Lawrence Bobo, Stanford University
The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study, first published by W. E. B. Du Bois in 1899, was then and remains to this day a magnificent scholarly achievement. It documents in systematic and meticulous detail the living circumstances at the close of the nineteenth century of the largest black population outside the South. In its use of a systematic method of community social survey, it shows the most rigorous and sophisticated empirical social science of its era. In an understated but ultimately clear and convincing manner, The Philadelphia Negro advances both a framework for studying the black community and a powerful sociological—not biological, nor psychological, nor otherwise victim-blaming account—of the factors causing black disadvantage. And it shows how careful social research might be linked fruitfully to the ambition of reform and advocacy for social justice on behalf of a stigmatized people.
These many qualities notwithstanding, Du Bois’s work waited many years before rising to a place of serious and enduring recognition among that of other social scientists. To be sure, the popular press initially reacted favorably to the work, with positive reviews appearing in such publications as The Nation and The Literary Digest. Some academic outlets also praised his work at the time. For example, the Yale Review opined that The Philadelphia Negro was “not merely a credit to its author and to the race of which he is a member; it is a credit to American scholarship, and a distinct and valuable addition to the world’s stock of knowledge concerning an important and obscure theme. It is the sort of book of which we have too few, and of which it is impossible that one should have too many.” Likewise, black outlets responded favorably, with the A.M.E. Church Review writing: “At last we have a volume of the highest scientific value on a sociological subject and written by a Negro.”1
With the clarity of hindsight, one can now comfortably say that by any objective assessment the book constitutes a landmark in sociological research. The research for and writing of The Philadelphia Negro was undertaken and completed at a point when the fledgling discipline of sociology was just taking shape. The first sociology department in the United States was established at the University of Chicago in 1892, followed in 1894 by Columbia University. Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), considered the creator of sociology, published his best-known work, Suicide, in 1897. Thus the publication of an ambitious, carefully crafted, and meticulously documented study of urban social life should arguably have drawn significant scholarly attention and made a lasting imprint on the young discipline. Despite being a major sociological work written at the very dawn of the discipline, Du Bois’s work was not reviewed in the American Journal of Sociology, founded at the University of Chicago in 1895. And even though many of those who came to found the leading sociology departments were aware of Du Bois’s work and sometimes cited it, in no way was The Philadelphia Negro given proper recognition by social scientists of the day.2
Today, scholars spanning the fields of sociology, history, political science, anthropology, education, urban studies, and even philosophy are bringing The Philadelphia Negro to a place of prominence that it should have garnered long ago. The resurrection of Du Bois began, in many respects, with the training at the University of Chicago of black sociologists such as Charles S. Johnson and E. Franklin Frazier. Then with the publication of two other landmark investigations, the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal’s massive two-volume An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy in 1944 and St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton’s Black Metropolis in 1945, a trend began to usher back into view the type of work at which Du Bois had been the pioneer. Myrdal, for example, applauded Du Bois’s interpretive and analytic framework, writing that it “stands out even today as a most valuable contribution” for its seeing the conditions of blacks as rooted in systematic social sources. Such a perspective was quite at odds with prevailing modes of thinking when Du Bois wrote. Myrdal also suggested that The Philadelphia Negro was the best model for the study of black communities, though he bemoaned that it “is now all but forgotten.” It is rare to find a sociological study that has grown markedly in influence a century after its initial publication. But this is precisely the case for W. E. B. Du Bois’s magisterial community survey The Philadelphia Negro.
In June 1896, Du Bois received an invitation for a one-year appointment from Charles C. Harrison, then the acting provost of the University of Pennsylvania. Harrison’s invitation had come at the behest of Susan Wharton, a member of the powerful Wharton family and an activist social reformer deeply involved with the College Settlement Association. Like many progressive elite Philadelphians of the time, Harrison and Wharton were concerned about the growing black presence in Philadelphia and about the array of ills that blacks were seen as bringing with them. Hence the charge to Du Bois from Harrison was to “know precisely how this class of people live; what occupations they follow; from what occupations they are excluded; how many of their children go to school; and to ascertain every fact which will throw light on this social problem.”3
Du Bois entered the enterprise as a committed empirical social scientist. He was openly critical of the sweeping generalizations and the sort of grand theorizing then common in the emerging field of sociology. He preferred an inductive approach. He brought to the task a zeal for gathering facts and assembling data that had been cultivated during his years at Harvard under Albert Bushnell Hart and even move so during his studies in Berlin under the German political economist Gustav Schmoller. But he did not pursue science for science alone. Du Bois saw his scholarly work as intimately linked to the task of reform and social change so desperately needed by blacks in his time.
The young sociologist’s ambition was to provide a comprehensive analysis of Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward, then the largest concentration of blacks in the city. Du Bois and his wife lived in the Seventh Ward during Du Bois’s fifteen months of research and writing. Du Bois developed six interview and enumeration protocols. He did so with enormous care and sophistication, almost certainly drawing on the model of Charles Booth’s Life and Labor of the People in London (1889) and the Hull House Maps and Papers (1895), which focused on Chicago.4 Du Bois conducted several thousand interviews himself, which he tabulated to produce numerous tables, counts, and figures reported in the book. When appropriate, he even systematically compared his own data to that from the London studies and other sources in order to bring real comparative authority to his work. Du Bois’s topical range spanned from careful assessments of the work, pay, and regular expenditures of blacks to the charting of their health and well-being, and it reached all the way to considering matters of schooling, civic groups, community and family life, and social activities.
Contrary to the presumptions of his sponsors and to received wisdom of the time, Du Bois eschewed interpreting the hardship in which most black Philadelphians lived as a reflection of basic black capabilities.5 Instead Du Bois crafted a historically grounded analysis of blacks, whose circumstances had clear social or environmental roots. His framework stresses the interplay of six factors: (1) a history of enslavement, servitude, and oppression; (2) demographic composition effects such as the disproportion of women to men; (3) the economic positioning and intensifying competition with free whites both native born and newly arrived from Europe; (4) racial prejudice and discrimination; (5) the resources, internal structure, dynamics, and leadership of the black community itself; and (6) the moral agency and capacity for black self-determination. Of these, Du Bois clearly placed the economy as a central factor shaping the circumstances and life chances of black Philadelphians.6 And there in particular he documented how blacks were closed out of and sometimes consciously pushed out of various lines of work.
The Philadelphia Negro is a work of enduring importance for several reasons beyond the extraordinary detail of the conditions of the black community that Du Bois documented or the general sociological interpretation that he fashioned. Du Bois also identified a series of conditions and processes of enduring relevance to the evolving status of blacks in America. First, a signal feature of Du Bois’s approach was to highlight the internal heterogeneity and complexity of the black population itself. He put forward what may be the first effort to describe empirically a class structure within the black community. He even identified a sort of “submerged tenth” that has similarities to more contemporary discussions of an “urban underclass” or new ghetto poverty. In time, that attention to class stratification within the black population only grew in relevance to social-scientific examinations of the black experience.
Second, in The Philadelphia Negro Du Bois provided an early focus on black families and the challenges they faced. Indeed, Du Bois pointed to “the early breaking up of family life” among blacks as a serious problem. Equally telling of the power of Du Bois’s insight is the analytical stance that he took on this problem. He traced the fragility of black families (a) to the traumatic and oppressive slave experience, (b) to economic marginalization, and (c) to an at best indifferent and often deliberately unwelcoming social climate of opinion among whites. Consistent with the temper of the times and his own Victorian inclinations, Du Bois called upon blacks to establish stronger, healthier family ties and norms. Placing the family at the center of examinations of the status of black Americans is, of course, a thread that runs from Du Bois to E. Franklin Frazier to the controversial Moynihan Report in the 1960s to the more recent sociological scholarship of William Julius Wilson and his discussion of The Truly Disadvantaged (1987) and When Work Disappears (1996).7
Third, Du Bois focused much attention on the problem of black involvement with crime. After documenting disproportionate black involvement with crime, Du Bois wrote: “There is a widespread feeling that something is wrong with a race that is responsible for so much crime, and that strong remedies are called for … Indeed, to the minds of many, this is the real Negro problem.” He was the first scholar to venture the hypothesis that much black involvement in crime might be traceable to a reaction against patterns of exclusion, marginalization, and stigmatization facing African Americans.
Fourth, Du Bois compared the black condition to that of white European immigrants then also coming to Philadelphia in large numbers. The conditions that he documented heavily influenced later sociological examinations of the “immigrant analogy” hypothesis. Du Bois’s attention to occupational exclusion, segregation, and prejudice influenced the work of the eminent sociologist Stanley Lieberson and his definitive work on the subject, A Piece of the Pie: Blacks and White Immigrants since 1880 (1980).
Scholars today draw on The Philadelphia Negro for many purposes, and by doing so they acknowledge and reinforce the remarkable breadth and quality of the work that Du Bois did more than a century ago. Contemporary scholars look to Du Bois for his attention to and discussions of the role of the black middle class.8 He was an early voice identifying the powerful role of the church in black social life and community affairs.9 Du Bois put forward one of the most complete and holistic treatments of racial prejudice as a factor shaping the status of blacks in American society.10 He had a posture of both sympathetic engagement and also strong normative judgment regarding the behavior of the poorest and most disadvantaged segments of the black population.11 Du Bois’s ideas in The Philadelphia Negro continue to influence how political scientists approach issues of black political discourse and involvement.12 And of course, many of those who seek to develop new general theories of race and society owe a clear debt to The Philadelphia Negro.13
The Philadelphia Negro is an even more remarkable achievement when judged in the light of two other considerations. Du Bois carried out the research without the sort of financial resources, institutional support, or social standing that Charles Booth or Hull House researchers had. Moreover, Du Bois managed to craft an approach and an argument that rose above much of the worst of the racial ideology reigning at the time. It is important to recall that Du Bois wrote during a period when even the main currents of progressive elite white opinion saw blacks, on the whole, as a lesser race best suited to a limited range of roles in society.14 Thus Du Bois did not garner an appointment at a major mainstream university after producing a scientific work of monumental scale and cuttingedge quality. Indeed, so powerful was the ideology of segregation in this era that the idea of getting an appointment at a mainstream university had scarcely occurred to Du Bois himself, who assumed instead that he would join one of the black universities. He did, however, hope and argue for support and collaboration with major white scholars and institutions in a future program of research on African Americans.15 Though he himself did much important work from his subsequent perch at Atlanta University, Du Bois did so with little support from his white peers.
We should never forget that in addition to his achievements as an organizer and political activist, and in addition to his achievements of a more literary tilt, such as the immortal The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W. E. B. Du Bois spent many years as an empirical social scientist. He is, unambiguously, one of the pioneers of systematic survey research and community studies. He is thus a founding figure in the discipline of sociology. With The Philadelphia Negro in particular, Du Bois made a profoundly inspiring and lasting contribution to knowledge and to the way in which many scholars do their work.