Black Logics,Black Methods: Indigenous Timelines,Race,and Ethnography

“Time Is Money”: Colored People’s Time and the Sociology of Racialized Time

“Colored people’s time,” or “CP” time, has long been a playful intraracial commentary on black folks use and understanding of time. Although in daily interaction the phrase is most commonly meant to note lateness, it is also true that embedded in its use is a precise notion of black agency and its dynamic collision with time. Events may have already begun for some, but the individual’s experience of that event begins when he or she or they enter the event. Thus, as I began to piece together the story of the Black Seventh Ward, this colloquialism took on new meaning. Normative historical drivers of time (i.e., World War I, The Great Depression), while intersecting with the black experience, were not the timeline driver in the life course of the neighborhood as our preexisting white logics and white methods assume and insinuate.

For example, when I set out to do the research, the severity of the Great Depression period on black Philadelphians was clear. However, as I looked through archives and news media of the time, I began to notice a difference in how the Great Depression was being reported by the local mainstream press, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Evening Bulletin, and the local black newspaper, The Philadelphia Tribune. While each newspaper of record shared the same sentiment about the economic downturn of 1930s, the depictions of the financial climate of the 1920s differed greatly between the mainstream and black press. Although the 1920s were being depicted as financially roaring for white Philadelphians, The Philadelphia Tribune had been documenting what amounted to a black Great Depression beginning mid-1920.

Despite very rainy conditions, on Wednesday, February 4, 1925, black depositors patiently and with great anxiety stood in line in the Black Seventh Ward awaiting the opening of the Brown & Stevens Bank located at Broad and Lombard streets. This gathering was by no means in anticipation of a grand opening. Rather, Black Seventh Warders and residents from surrounding areas were at the Brown & Stevens Bank hoping to receive their deposits back in full. During the daylong run on Brown & Stevens Bank, cofounder Edward C. Brown spoke with the local press to convey his confidence in the bank and assure interested parties, “We will weather the storm, unless the run is too heavy on us tomorrow. We are solvent, but of course you know the strongest bank in the world cannot hold up under some conditions.” Within the first three hours of business on Wednesday, February 4, 1925, the bank paid out more than $20,000 ($274,000 in 2018 US dollars) to depositors, exhausting the amount of cash the bank had on hand. While Brown had been able to convince some depositors of the bank’s solvency, most who arrived, particularly those with large deposits, were unconvinced, seeking the full amount of their deposits. ¹

Initially, Brown believed that his efforts to convince the morning crowd of depositors that their savings were secure had been successful. In the afternoon, however, depositors who remained unconvinced by Brown’s claims arrived at the bank in large numbers, refusing to leave until their money was returned. As the end of the business day neared, Brown began to instruct depositors to return on Thursday as the bank no longer had enough cash-on-hand to repay savings in full. However hopeful and confident Brown may have seemed, the fact remained that in one day, more than 300 depositors withdrew their savings. Assuring all in line and inside the bank that their money was safe, Brown announced that there would be a meeting at the Knights of Pythias meeting hall, located at Nineteenth and Lombard Streets, to discuss the bank’s solvency and the security of deposits, loans, and credit managed by the bank. Providing details about the meeting, Brown commented to the press,

We are going to have some of our preachers give assurances to our depositors in their churches, and we are planning meetings at which the financial conditions of the bank will be thoroughly discussed. We are also going to print advertisements and statements in some of our newspapers. The rumors about the bank have been in circulation for about a year. There have been anonymous telephone calls to some of our depositors. The run started this morning almost as soon as the doors were opened. We are going after the people who have been doing this work. We know the names of some of them, and we are going to have detectives find out who the rest are. ²

Although some were surprised by Brown’s claim that rumor was responsible for Wednesday’s unexpected bank run, news reports at the time suggested that rumors played a significant role. By all accounts, two connected rumors are said to have played a significant role in the swift nature of the subsequent events leading to the banks ultimate and beleaguered closure. The first was tied to the collapse of Marcus Garvey’s pan-African movement following collective attacks of local and national authorities, which subsequently led to Garvey’s imprisonment. When rumor spread that Brown & Stevens Bank had heavily invested in the Black Star Steamship Company, Garvey’s pet project, fear that Garvey’s failures were tied to their savings spread rapidly.

Adding to this account, the Evening Bulletin reported,

When word of Garvey’s sentence spread through the section [where most of the Black depositors live] his name was linked up with the affairs of the bank, and it is said that some of the larger depositors became panicky and started the run. ³

A second rumor resulted from the experience of one of the big depositors who unsuccessfully attempted to collect his entire deposit of $20,000 ($274,000 in 2018 US dollars) on Monday, February 2, 1925. When told he would have to wait a day or two for the return of his deposit, the depositor was said to have gone through the Black Seventh Ward spreading word about his experience with the bank, asserting that deposits held at the Brown & Stevens Bank were endangered. Rumors mattered for the livelihood of the bank from its inception, as black leaders and institutions used stories of Brown’s successes elsewhere to convince black Philadelphians to participate in and support the banking duo’s various enterprises. Just as positive stories had constructed the banking duo’s success, rumors surely facilitated the reemergence of black skepticism of banking institutions.

Added to this, on February 18, 1925, Teresa A. Williams, Norma B. Winslow, and Clarence L. Smith filed an involuntary bankruptcy suit against the Brown & Stevens and Cosmopolitan Banks. Seeking the repayment of their savings totaling $1,932 ($26,500 in 2018 US dollars), Williams, Winslow, and Smith were among the nearly 13,000 depositors whose savings were in limbo due to the failure of the two banks. ⁴ Much like these three depositors, many black Philadelphians had placed their savings in the two banks in hopes of establishing financial security for themselves and their families. After a series of massive withdrawals by depositors or “runs,” two black banks, Brown & Stevens and Cosmopolitan Banks, closed suddenly, leaving many to wonder when and if they would ever see their savings returned. While some relied on the goodwill of those in charge of managing the two banks, others sought legal means to recoup their savings.

However, by 1928, nearly all depositors remained unpaid. That same year, Brown, who fled the Black Seventh Ward as reports about his mismanagement mounted, died in New York City and whatever money had been received from the sale of the real estate owned by Brown and Stevens (including the two banks) had only been paid to creditors. In May of 1933, the state banking commission announced that the banking affairs had been concluded, and that claims of $6 ($111.00 in 2018 US dollars) or less would be paid out. Reports indicate that the receiver was only able to salvage “about $100,000” ($1,850,000 in 2018 US dollars) “out of the $1,000,000 resources” and pay approximately 2,000 depositors back; such reports also revealed that even those “who did not have a quarter in [the bank] . . . ‘lost’ [significant] amounts,” illustrating that the financial damage caused by the banking collapse was far-reaching. In addition to shrinking the already fragile wealth of black residents, the banking failures precipitated the loss of jobs for those employed by the banking duo, the demise of the Black Dunbar, Douglass, and Standard Theatres, and the Clef Club. In the end, at least 8,000 depositors never received repayment, and many were left in dire straits. Such an economic collapse was amplified for black Philadelphians as the nation entered into the tremendous economic depression caused by the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929. ⁵

And, as further research and investigation would reveal, this outcome and, thus, the timeline for the black experience of the Great Depression, or the Black Great Depression, was longer than conventional historical measures, beginning earlier, more protracted with traceable origins to the aftermath of the emancipation. My research would lead me to find that the Black Great Depression of the 1920s and 1930s was the racial and economic consequence of the failed policies following the Emancipation Proclamation, notably the sudden closing of branches of the Freedmen’s Bank June 28, 1874. The claims of Williams, Winslow, and Smith reflected, then, an important interaction black Americans had during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with banks. Indeed, Du Bois noted in The Philadelphia Negro, “Negroes distrust all saving institutions since the fatal collapse of the Freedmen’s Bank.” Therefore, an understanding of the sociopolitical history of black banks in Philadelphia (or anywhere in the United States) is distinctly tied to the rise and fall of the Freedmen’s Bank. ⁶

Following President Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863, banks became one of the first experiments to address the social inequality created under slavery. After emancipation, black Americans had the chance to accumulate wealth. But to protect that wealth, they needed banks. Yet, the banks were also “separate but equal,” leading to racially disparate risks of being bankrupted by the bank. On March 3, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln signed legislation, the Freedmen’s Bank Act, authorizing the organization of the bank. As Lincoln signed the legislation, he lauded it as a significant step in the realization of black freedom: “This bank is just what the freedmen need.” ⁷ Due to aggressive recruiting efforts, the bank’s list of black depositors grew quickly, and, soon, 34 branches were established in locations across the country including Philadelphia. Wowed by the popularity of the bank, a journalist in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1870, reported, “Go in any forenoon and the office is found full of negroes depositing little sums of money, drawing little sums, or remitting to distant part of the country where they have relatives to support or debts to discharge.” ⁸ By January 1874, less than 10 years after the establishment of the Freedmen’s Bank, deposits at the 34 branches totaled $3,299,201 ($71,700,000 in 2018 US dollars). As the only two northern branches of the Freedmen’s Bank, New York and Philadelphia offices held total deposits of $344, 071 and $84,657 ($7,480,000 and $1,840,000 in 2018 US dollars), respectively (Harris [1936] 1969).

The bank’s success led to a shift in the function of the bank from largely a home for savings to one that was also a loan-lending institution. This shift was accomplished when Congress amended the bank’s charter in 1870. “Before the charter was amended in 1870, no loans could be made by the principal bank or by the branches, for, by the law of 1865, two thirds of all deposits” were to be “invested in United States securities and the remainder held as an available fund.” After 1870, however, Congress provided a stipulation that allowed the bank to provide mortgages and business loans. Such mortgages and loans were often given to whites, representing an important contradiction—a black bank using the savings and income of black depositors to advance the economic fortunes of whites who had mainstream banks that excluded blacks at their disposal. This contradiction would soon show itself, as the liabilities created because of lending began to disrupt the viability of various branches. In this way, black depositors were set up to shoulder all the risks, with whites benefiting from the frugality of those depositors. ⁹

In the end, Congress decided to liquidate the bank’s affairs, officially closing the bank on June 28, 1874.

By 1900, only $1,638,259.49 ($48,300,000 in 2018 US dollars), or 62 percent, of the total amount of deposits prior to the bank’s failure had been paid. To be clear, the repayment of 62 percent of the deposits did not mean that 62 percent of the depositors were repaid. Instead, repayment was piecemeal, leaving many without any sign that their savings would ever be returned. In the end, many black depositors lost their savings, receiving little to no money back from the bank or the U.S. Government. Soon, general distrust of banks set in among blacks across the United States. Douglass was not the only black leader disappointed and duped by the bank, as Southern black leader of economic self-sufficiency Booker T. Washington’s (1909: 214-215) comments reflect the psychological toll the bank’s collapse took on black depositors:

[Freedmen’s] bank had agents all over the South, and coloured [sic] people were induced to deposit their earnings with it in the belief that the institution was under the care and protection of the United States Government. When they found out that they had lost, or been swindled out of all their savings, they lost faith in savings banks, and it was a long time after this before it was possible to mention a savings bank for Negroes without some reference being made to the disaster of the Freedman’s [sic] Bank. The effect of this disaster was more far-reaching because of the wide extent of territory which the Freedmen’s Bank covered through its agencies.

W. E. B. Du Bois (1982: 32, emphasis added) also tied the collapse with an accompanying and obdurate loss of black confidence in banking:

Then in one sad day came the crash [of the Freedmen’s Bank],—all the hard-earned dollars of the freedmen disappeared; but that was the least of the loss,—all the faith in saving went too, and much of the faith in men; and that was a loss that a Nation which to-day sneers at Negro shiftlessness has never yet made good. Not even ten additional years of slavery could have done so much to throttle the shift of the freedmen as the mismanagement and bankruptcy of the series of savings banks chartered by the Nation for their especial aid.

While the black economic depression sparked by the banking collapse of 1925 was devastating, it provided an equalizing force of sorts—diminishing intraracial class divisions. As a result of the banking collapse and subsequent events, class interests among blacks would come to converge around issues of housing reform with the attention of black Philadelphians returning to the Black Seventh Ward once again.

The Black Origins of Public Housing: Racially Recalibrating Urban American History and Policy

The trajectory of housing reform in Philadelphia also revealed the importance of the intraracial politics and choices made over time by Black Seventh Ward residents, manifesting a black logic and black method. Rather, I discovered that the common wisdom that policy makers sought to rejuvenate urban America and address housing shortages for understanding and apprehending how and why public housing was both racialized and driven by events in black neighborhoods. And, yet again, another black-centered timeline, indigenous to the neighborhood and the experiences of the residents, emerged in contrast to conventional historical wisdom requiring racial recalibration much like that required to analyze and accurately depict the Black Great Depression in Philadelphia.

On Saturday, December 19, 1936, Lucy Spease (age 42) welcomed her cousin Hattie Bouy (age 25) over to her small but homey second floor apartment at 519 South Fifteenth Street. Bouy, a resident of another Philadelphia neighborhood, decided to arrive early on Saturday to spend part of her weekend with Spease and Spease’s children, Bernice (age 13), Samuel (age 6), and Helen (age 5). Spease’s apartment much like her fellow neighbors was in great disrepair, leading to continued exposure to the frosty chill of the winter through broken windows and cracked ceiling. In fact, all of Spease’s neighbors, including those in the next-door apartment building, 517 South Fifteenth Street, had complained about property conditions to the white landlord, Abraham Samson, many times.

Meanwhile, Raymond Blackwell, Spease’s neighbor at 519, frustrated with the state of the building and his apartment, voiced their concerns to the landlord hoping repairs would be made as families readied for the impending Christmas holiday. Blackwell handed Samson his rent while repeating to the landlord the repair issues that he and others, including Spease, had noted for countless months. In his plea to Samson, Blackwell described the disrepair of the building, admonishing the landlord: “The walls on the second floor front room [are] bulging at least a foot and a half [and] the paper in the kitchen [is] falling off and the walls [have] begun to crack.” ¹⁰

As Blackwell hoped to convince Samson of the dire nature of the apartments, Spease and her cousin Hattie tucked Bernice, Samuel, and Helen into bed. Soon after, Spease and Bouy began to feel the walls shake and see the ceiling plaster fall down in huge chunks. Suddenly, the floor beneath their feet caved in as they rushed to the children. This, too, was the case for others in the building, including Blackwell’s cousin, Alberta Richardson, who lived on the third floor. Somewhat more fortunate than the Spease family, Richardson was already heading out as the wall shook, but fell through the floor as she and her young daughter Norma reached the hallway. Blackwell, walking with the hopes that his words had finally pushed Samson to action, arrived at 519 to find that the entire building had collapsed. A pile of ruins more than a story high, with nearly 35 people scattered within them, was all that was left of the two buildings located at 517–519 South Fifteenth Street.

Barely alive, Lucy Spease could be faintly heard calling out, “Hurry please; Hurry please.” Unfortunately, by the time rescuers found her, she had succumbed to her injuries and died. Rescuers found Lucy Spease lying dead not too far from her children Bernice and Samuel and her cousin Hattie, all of whom also died in the collapse. Helen, Spease’s youngest daughter, died the following day at Frederick Douglass Memorial Hospital. The site of collapse, littered with dismembered body parts, took several days to clear. All told, seven people were killed, and more than two dozen were injured. ¹¹

In my research, it became clear that this event accelerated an unprecedented period of housing reform and construction in Philadelphia, with two of the first three housing projects built to supply affordable housing to poor and working-class black residents. On Sunday, December 20, 1936, race leader Crystal Bird Fauset, heading a committee of blacks who sought to investigate the collapse of 517–519 South Fifteenth Street, toured the site. Inviting leading Democratic figure Kelly along, Fauset and her committee made sure to ask neighbors and former residents about the condition of the building prior to the collapse, inquiring into the landlord’s malfeasance. During their tour of the site, it became clear to Fauset that such an event was avoidable and the result of years of neglect by black and white Republican leadership.

Fauset argued that the progressive politics of the New Deal were the appropriate alternative to years of Republican inaction on the issue of housing. Fauset, in an editorial for the black newspaper the Philadelphia Independent, argued,

Time after time, these housing needs have been pointed out to us. Several years ago, [The Committee on Negro Migration (1924) and Philadelphia Housing Association (1927)] surveyed these places and reported that something need to be done, and be done quickly . . . but the houses crashed and killed several women and little children. What does this mean for all of us? It means that we women who make the homes of the land, who revere the home, must act as well as merely observe or voice an opinion. Once sensing a situation, we must not wait on others to meet the need, whether they be officials or other [Black] people . . . we must pitch in and compel action.

Fauset took to the black press to ignite a powerful black response, particularly calling on black women to rally for housing reform. Both Kelly’s and Fauset’s comments targeted old leadership and held Mayor Wilson culpable, and foreshadowed a renewed focus on housing reform—one that would rely on the combined efforts of black residents and concerned white leaders. ¹²

Fauset’s commentary, in particular, is significant for several reasons. First, her comments are representative of the gendered politics and rhetoric that precipitated the rise of black female-led groups and activism targeting domestic issues such as housing in the 1930s and 1940s, recently described by historian Lisa Levenstein. ¹³ Second, her use of the tenement collapse to forge a collective black narrative is illustrative of the manner in which previously contentious or “cross-cutting” issues are reframed to express a collective black reality. In this case, for instance, we find in Fauset’s commentary an absence of place. That is, we find no mention of the Black Seventh Ward. In this way, by removing place from her discussion of housing, Fauset, like other black leaders at the time, reconfigured the existing narrative of black housing from earlier years by using the tenement collapse to compel local, state, and federal officials to redress black housing. Positing housing reform as a consensus issue, Fauset’s commentary is representative of the ways in which ties among black neighborhoods and residents are played up or downplayed for particular political ends.

Sitting Republican Mayor Wilson, however, needed little prodding. He, too, was outraged. While touring the site, Wilson determined three actions were necessary: (1) arresting and charging Samson, the landlord, with homicide; (2) razing the slums of the Black Seventh Ward; and (3) building new housing. Wilson personally handled Samson’s arrest and bail hearing, publicly announced his disapproval of the treatment of countless Black Seventh Warders, and created a Mayoral Housing Commission overnight. Wilson seemed determined to combat the slums with an unprecedented focus on slum clearance and housing reform. Wilson, commenting on the disaster, confessed that Black Seventh Ward residents “can’t live the way they are now . . . it is impossible for humans to live in the squalor I saw this morning.” Such a confession by Wilson was quite a departure from Mayor Moore’s contention just four years earlier that there were no slums in Philadelphia. ¹⁴

Within a week of the tenement collapse, the mayor had already begun to raze dilapidated housing near and around the site of the collapse. Using the $10 million given to Philadelphia due to the earlier writing campaign of black Philadelphians, Wilson quickly took to the Black Seventh Ward, removing residents from properties. Despite Wilson’s intentions, such an action appeared to many as an additional attack on Black Seventh Ward residents. In response, Black Seventh Warders took to the streets openly protesting the actions of the mayor, black leadership, and housing conditions in the neighborhood. Furious with Wilson’s lack of planning, residents asserted that the mayor had no plan for rehousing displaced residents, and was instead more focused on the superficial aspect of the problem, expending his energies solely on removing properties that looked bad.

One group of tenants argued, “They still haven’t told us where we can move . . . we positively will not live like pigs in an armory. If they want us out of here they’ll have to come and drag us out.” Another resident of the Black Seventh Ward, a young black woman, asserted, “we have a right to a home . . . we have household furnishings, children and pets. What would we do with them in an armory.” The response of Black Seventh Ward residents intimidated Wilson, and he soon changed his policy on slum clearance. Subsequently, Wilson allowed police to condemn properties but decided against evicting residents, instructing police that they were not allowed to force residents out of their homes. ¹⁵

Wilson’s response signaled a victory for Black Seventh Ward residents. By actively voicing their concerns and protesting in the streets, black residents managed to shift the mayor’s approach to fixing their housing problems. Much like the letter writing campaign a year earlier, initial protests of Black Seventh Warders were spontaneous events. Differing from conventional wisdom regarding black protests and resistance, in this case these protests were spontaneous acts of resistance that then spawned organizations to maintain pressure.

Black residents capitalized on this victory by forming and enhancing two groups that would play a significant role in housing reform policy, the Tenants League and the Philadelphia affiliate of the National Negro Congress (NNC). As historian James Wolfinger (2007) notes in Philadelphia Divided: Race and Politics in the City of Philadelphia, the Tenants League, led by Executive Secretary Bernard Childs, became one of the most powerful voices of housing reform for blacks in Philadelphia, especially in the late 1930s. The Tenants League, which drew support from the Workers’ Alliance, the Armstrong Association, and the Communist Party’s International Labor, utilized the emergent interracial alliance to push conservatives and Republican leaders to act with urgency and produce results immediately. The NNC echoed the Tenants League’s call to action.

The turn of events for St. Thomas African Episcopal Church following the tenement collapse perhaps best reveals the latent implications of the battle for housing reform that ensued following the Spease family deaths. Founded in 1793 by black reverend and leader, Absalom Jones, St. Thomas had been a key institution in black Philadelphia from its inception. Following the collapse, the institution, like others, fell on hard times. With many blacks refusing to come to the impoverished Black Seventh Ward, and residents moving to other areas, St. Thomas was without the robust membership it had come to expect. As mortgages began to mount, the foreclosure of the church loomed. Congregants and church leadership searched for ways to deal with this problem. Unable to rely on the financial stability a larger congregation once afforded, members and church leaders decided that a move to West Philadelphia would be in the church’s best interests.

West Philadelphia had, over the first 30 years of the twentieth century, become the premiere destination for middle-class blacks as they migrated within Philadelphia, and many of those families and individuals formed the basis of the St. Thomas’s congregation during its heyday. In the end, the building near the Black Seventh Ward, located at Twelfth and Walnut Streets, was sold to cover outstanding loan amounts, and the church joined with a newer church in West Philadelphia, the Church of the Beloved Disciple, at 57th and Vine Streets. Holding its first combined service in June of 1938, St. Thomas bid farewell to its home just a few blocks north of the Black Seventh Ward. ¹⁶

Although many were saddened by the move, Reverend Robert L. Bagnall, rector for St. Thomas, assured congregants the move was in the church’s best interests, commenting,

I believe that the steps taken in this direction will give this, the oldest Negro church organization in America, an opportunity to build a larger, strong and useful parish among the 70,000 colored people of West Philadelphia . . . The church at 12th and Walnut streets was removed from its congregation and had no community in which it could effectively work.

St. Thomas was not alone in its struggle as a historical black institution rooted in and near the Black Seventh Ward, as Frederick Douglass Memorial Hospital experiencing similar financial woes joined with Mercy Hospital in West Philadelphia by the early 1940s. Here, like in the case of the Phyllis Wheatley Community Centre, a black cultural institution was forsaken in an effort to achieve what appeared to be a larger black issue. ¹⁷

Ultimately, the decline of key institutions in the Black Seventh Ward received little attention from city officials and much of the black leadership. The focus instead was on the provisions for public housing and the location of new construction. Such news came in May of 1938. The Philadelphia Housing Authority (PHA) had decided to build a new housing project on the Glenwood Cemetery, and assured blacks that the new homes would primarily house low-income black families. Choosing to name the new project the James Weldon Johnson Homes after the noted black activist, the PHA’s choice received overwhelming approval from blacks and whites alike. The groundbreaking of the Johnson Homes was a cultural event.

Seeking to garner more federal money for their shrinking budget, the PHA decided almost overnight to give the Allen Homes to the Defense Housing Administration. The Defense Housing Administration, charged with providing affordable housing to war workers, had been struggling to find appropriate housing sites in Philadelphia. Unable to broker the construction of sites because of the work of the PHA, the Defense Housing Administration could not make use of the federal funds budgeted to fully house all war workers in Philadelphia. By 1940, the PHA, aware of this struggle, sought to exchange the Allen Homes, which had been assigned to low-income black families, for a portion of the Defense Housing Administration’s federal funds. Black residents, especially those who had been assigned to the Allen Homes, openly disapproved of the actions of PHA and the Defense Housing Administration. Citing the PHA’s actions as a violation of an agreement with black Philadelphians, black leadership rallied constituents across class and neighborhoods to compel the PHA to follow through on its promise to make the Allen Homes a predominantly black low-income housing project. ¹⁸

Black leadership along with black press encouraged black residents to openly protest and even suggested that all blacks put in applications for a residence in the Allen Homes. It was also suggested that blacks should solidify their place in North Philadelphia by moving in large numbers into the area surrounding the Allen Homes. Local mainstream press was outraged, too. The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Evening Bulletin ran opinion columns on the issue, often emphasizing the promise of the city to the victims of the tenement collapse. One columnist wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer that these homes were created to

rid the city of a squalid slum district and to give the evicted families and other low income groups decent living accommodations at a small cost . . . the latter objective now goes up in smoke. The poor are turned away. Others are to get their promised homes. ¹⁹

Black residents across class and political-lines took once again to a writing campaign, targeting President Roosevelt with their calls to action. In a letter to the president, composed by a committee consisting of leading Reverends E. Luther Cunningham and Marshall L. Shepard along with influential black attorney Raymond Pace Alexander, black leaders made clear their position and the issues surrounding the Allen Homes:

We, the undersigned, representatives of the quarter million Negro residents of Philadelphia, make this appeal in behalf of the low income group of people for whom the Richard Allen Homes Project in Philadelphia was planned, intended and constructed. We share the growing fear of this entire city as expressed by the unanimity of the daily and weekly press in this area, and insist that you, Sir, take immediate cognizance of the fact that the United States Housing Authority has diverted the use of these homes from their original purposes at the expense of the low income group, who are least able to obtain decent housing even in normal times and not able at all in these times. We urge you to act in the interest of these persons who cannot obtain decent housing within their capability to pay. This is equally a defense measure, which will sustain and insure the morale of a large percentage of the citizens of our country. We pray your deepest consideration to this plea and your early action and reply. ²⁰

In February of 1942, the official announcement was made that the United States Housing Administration agreed with black Philadelphia residents, thus making efforts to preserve the Allen Homes as housing for low-income black families a success.

That same month, the Edwards family became the first family to move into the new Allen Homes. More than 5,000 other black residents joined the Edwards family, and, with that, all of the units in the Allen Homes were occupied. As the moving of black residents into the Allen Homes came to an end, so too did the era of housing reform borne out of the tenement collapse, as a new conservative agenda took over. Led by Republican Robert Lamberton, who had been selected as mayor in the fall of 1939, the city quickly abandoned the progressive housing reform of the New Deal era. Returning to the dismissive rhetoric once espoused by Wilson a decade earlier, Lamberton denounced the public-housing program, asserting, “Slum areas exist . . . because some people are so utterly shiftless that any place they live becomes a slum”; thus, the New Deal era of housing for black Philadelphians faltered and ultimately ended. Tenant League leader Bernard Childs’s observation best characterized this shift in progressive housing reform: “The period of agitation when everyone was concerned about housing is over . . . and apathy has set in.” Childs’s observation was correct, as housing reform efforts in the postwar years would not operate with the same political fervor and urgency as that which characterized the period following the tenement collapse. ²¹

In the wake of the tenement collapse, population and institutional shifts in the Black Seventh Ward accelerated; thus, yet again, another black-centered indigenous timeline emerged. In this case, black residents and indigenous institutions shifted to other black areas of the city as a consequence of public-housing construction. Such secondary migration or within-city migration led to a shift in the city’s racial geography and the institutional makeup of black Philadelphia. In an effort to maximize their portion of the limited resource of public housing, black Philadelphians quietly consented to the racial formula employed by housing officials. In times when there was dissent among black Philadelphians, black leaders actively worked to address the intraracial friction to preserve the status quo.

The framework black Philadelphians used to compel state and federal intervention to address housing reform was not a ward-specific or place-based argument, and as such did not hold officials accountable for rebuilding and sustaining the Black Seventh Ward, thus facilitating the racial organization of public housing in Philadelphia. While at a cursory level having city officials cater specifically to the housing needs of black families gave way to new housing opportunities, the choice to build new housing in North Philadelphia as opposed to the Black Seventh Ward shifted the black population culturally, politically, and socially, as evidenced by the relocation of prominent black institutions such as St. Thomas Church and the Frederick Douglass Memorial Hospital. Leading to a timeline where the neighborhood was nearing its ultimate disappearance, its population reshuffled throughout emergent black areas of North and West Philadelphia.

The trajectory of housing reform in Philadelphia shows the importance of the intraracial politics and choices made over time by Black Seventh Ward residents. The tragedy of the tenement collapse forged a series of powerful black responses that critically shaped the manifestation of housing reform in Philadelphia, and altered patterns of secondary migration by black and white residents. Despite the successes of the New Deal era for black progressivism, there were serious costs. Much of these costs began and ended with the Black Seventh Ward. Although the tragic death of the Spease family, the overcrowding, and the dilapidated housing that sparked such powerful black responses were rooted in the Black Seventh Ward, the approach black leaders and residents took emphasized the issues and not the place. In other words, the framework within which black Philadelphians used to compel state actors to reform housing was not a place-based argument, and as such did not hold officials accountable for rebuilding and sustaining the Black Seventh Ward.

An examination of this episode in the sociopolitical history of the Black Seventh Ward and its place in the fight for housing reform in the New Deal era provided an opportunity to understand and analyze the interdependent relationship between neighborhoods within local black politics. Most often, urban black neighborhoods are examined and understood as distinct densely populated areas of a given city. This case, however, reveals a more complicated picture. The tragedy of tenement collapse politicized the Black Seventh Ward, in ways that detracted from other black neighborhoods in the city, and was the backdrop upon which local housing policy was calibrated. Local housing efforts were frustrated and facilitated by events in urban black enclaves and debated among urban black residents. Indeed, this case reveals that black residents actively shaped narratives about shared housing problems and the ways in which local and federal officials should address such issues.