The Philadelphia Negro

In the 1890s the Negro population in Philadelphia was afflicted with many of the problems seen across the U.S. in areas of low socioeconomic status.[4] Crime, poverty and drug addiction are of the many issues that the Philadelphia Negro population dealt with that added to the apparent social blight of community.[5]

Distribution of African American inhabitants of the 7th Ward, from The Philadelphia Negro

In order to collect survey data, Du Bois and his wife moved into the 7th ward of Philadelphia and distributed the survey himself, living in impoverished quarters on Saint Mary Street, from 1896 to 1897. With his only appointed assistant, Isabel Eaton, Du Bois employed "archival research, descriptive statistics, and questionnaires". These surveys entailed questions about occupations, health, education, and religious, social, and family life. From conducting a door-to-door examination of the ward, Du Bois and Eaton were able to collect over 5,000 personal interviews.[6] This survey data included a census number of Black individuals within the city, information about their places of birth, occupation, the age of the respondent, the sex of the respondent, etc.[7]

The sample size for Du Bois's study was limited in that it was a neighborhood study of the central Seventh Ward, which encompassed from Spruce to South Street and from Seventh Street to the Schuylkill River. However, within this neighborhood, there was an incredible diversity. Its western fringe was occupied by affluent whites, its center with one of the nation’s densest concentrations of black elites, and its eastern front inhabited by numerous poor from both races. The eastern side was also notorious as the city’s black ghetto.[8]

The findings of Philadelphia research revealed a community of diversity and advancement; yet it simultaneously reaffirmed the reality of poverty, crime, and illiteracy. Addressing this contradiction, Du Bois explained that black members of the community possessed their own internal class structure, and therefore should not be judged solely by the “submerged tenth”, the 10% beneath the surface of socioeconomic viability.[9] Likewise, the “Negro problem" was ostensibly “not one problem, but rather a plexus of social problems,” and had less correlation to a black “social pathology” than to whites’ enforcement of racial discrimination and a provision of unequal opportunity.[10]

Du Bois emphasized socio-economic and historical causes of the "Negro problem", notably the exclusion of blacks from the city’s premier industrial jobs, prevalence of black single-family homes, and the continued legacy of slavery and unequal race relations. Such biased provision was evident in housing. Du Bois found that African Americans had to pay “abnormally high rents for the poorest accommodations, and race-prejudice accentuates this difficulty, out of which many evils grow.”[11]

Du Bois ends his study with a section entitled "The Meaning of All of This." In this section he explains how the overarching dilemma that Negros in America faced laid in their image in the eyes of the majority of Americans. By changing how Blacks are perceived in America, from inferior to equally capable, many of the problems seen in the Black community would subside. Du Bois documents that if change is expected to occur in Philadelphia's Black communities, both the Black and White communities must work in tandem. He assigns responsibilities for Blacks and Whites in this section.

In spring 2008, Philadelphia's Mural Arts Program, in partnership with The Ward project,[12] memorialized the history of The Philadelphia Negro with the mural Mapping Courage on the side of Engine Company 11's building at S 6th Street and South Street. The company was one of the original 22 fire companies established by Philadelphia's first paid municipal fire department in 1871. Until the Philadelphia Fire Department officially desegregated in 1952, Engine 11 was Philadelphia's de facto African American firehouse. The company's original building at 1016 South Street still stands and belongs to the Waters Memorial African Methodist Church.[13]

• History of the African-Americans in Philadelphia

• The Philadelphia Negro, digital text