University of Pennsylvania into the condition of the forty thousand or more people of Negro blood now living in the city of Philadelphia. This inquiry extended over a period of fifteen months and sought to ascertain something of the geographical distribution of this race, their occupations and daily life, their homes, their organizations, and, above all, their relation to their million white fellow-citizens. The final design of the work is to lay before the public such a body of information as may be a safe guide for all efforts toward the solution of the many Negro problems of a great American city.

2. The Methods of Inquiry.—The investigation began August the first, 1896, and, saving two months, continued until December the thirty-first, 1897. The work commenced with a house-to-house canvass of the Seventh Ward. This long narrow ward, extending from South Seventh street to the Schuylkill River and from Spruce street to South street, is an historic centre of Negro population, and contains to-day a fifth of all the Negroes in this city.¹ It was therefore thought best to make an intensive study of conditions in this district, and afterward to supplement and correct this information by general observation and inquiry in other parts of the city.

Six schedules were used among the nine thousand Negroes of this ward; a family schedule with the usual questions as to the number of members, their age and sex, their conjugal condition and birthplace, their ability to read and write, their occupation and earnings, etc.; an individual schedule with similar inquiries; a home schedule with questions as to the number of rooms, the rent, the lodgers, the conveniences, etc.; a street schedule to collect data as to the various small streets and alleys, and an institution schedule for organizations and institutions; finally a slight variation of the individual schedule was used for house-servants living at their places of employment.²

This study of the central district of Negro settlement furnished a key to the situation in the city; in the other wards therefore a general survey was taken to note any striking differences of condition, to ascertain the general distribution of these people, and to collect information and statistics as to organizations, property, crime and pauperism, political activity, and the like. This general inquiry, while it lacked precise methods of measurement in most cases, served nevertheless to correct the errors and illustrate the meaning of the statistical material obtained in the house-to-house canvass.

Throughout the study such official statistics and historical matter as seemed reliable were used, and experienced persons, both white and colored, were freely consulted.

3. The Credibility of the Results.—The best available methods of sociological research are at present so liable to inaccuracies that the careful student discloses the results of individual research with diffidence; he knows that they are liable to error from the seemingly ineradicable faults of the statistical method, to even greater error from the methods of general observation, and, above all, he must ever tremble lest some personal bias, some moral conviction or some unconscious trend of thought due to previous training, has to a degree distorted the picture in his view. Convictions on all great matters of human interest one must have to a greater or less degree, and they will enter to some extent into the most cold-blooded scientific research as a disturbing factor.

Nevertheless here are social problems before us demanding careful study, questions awaiting satisfactory answers. We must study, we must investigate, we