The Philadelphia Negro at 125 Years: A Critical Commemoration

125 Years of The Philadelphia Negro

In “laboring morning, noon, and night,” Du Bois canvassed nearly every corner of the Seventh Ward, an area that covered over 50 city blocks, during research conducted between August 1896 and December 1897. Du Bois walked house-to-house, interacted by his estimation with nearly 5,000 people, compiled a mountain of statistics, drew detailed maps, and scoured people’s private archives. TPN thus provided an early template for mixed-methods research (Anderson [1899] 2023). The University of Pennsylvania had invited Du Bois to lead the study, with the support of the city’s branch of the College Settlement Association. ³ When the young and newly married Du Bois arrived in Philadelphia, he encountered a city that was already a manufacturing juggernaut and was expanding rapidly (Katz and Sugrue 1998; Rucks-Ahidiana and Blume Oeur 2024). Du Bois ([1899] 2023) estimated that 45,000 Black people lived in the city, but by virtue of racial and economic discrimination were largely segregated in neighborhoods like the Seventh Ward—a “city within a city” (5), as he described it. So, Du Bois ([1899] 2023) set out to investigate how the “physical environment” of the Seventh Ward–where Black Seventh Warders lived, worked, and leisured–was shaped by “the far mightier social environment–the surrounding world of custom, wish, whim, and thought which envelops this group and powerfully influences its social development” (5). TPN, which was published during the birth of social statistics, thus came to stress race less as an essential variable within people and more as an event (Zuberi 2000). Adopting a “megascope” to understand the “social development” of Black people, he viewed the period in which he arrived in Philadelphia as even more consequential for this group than Reconstruction. ⁴

While many of TPN’s insights are taken for granted today, the study was revolutionary during its own time (Rabaka 2010). The “Negro problem” was in truth a “plexus of social problems,” as Du Bois (1898b) wrote in 1898, which “have their one bond of unity in the act that they group themselves about those Africans whom two centuries of slave-trading brought into the land” (p. 3). Du Bois countered the scientific racism of the time with rigorous methods and study as part of his early research “program” (Du Bois [1944] 1990) in TPN and concurrent and subsequent studies including The Negroes of Farmville, Virginia (Du Bois 1898a), The Black North in 1901 (Du Bois [1901] 1969), and his various research reports conducted with Atlanta University. The research practices that Du Bois developed for TPN—including data triangulation, the practice of making transparent the methods used to carry out a study, and acknowledging the limitations of research—were institutionalized at the (Black) Atlanta Sociological Laboratory, the first empirical school of sociology in the country, which Du Bois led after departing Philadelphia in 1897 (Wright 2020). The Atlanta Laboratory predated and was later overshadowed by the Chicago School, whose influence in urban sociology has endured. Yet the basic premises of the Chicago School were undercut by Du Bois’s Sociology, as others have demonstrated (see, e.g., Werth 2024) and as we reiterate here. ⁵ Du Bois’s research, in short, “exposed and dispelled lies” (Go 2023:1, emphasis in the original) that were the biological and cultural explanations for the life outcomes of the Black urban poor.

TPN has proven to be foundational for its careful documentation of the social antecedents for processes that have come to characterize modern cities. Du Bois witnessed firsthand disinvestment combined with the stigma attached to the Seventh Ward, which produced a “controlling image” of Black neighborhoods (Rucks-Ahidiana 2024). Disinvestment led to further decline for some Black neighborhoods as low-income Black residents became further concentrated into high-poverty neighborhoods (Wilson 1987). Decline allowed for targeted destruction through urban renewal (Rucks-Ahidiana and Blume Oeur 2024), reconcentrating Black residents into some areas that later faced gentrification and exposing their residents to serial displacement (Fullilove 2016). There is now a long-standing practice of city planners, city administrators, and private business actors engaging in urban revitalization projects that result in both commercial and residential gentrification, as well as cultural displacement (Angelo and Vormann 2018; Tuttle 2022). The changing composition of neighborhoods is often driven by investors’ racialized assumptions concerning the worth of a neighborhood as a target for investment and profit accumulation (Rucks-Ahidiana 2022), which in turn determines where and when residents will move (Hwang and Ding 2020).

Like all archives, the Du Boisian one is not, in Stuart Hall’s (2001) words, “inert,” but “stand[s] in an active, dialogic, relation to the questions which the present puts to the past; and the present always puts its questions differently from one generation to another” (p. 92). The turn of the 21st century was met with world crises which reshaped social scientific research on race and cities. Following decades of scholarship into the ghetto poor and urban underclass (Marks 1991; Wilson 1987), the final years of the last century witnessed sociology’s renewed focus on world affairs and the reach of globalization (after years of American sociology’s insular Eurocentrism had been the normative frame, a perspective that is now being challenged; see e.g., Connell 2007). On the occasion of TPN’s 100th anniversary, scholars including Nightingale (1998) urged returning to the book as an early template for understanding how the plight of Black Americans in inner cities was connected to the “global village.” At century’s end, historic levels of crime and poverty in cities like Philadelphia were greeted with the “solutions” of urban neoliberalism, from poverty governance (Collins, Beckett, and Brydolf-Horwitz 2023) to the market management of schools (Blume Oeur 2018; Cucchiarra 2013), which continue to this day.

Our special issue arrives amid Sociology’s reckoning with its long dismissal of Du Bois’s work and the Atlanta School of empirical sociology (Morris 2015; Wright 2017). Scholarship has helped move Du Boisian writings more firmly into the sociological and urban mainstream in what has been called a “New Du Boisian Sociology” (Conwell and Loughran 2023). In addition to bringing Du Bois into sociological theory, this Du Boisian moment confronts new demands from a quantitative sociology that increasingly speaks the language of Big Data and data analytics, and that necessitates a Du Boisian alternative to still normative thinking on variable-focused and deductive theory-testing. Conwell and Loughran (2023:17) have directed attention to how TPN—as well as studies which built on TPN, such as The Negro Artisan (Du Bois 1902)—was “inductive, descriptive, and empirically comprehensive.”

The Philadelphia Negro and the Tenets of Du Boisian Sociology

In this special issue, we return to TPN as a reminder of its value both as a text and for the tenets of a Du Boisian Sociology. The tenets we articulate here are not exhaustive of the text’s contributions but emerge as themes across the issue’s four articles. They support the focus on Du Bois’s theory of racialized modernity, the current moment which is characterized by industrialization, urbanization, and advanced technologies, and cut through by the color line and racial inequality (Itzigsohn and Brown 2020).

The articles illustrate how the theoretical insights that Du Bois began to develop in TPN continue to be relevant for the study of urban space today, concerning topics such as gentrification, policing, residential mobility, and the rhythms of daily life in Black neighborhoods. Taken together, these articles adopt four tenets of Du Boisian Sociology that are grounded in the contributions of TPN: (a) using history to contextualize the contemporary, (b) studying social phenomena through the subaltern perspective, (c) using a “case of” design, and (d) analyzing the structural context that shapes individual outcomes, with attention to people’s agency. These tenets of Du Boisian Sociology build on foundational texts on Du Bois’s lifetime of research and activism (Green and Driver 1978; Itzigsohn and Brown 2020; Morris 2015; Ojeh and Wright 2024; Williams 2006).

Introducing the Special Issue

In the first article of this special issue, AJ Golio challenges the long-standing focus on class in the study of gentrification by contributing to the growing perspective that gentrification is a racialized process of class change (Rucks-Ahidiana 2022). “Building a Du Boisian Research Agenda on Gentrification” identifies four key gaps in the literature on gentrification due to the predominant emphasis on class: a lack of attention to whiteness, the omission of institutions and organizations, an oversight of nonphysical forms of displacement, and the disregard of agency among low-income residents of gentrifying neighborhoods. To address these concerns, Golio points to three core takeaways from TPN and Black Reconstruction that provide theoretical and methodological guidance for future gentrification research. Du Bois helps explain how White individuals and institutions leverage “the wages of whiteness” (an idea Du Bois developed in Black Reconstruction) to claim space, how the loss of community-building institutions contributes to cultural displacement and affective effects of gentrification, and how long-term residents are more than just victims and displaced peoples, and have more varied experiences.

These recommendations build on the core tenets of a Du Boisian Sociology. While gentrification studies often document contemporary neighborhood conditions, Golio argues that a historical view is necessary to contextualize the present in a trajectory of neighborhood change. Furthermore, his focus on whiteness is a call to study the “structural role of whiteness and white privilege” in the gentrification process through more studies of the institutions and organizations that produce and contribute to gentrification. Finally, he argues that a subaltern perspective urges an analysis of the heterogeneity of experiences with, and reactions to, gentrification.

In the second article, Theresa Rocha Beardall, Rahim Kurwa, and Demar Lewis IV bring lessons from TPN, Darkwater, and Black Reconstruction into the study of policing. In “Mended Windows, Not Broken Windows: A Du Boisian Analysis of Urban Policing,” the authors challenge the Chicago School’s long-held ecological view of “disordered” cities. They argue, rather, that by taking the Du Boisian approach of centering the subaltern’s perspective, or studying those who are “most affected by urban inequalities,” scholarship can identify the structural causes of issues of inequality and craft structural solutions, which the authors call the “mended windows theory.” A mended windows approach has four pillars: it (a) recognizes the structural oppression that produces social disorder, (b) refuses (or seeks reconciliation) of controlling images of Black and Brown people, (c) nurtures coalitions and communities of care, and (d) fights for the redistribution of resources in addressing historical injustices. This mended windows theory illustrates the importance of historicism characteristic of a Du Boisian Sociology, as well as centering a subaltern perspective.

This historic and subaltern-centered approach illuminates how exposure to hyperpolicing aggravates other social problems for Black residents. Using ethnographic and archival research conducted in Syracuse, New York, and Antelope Valley, California, the authors document how the structural forces of labor exclusion, housing displacement, and the criminalization of blackness contribute to increased policing, surveillance, and eviction. These locations represent a racially diverse, midsize Rustbelt city (Syracuse, NY) and a suburban case of Black migration (Antelope Valley, CA). Rocha Beardall, Kurwa, and Lewis conclude that structural conditions produce physical disorder, not disorderly people, which reinforces the Du Boisian Sociology tenet of understanding structural circumstances.

“‘Broken Home’: (De)constructing the Moral Standards of Mobility for Atlanta’s Early Black Public Housing Families,” by Akira Drake Rodriguez and Prentiss Dantzler, speaks to a major thesis behind TPN: that a group’s opportunities and outcomes are profoundly shaped by structural dynamics. In this case, the authors focus on how the racialized political economy shapes the composition of public housing. Returning to Du Bois’s familiar locale of Atlanta, Georgia, the authors use records of public housing tenancy between 1937 and 1975 to illustrate how the city’s housing market served as a sorting structure. Atlanta serves as a case of a Black–White city that used public housing to reinforce racial segregation, providing insight into how public housing itself became a tool of White supremacy.

Drawing on the history of Atlanta’s public housing, Rodriguez and Dantzler explain how racially biased policies and practices used by the Public Housing Authority (PHA) produced racially distinct socio-economic mobility for renters over time. For White families, leaving public housing was a means of moving into homeownership, while for Black families, leaving was a matter of expulsion through the coding of undesirable residents. The PHA thus served as a structural force in shaping Black mobility and immobility from public housing. While Rodriguez and Dantzler focus on the consequences for residential mobility, their findings connect the implications of racial bias in policy implementation with other life outcomes, including the accumulation of significant, early wealth holdings among White Americans. In this way, the authors highlight how racism contributed to not only physical but economic mobility patterns in the 20th century.

In the fourth and last article, “Syncopating the Ground Rhythm: W. E. B. Du Bois and Black Geographic Futurity on New Orleans’s North Claiborne Avenue,” Anna Brand documents how Black people resist White supremacy through place-making or “Black geographical formations.” Focused on a case of erasure and removal in the North Claiborne corridor of Tremé and the seventh Ward in New Orleans, this study illustrates how White supremacy has attempted to erase Black people, businesses, and culture by destroying space; and how, in turn, the Black community has resisted. The article engages not only with TPN, but also with Du Bois’s fictional story “The Princess Steel,” which offers the concept of the “megascope” through which we can see how the past informs the present (Du Bois 2015). Brand weaves this Du Boisian concept with Clyde Woods’s Blues epistemology, creating a soundtrack that is resistance to the racial order.

Through a telling of the history of the place and an innovative merging of maps and images, Brand shows the connections among the North Claiborne corridor’s past as the center of life for free Black people in New Orleans, erasure through urban renewal and highway construction, resistance to removal through a reestablishment of the Black community, and the threat of erasure through gentrification. By documenting this erasure, the author traces the grooves of the subaltern experience—how ordinary residents came together to make neighborhoods their own—while calling out the continuous violence impacting the Black community that mutes their contributions in the present. Through their claims to space, their cultural roots, and their continued re-establishment, the Black community of the seventh Ward in New Orleans has continued to fight for their freedom.

The Next 125 Years of The Philadelphia Negro

While already a classic, The Philadelphia Negro deserves an even wider audience for its lessons on what city blocks can tell us about the character of a city: the residents and their institutions that have come and gone, the shape of changing neighborhoods, and what all that could mean for urban change in the future. Locally, guided tours of the Seventh Ward are teaching new generations about how “bleaching” pushed out Black people and cultural institutions. ⁶ Still, as Hunter (2013) has written, a focus on process should not overlook how residents of Black urban neighborhoods have always been citymakers who have helped shape narratives about urban redevelopment, renewal, and growth.

As our special issue emphasizes, a Du Boisian agenda of urban studies will analyze multiple scales of structures and institutions: from capitalism and other forces of macro-level change, to the voices of ordinary residents impacted on the ground, making their way to build lives in the city. By embedding analyses of individual outcomes, decisions, and experiences in the broader structural and institutional context, urban studies will identify not only where structural and institutional barriers create and reproduce inequalities, but also where true agency emerges through resistance, place-making, and the experience of joy (Hunter et al. 2016).

A Du Boisian agenda for urban scholarship brings together multiple methods in ways that are complementary and also cognizant of their respective strengths and limitations (Itzigsohn and Brown 2020). This strategy ultimately aims for a public sociology where urban scholarship supports on-the-ground efforts at reducing inequality in the cities, but also engages the public in the use of community-based and driven methods (such as Participatory Action Research) that includes community members in research with and about those communities and not simply on the historically marginalized (Fahlberg 2023).

Finally, in returning to TPN, urban sociologists would do well to follow Du Bois’s lead in embracing a historical sensibility, one which traces with great care the unfolding of history in cities to show where those cities might be headed. In looking back, we can see how past decisions determine contemporary outcomes, how past structures are replicated in the present to ensure persistent inequality, and what systemic change must happen to promote a path forward. A path where we name racism for what it is. Where institutions, structures, and policies are held accountable for the devastation they have reaped on urban communities. And where we listen to the voices of the unheard who have long been screaming for justice and equality.