“The Negro Problems of Philadelphia,” “The Question of Earning a Living,” and “Color Prejudice”: from The Philadelphia Negro (1899)

Abstract

In this selection from The Philadelphia Negro (1899), William Edward Burghardt Du Bois detailed what was commonly called “the Negro problem” in America by studying Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward, the city’s Black ghetto. While Du Bois found many problems in Philadelphia’s segregated African-American community in the 1890s (largely the result of pervasive race prejudice in the larger American society), there was work available for able-bodied laborers, little evidence of drug use, substantial homeownership, middle- and upper-income craftspeople, businessmen, and professionals to serve the community and act as role models, and very little violent crime. Ethnographic studies by sociologists and anthropologists often shed light on variations within communities, which are viewed as homogenous by outsiders. While white Philadelphians who never visited the Seventh Ward tended to view the area as homogenous and all African Americans as similar, Du Bois found a physical and social structure within the neighborhood – alleys peopled by criminals, loafers, and prostitutes separate from streets of the working poor and still other streets where an established group of Black middle-class homeowners lived. What he found, in short, was a whole community, separated from the rest of the city by racial segregation, but a working, multi-class community very different from the underclass-only ghettos that exist in many American cities today.