City of Brotherly Hate

Abstract

The city of Philadelphia is known as the City of Brotherly Love, but for black people in the nineteenth century this was not the case. Between 1832 and 1849 the tranquility of Philadelphia was shattered by five major and numerous smaller interracial battles.' White mobs called terrorizing the city's black population hunting the nigs.2 As Roger Lane argued in his earlier book, Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 1860-1900, antiblack violence in Philadelphia constituted a particular type of urban disorder. In a city where rival gangs of young white males regularly battled for turf, assaults on blacks cut across class, gender, and age lines. I mention this book because it must be read with Lane's William Dorsey's Philadelphia and Ours. Together these two studies present the most ambitious, detailed, and provocative analysis of urban northern postbellum black life in print. In brief, the Dorsey volume is a welcome addition to and revision of W. E. B. Du Bois' classic study, The Philadelphia Negro (1899). In Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, Lane dealt with the unique problem of criminality in black Philadelphia during the last forty years of the nineteenth century (p. 3). This was a strong thesis-driven book that examined the consequences of blacks' failure to enter the urban industrial order. William Dorsey's Philadelphia is a more complex and detailed exploration of this same problem. The new book details the interaction of blacks and whites in postCivil War Philadelphia and examines the institutions black people created to sustain themselves in a hostile environment. William Dorsey's Philadelphia shows that blacks never passive victims of white supremacy. Even though they possessed limited resources and often faced defeats in their quest for equality, the Negro citizens of Philadelphia were more inclined to emphasize progress than pain (p. 309). But having said this I think it should be noted that Lane presents a subtle and nuanced analysis of black inequality in the Quaker City. According to Lane, black deprivation after the Civil War