In the 1890s, the city of Brotherly Love bustled with growth and the sound of steel mills. Life for Blacks there both flourished and floundered in a conspicuous separate world that numbered about 45,000. But wealthy Whites considered their Black neighbors to be inferior among the million who called Philadelphia home.
In the summer of 1896, the University of Pennsylvania hired Dr. William E. B. Du Bois as an “assistant in sociology,” paying him $90 a month to study and write about “the social condition of the colored people in Philadelphia, particularly in the Seventh Ward …,” where one in five Blacks in the city once lived. At 28 years old, Du Bois moved and lived among the masses of Blacks he interviewed and observed, making his home with his wife above a settlement house on Lombard Street in what he called “the worst part of the Seventh Ward.”
Du Bois described the life he saw and experienced: “We lived there a year, in the midst of an atmosphere of dirt, drunkenness, poverty, and crime. Murder sat at our doorsteps, police were our government, and philanthropy dropped in with periodic advice.” He concluded that being a Negro wasn’t the problem; instead, Black Philadelphia’s problem was namely systematic racial discrimination. Those findings became his classic 1899 book, The Philadelphia Negro.
That once-vibrant and complex Black community where Du Bois saw humanity, not just problems, died out over time. In an introduction to The Philadelphia Negro, which was reissued by the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Elijah Anderson, then a distinguished sociologist at the university, wrote that Blacks who once dwelled in the old Seventh Ward “moved completely” and, today, most Blacks seen in the neighborhood “are usually passing through.”
The Seventh Ward Du Bois found at the turn of the century may no longer be the epicenter of Black life in Philadelphia, but Dr. Stephanie C. Boddie, a sociologist and professor affiliated with both the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Pittsburgh, is re-creating Du Bois’ survey for The Ward: Race and Class in Du Bois’ Seventh Ward, a year-old University of Pennsylvania research, education and outreach project that is using new technology and archival records, including census data.
For her research, Boddie has turned to some of the Ward’s Black churches to gather oral histories from the elders who can bear witness to a time and place that has taken flight. The churches remain as vestiges of that era and were strong towers that buffeted the Black community from the day’s social forces. She started with the historic Tindley Temple United Methodist Church, formerly known as Bainbridge Street Methodist Episcopal Church when Du Bois visited.
