j
THE PHILADELPHIA NEGRO
A Social Study
W. E. B. DuBOIS
Introduction by E. DIGBY BALTZELL
Together with
A Special Report on
Domestic Service
by Isabel Eaton
SCHOCKEN BOOKS NEW YORK
First published in 1899
First SCHOCKEN edition 1967
Introduction by E. Digby Baltzell, Copyright 1967 by Schocken Books Inc.
Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 67-26984
Manufactured in the United States of America
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
INTRODUCTION by E. Digby Baltzell
THE PHILADELPHIA NEGRO.
CHAPTER I. The Scope of This Study ........... 1-4
1. General aim ............. i
2. The methods of inquiry ....... i
3. The credibility of the results ..... 2
CHAPTER II. The Problem ................ 5~9
4. The Negro problems of Philadelphia . 5
5. The plan of presentment ....... 8
CHAPTER III. The Negro in Philadelphia, 1638-1820 .... 10-24
6. General survey ............ 10
7. The transplanting of the Negro, 1638-
1760 ................ ii
8. Emancipation, 1760-1780 ....... 15
9. The rise of the freedmen, 1780-1820 . . 17
CHAPTER IV. The Negro in Philadelphia, 1820-1896 .... 25-45
10. Fugitives and foreigners, 1820-1840 . . 25
11. The guild of the caterers, 1840-1870 . . 32
12. The influx of the freedmen, 1870-1896 39
CHAPTER V. The Size, Age and Sex of the Negro Popula
tion ........... . . ~ * ""."". (. 46-65
13. The city for a century ........ 46
14. The Seventh Ward, 1896 ....... 58
CHAPTER VI. Conjugal Condition ............ 66-72
15. The Seventh Ward .......... 66
16. The city ............... 70
KANSAS CITY (MO.) PUBLIC LIBRARY ^
EXTENSION MAY 15 1969
Contents.
PAGE.
CHAPTER VII. Sources of the Negro Population 73-82
17. The Seventh Ward 73
18. The city 80
CHAPTER VIII. Education and Illiteracy 83-96
19. The history of Negro education ... 83
20. The present condition 89
CHAPTER IX. The Occupation of Negroes 97-146
21. The question of earning a living . . 97
22. Occupations in the Seventh Ward . . 99
23. Occupations in the city in
24. History of the occupations of Negroes 141
CHAPTER X. The Health of Negroes 147-163
25. The interpretation of statistics . ... 147
26. The statistics of the city 149
CHAPTER XI. The Negro Family 164-196
27. The size of the family 164
28. Incomes 168
29. Property 179
30. Family life 192
CHAPTER XII. The Organized Life of Negroes 197-234
31. History of the Negro church in Phila
delphia 197
32. The function of the Negro church . . 201
33. The present condition of the churches 207
34. Secret and beneficial societies and co
operative business 221
35. Institutions 230
36. The experiment of organization . . . 233
CHAPTER XIII. The Negro Criminal 235-268
37. History of Negro crime in the city . . 235
38. Negro crime since the war 240
39. A special study in crime 248
40. Some cases of crime 259
CHAPTER XIV. Pauperism and Alcoholism 269-286
41. Pauperism 269
42. The drink habit 277
43. The causes of crime and poverty . . 282
Contents,
PAGE.
CHAPTER XV. The Environment of the Negro 287-321
44. Houses and rent 287
45. Sections and wards 299
46. Social classes and amusements . . . 309
CHAPTER XVI. The Contact of the Races 322-367
47. Color prejudice 322
48. Benevolence 355
49. The intermarriage of the races . . . 358
CHAPTER XVII. Negro Suffrage 368-384
50. The significance of the experiment . 368
51. The history of Negro suffrage in Penn
sylvania 368
52. City politics 372
53. Some bad results of Negro suffrage 373
54. Some good results of Negro suffrage 382
55. The paradox of reform 383
CHAPTER XVIII. A Final Word 385-39?
56. The meaning of all this 385
57. The duty of the Negroes 389
58. The duty of the whites 393
APPENDIX A. Schedules used in the house-to-house inquiry . . 400-410
APPENDIX B. Legislation, etc., of Pennsylvania in regard to the
Negro 411-418
APPENDIX C. Bibliography 419-421
SPECIAL REPORT ON NEGRO DOMESTIC SERVICE
IN THE SEVENTH WARD.
I. Introduction 427~4 2 9
II. Enumeration of Negro domestic servants 430-434
Recent reform in domestic service 43
Enumeration 43 1
III. Sources of the supply and methods of hiring 435-443
Methods of hiring 43^
Personnel of colored domestic service 436
IV. Grades of service and wages 444-455
Work required of various sub-occupations 454
Contents.
PA.GB.
V. Savings and expenditure 456-462
Assistance given by domestic servants 459
... 462
Summary ^
VI. Amusements and recreations 4^3-473
VII. Ivength and quality of Negro domestic service 474-489
VIII Conjugal condition, illiteracy and health of Negro do
mestics
Conjugal condition 49
Health statistics for domestic servants 495
IX. Ideals of betterment 500-509
.... 511-520
INDEX
MAPS.
I. Map of Seventh Ward, showing streets and political divi-
sions Facing page 60
II. Map of Seventh Ward, showing distribution of Negro in
habitants throughout the ward, and their social condi
tion ' *"** page I
INTRODUCTION TO THE 1967 EDITION
by E. Digby Baltzell
IN AN appendix to his famous study of the American Negro, An
American Dilemma, Gunnar Myrdal discussed the need for
further research in the Negro community. "We cannot close this
description of what a study of a Negro community should be/' he
wrote, "without calling attention to the study which best meets
our requirements, a study which is now all but forgotten. We
refer to W. E. B. DuBois' The Philadelphia Negro, published in
1899." 1 One would hardly expect a greater tribute to this early
classic in American sociology. It is no wonder that there has not
been a scholarly study of the American Negro in the twentieth
century which has not referred to and utilized the empirical
findings, the research methods, and the theoretical point of view
of this seminal book.
A classic is sometimes defined as a book that is often referred
to but seldom read. The Philadelphia Negro, written by a young
scholar who subsequently became one of the three most famous
Negro leaders in American history, surely meets this requirement.
Though always referred to and frequently quoted by specialists,
it is now seldom read by the more general student of sociology.
For not only has the book been out of print for almost half a
century; it has been virtually unobtainable, as my own experience
of almost twenty years of searching in vain for a copy in second
hand bookstores attests. Even at the University of Pennsylvania,
under whose sponsorship the research was undertaken and the.
book published, although one copy has been preserved in the
archives and one on microfilm, the sole copy listed in the
catalogue and available for students in the library has been
unaccountably missing from the shelves for several years. In
writing this introduction, I am using a copy lent me by my good
friend, Professor Ira Reid of Haverford College, a one-time
colleague and friend of the late Professor DuBois at Atlanta
1. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma, p. 1132.
ix
x . Introduction to the 1967 Edition
University. Modern students, then, will certainly benefit from a
readily available paperback edition of this study of the Negro
community in Philadelphia at the turn of the nineteenth century.
In order to gain a full understanding of any book, one ought
to know something of the life and intellectual background of its
author, the place of the book in the history of the discipline ( in
this case sociology), as well as the climate of intellectual opinion
and the social conditions of the era in which the book was
written. Because The Philadelphia Negrolike all his other
writings was so intimately a part of the life of W. E. B. DuBois,
I shall begin this introduction with a brief outline of his career.
DuBois himself wrote in his seventies: "My life had its signifi
cance and its only deep significance because it was part of
a problem; but that problem was, as I continue to think, the
central problem of the greatest of the world's democracies and so
the problem of the future world." 2
It is one of the coincidences of American history that in the
year 1895, Frederick Douglass, a crusading abolitionist and the
first great leader of the Negro people, died, and Booker T.
Washington rose to national leadership with his "compromise"
speech at Atlanta, in which he made the famous statement that
"in all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the
fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to human
progress." In that same year, which marked the passing of Negro
leadership from the fiery and moralistic Douglass to the compro
mising and pragmatic Washington, a young New Englander, W.
E. B. DuBois, obtained the first Ph.D. degree ever awarded a
Negro by Harvard University.
William Edward Burghardt DuBois "was born by a golden
river and in the shadow of two great hills," in Great Barrington,
Massachusetts, in 1868, the same year "Andrew Johnson passed
from the scene and Ulysses Grant became President of the United
States." 3 He was a mulatto of French Huguenot, Dutch, and
Negro ("thank God, no Anglo-Saxon") ancestry. The Burghardt
family had lived in this area of the Berkshires ever since his
2. W. E. B. DuBois, Dusk of Dawn (New York: Harcourt, Brace and
World, 1940), p. vii.
3. In writing of DuBois* life, I have tried to quote him directly where
possible. I have profited greatly from the following biographical studies:
Introduction to the 1967 Edition xi
mother s great-grandfather had been set free after having served
for a brief period in the Revolution. (In 1908, DuBois was
accepted by the Massachusetts branch of the Sons of the
American Revolution but was eventually suspended from mem
bership by the national office because of his Negro ancestry.)
DuBois grew up in a community of some five thousand souls
which included between twenty-five and fifty Negroes. Social
position in the small town was more a matter of class than of
color. The rich people in town, mostly farmers, manufacturers,
and merchants, were "not very rich nor many in number." Like
the wealthier white children whom he "annexed as his natural
companions/' young Will DuBois judged men on their merits and
accomplishments and felt, as was natural in that day, that the rich
and successful deserved their position in life, as did the "lazy and
thriftless" poor. He "cordially despised" the immigrant mill-
workers and looked upon them as a "ragged, ignorant, drunken
proletariat, grist for the dirty woolen mills and the poorhouse."
As his father, apparently a charming but irresponsible almost-
white mulatto, died when he was very young, DuBois was
brought up by his mother. Though always very poor, she did her
best to pass on to her only son her own pride of ancestry and old-
established position in the local Negro community. Fortunately,
young Will was a precocious and brilliant boy, possessed of an
infinite cap ity for work and an abiding passion to excel. His
stern New i igland upbringing was reflected in the following
description of Ms values as a senior at Fisk: "I believed too little
in Christian dogma to become a minister," he wrote many years
later, "I was not without faith: I never stole material or spiritual
things; I not only never lied, but blurted out my conception of
the truth on many untoward occasions; I drank no alcohol and
knew nothing of women, physically or psychically, to the
incredulous amusement of most of my more experienced fellows:
I above all believed in work systematic and tireless." 4
Francis L. Broderick, W. E. B. DuBois: Negro Leader in a Time of
Crisis, and Elliott Morton Rudwick, "W. E. B. DuBois: A Study in
Minority Group Leadership" (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University
of Pennsylvania, 1956).
4. W. E. B. DuBois, "My Evolving Program for Negro Freedom," in
Rayford W. Logan, ed., What the Negro Wants, p. 38.
xii Introduction to the 1967 Edition
From an early age, DuBois planned to go to college and was
fortunately encouraged to do so by his friends and teachers. "A
wife of one of the cotton mill owners, whose only son was a pal
of mine," he wrote more than half a century later, "offered to see
that I got lexicons and texts to take up the study of Greek in
high school, without which college doors in that day would not
open. I accepted the offer as only normal and right; only after
many years did I realize how critical this gift was for my career." 5
Among the Negroes of Great Harrington, young Will DuBois
soon came to have a very special place. He was the only Negro in
his high-school class of twelve and one of the two or three boys
in the whole class who went on to college. After school and on
weekends he worked at all sorts of jobs. Through his friendship
with the local newsdealer, he obtained, for a brief period, a posi
tion as local correspondent for the Springfield Republican. He
also contributed local news to two Negro newspapers, one in
Boston and the other in New York. With a few harsh exceptions
as he reached adolescence, he was accepted on his merits by his
peers. Though not particularly good at sports, he was highly re
spected intellectually. At fifteen, he began annotating his col
lected papers, a practice he scrupulously followed until his
death, in Ghana, at the age of ninety-five.
DuBois was, of course, aware of the color line as he grew up,
but he had his first experience with a large Negro community at
the age of fifteen, when he went to visit his grandfather in New
Bedford. "I went to the East to visit my fathers father in New
Bedford," he later wrote, "and on that trip saw well-to-do, well-
mannered colored people; and once, at Rocky Point, Rhode
Island, I viewed with astonishment 10,000 Negroes of every hue
and bearing. I was transported with amazement and dreams; I
apparently noted nothing of poverty and degradation, but only
extraordinary beauty of skin color and utter equality of mien,
with absence so far as I could see of even the shadow of the
line of race." 6
DuBois graduated with high honors from high school in the
5. Ibid., p. 34.
6. Ibid,, p. 35.
Introduction to the 1967 Edition xiii
spring of 1884. His mother died soon after graduation day. Too
poor and also thought to be too young to go to college, he
finally took a job as timekeeper for a contractor who was building
a fabulous "cottage" for the widow of Mark Hopkins, whose
father-in-law had made a fortune in railroads and founded one of
the first families in San Francisco. He learned a great deal about
the ways of men on this responsible job, and was also able to save
a little money. In the fall of 1885, he obtained some scholarship
aid and entered Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, as a
sophomore. He would have preferred Harvard, but Fisk in many
ways proved to be a very valuable experience. Here for the first
time he lived among, and learned about, his fellow Negroes.
Though he did learn about a certain segment of the Southern
Negro community at Fisk and in Nashville, he was, nevertheless,
determined to see it whole. "Somewhat to the consternation of
both teachers and fellow students," he obtained a job teaching
school in the summer months in West Tennessee. "Needless to
say, the experience was invaluable," he wrote. "I traveled not only
in space but in time. I touched the very shadow of slavery. I lived
and taught school in log cabins built before the Civil War. My
school was the second held in the district since emancipation. I
touched intimately the lives of the commonest of mankind-
people who ranged from barefooted dwellers on dirt floors, with
patched rags for clothes, to rough, hard-working farmers, with
plain, clean plenty. I saw and talked with white people, noted
now their unease, now their truculence and again their friendli
ness. I nearly fell from my horse when the first school commis
sioner whom I interviewed invited me to stay to dinner. After
wards I realized that he meant me to eat at the second, but quite
as well-served table." 7
His years at Fisk, in contrast to his youth in New England,
left DuBois with a strong and bitter sense of the "absolute
division of the universe into black and white." Yet it was
probably a good thing that he went there before finally realizing
his boyhood dream of going to Harvard, which he entered on a
scholarship, as a junior, in the fall of 1888, "I was happy at
7. Ibid., pp. 37-38.
xiv Introduction to the 1967 Edition
Harvard, but for unusual reasons," he wrote much later. "One of
these unusual circumstances was my acceptance of racial segre
gation. Had I gone from Great Banington high school directly to
Harvard I would have sought companionship with my white
fellows and been disappointed and embittered by a discovery of
social limitations to which I had not been used/' 8
On the whole, his days at Cambridge were very lonely. He
made friends with only a very few of his classmates and reserved
his social life for the stimulating Negro community in and around
Boston: "I asked nothing of Harvard but the tutel' ge of teachers
and the freedom of the library. I was quite volurnarily and will
ingly outside of its social life." 9
Fortunately, the members of the faculty were far more friendly
than the students:
The Harvard of 1888 was an extraordinary aggregation of great
men. Not often since that day have so many distinguished
teachers been together in one place and at one time in America.
... By good fortune, I was thrown into direct contact with
many of these men. I was repeatedly a guest in the house of
William James; he was my friend and guide to clear thinking; I
was a member of the Philosophical Club and talked with Royce
and Palmer; I sat in an upper room and read Kant's Critique
with Santayana; Shaler invited a Southerner, who objected to
sitting by me, out of his class; I became one of Hart's favorite
pupils and was afterwards guided by him through my graduate
course and started on my work in Germany. It was a great
opportunity for a young man and a young American Negro,
and I realized it. 10
Apparently, even the haughty Anglophile and defender of
Anglo-Saxon traditions Barrett Wendell knew a good man when
he saw one. And DuBois never forgot the following experience:
I have before me a theme which I wrote October 3, 1890, for
Barrett Wendell, then the great pundit of Harvard English. I
said: "Spurred by my circumstances, I have always been given
to systematically planning my future, not indeed without many
8. Dusk of Dawn, p. 34.
9. Ibid., p. 35.
10. Ibid., p. 37.
Introduction to the 1967 Edition xv
mistakes and frequent alterations, but always with what I now
conceive to have been a strangely early and deep appreciation
of the fact that to live is a serious thing. I determined while in
school to go to college partly because other men went, partly
because I foresaw that such discipline would best fit me for
life. ... I believe foolishly perhaps, but sincerely, that I have
something to say to the world, and I have taken English 12 in
order to say it well." Barrett Wendell rather liked that last
sentence. He read it out to the class. 11
W. E. B. DuBois did indeed have something to say to the
world and he soon went on to write and speak more eloquently in
behalf of his race than any other man of his generation. But first
he finished his work at Harvard, obtaining an A.B. in 1890, an
M.A. in 1891, and completing most of the requirements for the
Ph.D. before going abroad for two years on a scholarship. DuBois
set sail for Europe on a Dutch boat in the summer of 1892, a
year, as he put it, which marked "the high tide of lynching in the
United States, when 235 persons were publicly murdered." He
studied at the University of Berlin, where he listened to Max
Weber and was accepted into "two exclusive seminars run by
leaders of the developing social sciences." During the vacations,
he traveled all over Europe where he was pleased to find far less
racial discrimination than in the United States. He later summed
up his experiences in Europe as follows:
From this unhampered social intermingling with Europeans of
education and manners, I emerged from the extremes of my
racial provincialism. I became more human; learned the place
in life of 'Wine, Women, and Song;" I ceased to hate or
suspect people simply because they belonged to one race or
color; and above all I began to understand the real meaning of
scientific research and the dim outline of methods of employing
its technique and its results in the new social sciences for the
settlement of the Negro problems in America. 12
DuBois returned from Europe in 1894 with an almost blind
faith in science and a determination to engage in a career of
research, writing, and teaching. He had originally wanted to be a
11. Ibid., pp. 38-39.
12. Logan, op. tit., p. 42.
xvi Introduction to the 1967 Edition
philosopher but "it was James with his pragmatism and Albert
Bushnell Hart with his research method, that turned me back
from the lovely but sterile land of philosophic speculation, to the
social sciences as the field for gathering and interpreting that
body of fact which would apply to my program for the Negro." 13
After spending a year teaching the classics at Wilberforce,
where he was frankly horrified at the low standards and
especially the overly emotional religious atmosphere (as con
trasted to his own rearing in the Congregational Church in Great
Barrington), he was called to the University of Pennsylvania,
where he was given an opportunity to carry out his program of
applying the methods of science to the Negro problem. In the
meantime, he received his Ph,D. from Harvard and had his thesis,
The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States
of America, 1638-1870, published as the first volume in the
Harvard Historical Series, in 1896, the year he began his research
on the Philadelphia Negro.
W. E. B. DuBois was brought to Philadelphia largely on the
initiative of Susan P. Wharton, a member of one of the city's
oldest and most prominent Quaker families. She had long been
interested in the problems of Negroes and was a member of the
Executive Committee of the Philadelphia College Settlement,
which had been founded in 1892. It is important to see that The
Philadelphia Negro was a product of the New Social Science and
Settlement House movements, both of which grew up in this
country and in England during the closing decades of the
nineteenth century.
"The best account of this new period/' writes Nathan Glazer,
"and indeed the most important book, to my mind, for an under
standing of the rise of the contemporary social scientific ap
proach, is Beatrice Webb's My Apprenticeship. Beatrice Webb
describes the rise of her interest in social problems, and the
unique vantage point afforded to her by the Potter family (she
was Beatrice Potter) and its connections to further his interest.
Although the most distinguished visitor to her home was Herbert
Spencer, two other distinguished Victorians who played a central
13. Ibid., p. 39.
Introduction to the 1967 Edition xvii
role in the development of social science were often there. One
was Francis Galton, whose discoveries in correlation were to be
largely responsible for moving social statistics from the level of
simple enumeration to that of a scientific tool of great precision
and value. The other was Charles Booth, who, with his own
fortune acquired from industry, was to conduct, beginning in the
1880's, the first great empirical social scientific study, an investiga
tion into the conditions of life among all the people of London." 14
It was in 1883, the year Karl Marx died, that young Beatrice
Potter deserted the social life of fashionable Mayfair and went to
the East End of London to work on her friend Charles Booth's
famous and seminal study of the life and living conditions of the
London poor. The next year, a group of Protestant clergymen,
followers of Charles Kingsley and Frederick Dennison Maurice
and their Christian Socialism, along with some young college men
from Oxford and Cambridge, founded Toynbee Hall, which was
an important landmark in the Settlement House and Social
Gospel movements in England and also in this country. At the
same time, Jane Addams, who had just graduated from college
and was traveling abroad, made her first visit to the slums of
London's East End. She was so horrified by what she saw there,
and so impressed with the work being done at Toynbee Hall and
with her newly acquired friend Beatrice Potter, that she came
back and founded Hull House, in 1889, in the heart of the
Chicago slums. Other settlement houses soon sprang up in most
of the major cities along the Eastern seaboard. In the meantime,
the famous Hull House Papers and Maps were published in 1895,
based directly on Charles Booth's methods of research; even the
colors on the maps, which indicated different degrees of poverty,
were the same.
While the more famous founders of sociology, such as Auguste
Comte, Karl Marx, and Herbert Spencer, were predominantly
armchair theorists in their approach to understanding the causes
and consequences of the industrial and urban revolutions, the rise
of capitalism and the problems of labor, it was the more
empirical and pragmatic tradition of Charles Booth in England
14. Nathan Glazer, "The Rise of Social Science Research in Europe," in
Daniel Lerner, ed., The Human Meaning of the Social Sciences (New
York: Meridian, 1959), pp. 58-59.
xviii Introduction to the 1967 Edition
and the Hull House work in this country, as the following
paragraph suggests, that inspired young DuBois when he came to
Philadelphia.
Herbert Spencer finished his ten volumes of Synthetic Phil
osophy in 1896. The biological analogy, the vast generali
zations, were striking, but actual scientific accomplishment
lagged. For me an opportunity seemed to present itself. ... I
determined to put science into sociology through a study of the
condition and problems of my own group. I was going to study
the facts, any and all facts, concerning the American Negro
and his plight, and by measurement and comparison and
research, work up to any valid generalization which I could. 15
It was in this same spirit that Susan P. Wharton went out to
the Wharton School, which a member of her family had founded
at the University of Pennsylvania, and prevailed on the Provost,
Charles C. Harrison, to undertake a study of the Negro problem
in the city's Seventh Ward (where, incidentally, Provost Har
rison, Miss Wharton, and many of Philadelphia's more fashion
able families lived at that time). Provost Harrison, heir to one of
the great sugar fortunes in America, had turned away from
business in his later years to devote himself to education and
social reform. He was immediately receptive to her plans. (The
project was outlined at a meeting at the Wharton residence, 910
Clinton Street, situated only a few blocks from the heart of the
Negro ghetto and the College Settlement House at Seventh and
South Streets [see map].) It was indeed fortunate for the
University, Miss Wharton, and the city as a whole, that a young
scholar of DuBois' ability, background, education, and scientific
point of view was obtained for the job by a member of the
Sociology Department of the Wharton School, Samuel McCune
Lindsay. DuBois came to the city in August, 1896, and, except for
a brief period of two months during the summer of 1897, when he
studied rural Negroes in Virginia because so many of them had
recently migrated to Philadelphia at the time of the study, he
remained in the city until January, 1898. Many years later,
DuBois described his call to Philadelphia and his stay there:
15. Dusk of Dawn, p. 51.
Introduction to the 1967 Edition xix
In the fall of 1896, I went to the University of Pennsylvania as
"Assistant Instructor" in Sociology. It all happened this way:
Philadelphia, then and still one of the worst governed of Amer
ica's badly governed cities, was having one of its periodic spasms
of reform. A thorough study of causes was called for. Not but
what the underlying cause was evident to most white Philadel-
phians: the corrupt, semi-criminal vote of the Negro Seventh
Ward, Everyone agreed that here lay the cancer; but would
it not be well to elucidate the known causes by a scientific
investigation, with the imprimatur of the University? It certainly
would, answered Samuel McCune Lindsay of the Department
of Sociology. And he put his finger on me for the task.
There must have been some opposition, for the invitation
was not particularly cordial. I was offered a salary of $800 for a
limited period of one year. I was given no real academic
standing, no office at the University, no official recognition of
any kind; my name was even eventually omitted from the
catalogue; I had no contact with students, and very little with
members of the faculty, even in my department. With my bride
of three months, I settled in one room over a cafeteria run by a
College Settlement, in the worst part of the Seventh Ward. We
lived there a year, in the midst of an atomosphere of dirt,
drunkenness, poverty and crime. Murder sat on our doorsteps,
police were our government, and philanthropy dropped in with
periodic advice. 16
These are bitter words. And apparently DuBois was not quite
true to the facts of the case. There was no evidence in the
minutes of the University's Board of Trustees of any "opposition"
to the appointment. On a request for information on the case
from a DuBois biographer, the late Professor Lindsay replied that
DuBois was "quite mistaken about the attitude of the Sociology
Department. It was quite friendly, I am sure, and as far as I
know that was true of the entire Wharton School faculty." 17 I
have quoted this passage from DuBois' writings, nevertheless,
because it suggests his own bitterness in 1944, when he wrote the
passage, at the general neglect in this country of the Negro
problem in the four decades following his publication of The
16. Logan, op. cit., p. 44.
17. Rudwick, op. cit., p. 32.
xx Introduction to the 1967 Edition
Philadelphia Negro. More important, I think, it may very well
reflect the spirit if not the letter of the thoughtless rather than
malicious attitudes of whites of that era toward an educated and
fastidious Negro like DuBois. For DuBois was very sensitive to
the climate of opinion at that time which, by and large, assumed
the inferiority of all Negroes, whether educated or not.
The life and thought of every age, one would suppose, is
always marked, like the lif e of every individual, by ambivalence,
paradox, and contradictions. In other words, just when many men
and women like Beatrice Webb, Jane Addams, or Miss Wharton
were dedicating their lives trying to understand and alleviate the
horrible conditions that surrounded the lives of the downtrodden
at the turn of the century, the dominant values of the com
fortable and complacent middle classes were crudely ma
terialistic, smugly racist, and somewhat self-righteous, to say the
least. In short, the 1890's were indeed marked by materialism at
the top and misery at the bottom of both the class and racial
scales. Thus DuBois, for instance, noted that the year 1892
marked the high tide of lynchings in the United States; it was also
the year of the bitter and cruel Homestead Strike. In 1894,
Coxey's Army marched on Washington. In 1895, South Carolina,
following the lead of Mississippi, and under the leadership of the
extreme racist Ben Tillman, disfranchised its Negroes; in the
same year, the Supreme Court of the United States, in the Plessy
vs. Ferguson case, sanctioned the "separate but equal" standard
that Booker T. Washington compromised with in his Atlanta
speech; and between 1895 and 1909, the Negro was systema
tically disfranchised throughout the South. It is no wonder that
many Americans responded to Bryan's plea, in the campaign of
1896, that Wall Street should not "crucify mankind upon a cross
of gold." Perhaps Kelly Miller, the son of former slaves who rose
to become a professor of sociology at Howard University, caught
the spirit of the "Gay Nineties/' as seen from the Negro point of
view, in the following summary of the distinction between
Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington:
The two men are in part products of their times, but also
natural antipodes. Douglass lived in the day of moral giants;
Washington lived in the era of merchant princes. The con
temporaries of Douglass emphasized the rights of man; those of
Introduction to the 1967 Edition xxi
Washington, his productive capacity. The age of Douglass
acknowledged the sanction of the Golden Rule; that of
Washington worships the Rule of Gold, The equality of men
was constantly dinned into Douglass' ears; Washington hears
nothing but the inferiority of the Negro and the dominance of
the Saxon. 18
The Anglo-Saxon complex Kelly Miller was referring to was, of
course, a reflection of the inevitable racial implications in Social
Darwinism, which was the overwhelmingly dominant ideology in
America at that time. In an age when men thought of themselves
as having evolved from the ape rather than having been created
in the image of angels, the Negro, it was almost universally
agreed among even the most educated people, was definitely an
inferior breed and situated at the very base of the evolutionary
tree. "Now as to the Negroes," Theodore Roosevelt wrote to his
friend Owen Wister, "I entirely agree with you that as a race and
in the mass they are altogether inferior to the whites." And
Roosevelt never repeated his "mistake," as he called it, of asking
Booker T. Washington or any other Negro to the White House.
For he was very sensitive to the opinions of an age in which, as
the historian Rayford W. Logan has written, "both newspapers
and magazines stereotyped, caricatured and ridiculed Negroes in
atrocious dialect that shocks the incredulous reader today. Few
newspapers in the Deep South today portray the Negro in such
outlandish fashion as did the spokesmen for the 'Genteel Tra
dition in the North/" 19 Nor must we forget that very distin
guished and objective social scientists, almost without exception,
agreed with the "Genteel Tradition" and Roosevelt's point of
view. With calipers and rulers and all sorts of statistical devices,
they were busy building up elaborate classifications of the
"inborn" mental and psychological traits of Nordics, Aryans,
Semites, Teutons, Hottentots, Japs, Turks, Slavs, and Anglo-
Saxons with Negroes of course at the very bottom of this bio
logical hierarchy.
18. Quoted in E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro in the United States,
p. 545.
19. Rayford W. Logan, The Negro in the United States; A Brief History,
p. 54.
xxii Introduction to the 1967 Edition
Finally, it is important to place this dominant American
ideology in a larger frame, For it was between the publication of
Darwin's Origin of Species by Natural Selection, or The Preser
vation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life, in 1859, and the
Boer War in 1902, that white Western men conquered, explored,
fought over, and partitioned among themselves the continent of
black Africa below the Sierra. The year of 1896, when DuBois
went to Philadelphia, also witnessed Queen Victoria's Diamond
Jubilee celebration, a symbol of the high tide of "white su
premacy" throughout the world.
It was, then, in the most discouraging and deplorable period
in the history of the American Negro since the Civil War that
young DuBois came to Philadelphia and set about doing a
thorough and objective study of the Negro community. That the
book, when finally published in 1899, succeeded in being ob
jective, most modern readers, I think, will recognize. But even
at the time of its publication, its reviewers were equally
impressed with the author's critical and thorough methods of
research. In the Yale Review, a reviewer found the book to be "a
credit to American scholarship . . . the sort of book of which we
have too few. . . . Here is an inquiry, covering a specific field and
a considerable period of time, and persecuted with candor,
thoroughness and critical judgment." 20 The reviewer in The
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
(a Southerner) found the book to be "exceptional and scholar
ly. ... It is a critical, discriminating statement of the conditions
and results of Negro life in a large, northern seaboard city a
little more than thirty years after the Civil War . . . and its perma
nent national value to the scholar and the statesman is pre
dicted." 21 The reviewer in The Nation was especially im
pressed with the historical material included in the book and
only criticized the author for taking "too gloomy a view of the
situation/' 22 The Outlook review was long, detailed, and filled
with praise: the historical background alone, thought tibe re-
20. Yale Review, IX (May, 1900), 110-11.
21. The Annals of the American Academy of Social and Political Science,
XV (January-May, 1900), 101.
22. The Nation, LXIX (1899), 310.
Introduction to the 1967 Edition xxiii
viewer, "would of itself give this volume exceptional value." 23
And he went on to praise DuBois' objectivity: "In no respect does
Dr. DuBois attempt to bend the facts so as to plead for his race
... he is less apologetic than a generous-minded white writer
might be. ... Professor DuBois' aim is always to keep well with
in the field where his generalizations cannot be disputed." 24
Thus the reviews at the time of publication invariably praised
the book and remarked on the objectivity of the author. In fact,
between the lines one has the impression that most of the white
reviewers were rather surprised that a Negro author could have
been capable of a work of such careful scholarship and objec
tivity. In spite of this, one is amazed to find that the reviewers
did not come out openly and criticize DuBois' definitely en
vironmental, rather than racial, approach to the problems of the
Philadelphia Negroes. There was only a hint of this in the
American Historical Review, in which the reviewer praised the
book but questioned the author's optimism in regarding the
Negro problem as soluble, in the long run, in terms of status and
environmental improvement. The reviewer also, incidentally,
appeared to be worried about "race pollution/ The tone of the
review is suggested by the following lines:
The book is not merely a census-like volume of many tables
and diagrams of the colored people of Philadelphia. The author
seeks to interpret the meaning of statistics in the light of social
movements and the characteristics of the times, as, for instance,
the growth of the city by foreign immigration. ... He is
perfectly frank, laying all necessary stress on the weaknesses of
his people. ... He shows a remarkable spirit of fairness. If any
conclusions are faulty, the fault lies in the overweight given to
some of his beliefs and hopes. 25
After praising DuBois' fairness and outlining some of his
findings, the reviewer criticizes DuBois' hopes:
This state of things is due chiefly, in Dr. DuBois 7 judgment,
to a color prejudice, and this he believes can be done away
with in time, just as the class prejudices of earlier centuries in
23. Outkok, LXIII (1899), 647-48
24. Ibid.
25. American Historical Review, VI (1900-1901), 163.
xxiv Introduction to the 1967 Edition
Europe are being wiped out gradually , . . but we need, what
Dr. DuBois does not give, more knowledge of the effects of the
mixing of blood of very different races, and the possibilities of
absorption of inferior into superior groups of mankind. He
speaks of the "natural repugnance to close intermingling with
unfortunate ex-slaves," but we believe that the separation is
due to differences of race more than of status. 26
The hereditarian or racial as against the environmental or
cultural approaches to .the causes of the differences between
Negroes and whites, both in America and in other parts of the
world, divide men to this day. Perhaps the ultimate truth lies in a
"both/ and" rather than an "either/or" approach. Nevertheless
and especially in an age such as our own which tends to assume,
often dogmatically, the greater importance of environment and
cultureone must look back on The Philadelphia Negro as a
pioneering attempt to objectively advance this modern approach
in an era when most men deeply and sincerely felt that fixed
hereditary aptitudes differentiated the races of men and con
sequently precluded any possibility of eventual integration on a
plane of social, cultural, and political equality, Thus, in answer to
his hereditarian opponents such as the reviewer in the American
Historical Review, DuBois fell back on his own broad historical
perspective by reminding his readers in the closing pages how
many once-held hereditarian dogmas had already been eroded by
the passage of time and the changing social situation:
We rather hasten to forget that once the courtiers of English
kings looked upon the ancestors of most Americans with far
greater contempt than these Americans look upon Negroes
and perhaps, indeed, had more cause. We forget that once
French peasants were the "Niggers" of France, and that
German princelings once discussed with doubt the brains and
humanity of the bauer (p. 386) .
It was, then, not only DuBois' painstaking methods of
research and his objective interpretations of the evidence that has
given The Philadelphia Negro a permanent place in the socio-
26. Ibid., p. 164.
Introduction to the 1967 Edition xxv
logical literature. It was also the fact that DuBois brought a
thoroughly sociological point of view to bear on this carefully
collected evidence. In other words, the book, in emphasizing an
environmental point of view, made a definite theoretical con
tribution. Some four decades later, for example, the authors of an
important modern study of the Negro community in Chicago,
Black Metropolis, explicitly referred to this contribution as
follows:
In 1899, Dr. W. E. B. DuBois published the first important
sociological study of a Negro community in the United States
The Philadelphia Negro (University of Pennsylvania). At the
outset, he presented an ecological map detailing the distri
bution of the Negro population by "social condition," and
divided his subjects into four "grades:" (1) the "middle
classes" and those above; (2) the working people-fair to
comfortable; (3) the poor; (4) vicious and criminal classes.
Despite the economic emphasis in this classification and his
extensive presentation of data on physical surroundings, Du
Bois concluded that "there is a far mightier influence to mold
and make the citizen, and that is the social atmosphere which
surrounds him; first his daily companionship, the thoughts and
whims of his class; then his recreation and amusements; finally
the surrounding world of American civilization" (p. 309). This
emphasis upon the social relations-in family, clique, church,
voluntary associations, school, and jobas the decisive ele
ments in personality formation is generally accepted. The
authors feel that it should also be the guiding thread in a study
of "class". . . all serious students of Negro communities since
DuBois have been concerned with the nature of social stratifi
cation. ... In the Thirties this interest was given added
stimulus by the suggestive hypotheses thrown out by Professor
W. Lloyd Warner and by a general concern in anthropological
and sociological circles with social stratification in America. 27
As this quotation from Black Metropolis suggests, there has
been a direct intellectual line between DuBois' emphasis on class
and social environment as major causal agents in personality
formation and a whole subsequent tradition in American soci-
27. St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis, pp. 787-88.
xxvi Introduction to the 1967 Edition
ology. Thus, for example, Franz Boas in his Lowell Lecture, The
Mind of Primitive Man (1911), was echoing the findings and
conclusions of DuBois when he wrote that "the traits of the
American Negro are adequately explained on the basis of his
history and his social status . . , without falling back upon the
theory of hereditary inferiority." 28 And the tradition continued
through W. I. Thomas and Florian Znanieckfs classic and
pioneering study of the adjustment to the urban environment of
Polish peasants in Chicago and Warsaw ( The Polish Peasant in
Europe and America 1918-21), through the whole school of
urban sociology which Robert E. Park (for some time an assistant
and colleague of Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee) inspired at
the University of Chicago during the 1920's, to the later W. Lloyd
Warner school of community studies at Harvard and Chicago,
which inspired Black Metropolis and Deep South as well as the
classic Yankee City Series. The origins, in both method and
theoretical point of view, of all of these studies are to be found in
The Philadelphia Negro.
In many ways, DuBois' whole life experiences before coming
to Philadelphia in 1896 his youth, when he competed on his
merits with his peers in the white community in Great Barring-
ton, his observations of the faculty and students at Fisk as well as
the poorest and most primitive Negroes in West Tennessee, his
own achievements at Harvard as well as his contacts with great
teachers like William James, and his witnessing the attitudes of
educated Europeans toward hruself all combined to prepare
him to see that racial inequality was partly a matter of class
inequality and to emphasize the need for stratification and the
creation of an open and talented elite class within the Negro
community. And, above all, he emphasized the fact that this class,
already existing in nascent form in Philadelphia, must be
recognized by members of the white community who were
forever judging all Negroes on the basis of the behavior of the
"submerged tenth." "In many respects it is right and proper to
judge a people by its best classes rather than by its worst classes
or middle ranks," he wrote in the excellent chapter on "The
Environment of the Negro" (p. 316). "The highest class of any
28. Franz Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man (New York, 1911 ), p. 272.
Introduction to the 1967 Edition xxvii
group/' he continued, "represents its possibilities rather than its
expectations, as is so often assumed in regard to the Negro. The
colored people are seldom judged by their best classes, and often
the very existence of classes among them is ignored." Thus
DuBois saw very clearly that the white community's propensity to
see all Negroes as part of one homogeneous mass served as a
rationalization for their own racist thinking. Much of the
charitable work among the depressed classes of Negroes, more
over, only served to reinforce white prejudices : "Thus the class of
Negroes which the prejudices of the city have distinctly en
couraged," wrote DuBois, "is that of the criminal, the lazy and the
shiftless; for them the city teems with institutions and charities;
for them there is succor and sympathy; for them Philadelphians
are thinking and planning; but for the educated and industrious
young colored man who wants work and not platitudes, wages
and not alms, just rewards and not sermons for such colored
men Philadelphia apparently has no use" (p. 352).
While DuBois was rightly critical of the white community, he
also criticized upper-class Negroes for not taking the lead among
their own people:
The aristocracy of the Negro population in education, wealth
and general social efficiency ... are not the leaders or the ideal-
makers of their own group in thought, work, or morals. They
teach the masses to a very small extent, mingle with them but
little, do not largely hire their labor. Instead then of social
classes held together by strong ties of mutual interest we have
in the case of the Negroes, classes who have much to keep
them apart, and only community of blood and color prejudice
to bind them togethere. . . . The first impulse of the best, the
wisest and richest is to segregate themselves from the mass . . .
they make their mistake in failing to recognize that however
laudable an ambition to rise may be, the first duty of an upper
class is to serve the lowest classes. The aristocracies of all
peoples have been slow in learning this and perhaps the Negro
is no slower than the rest, but his peculiar situation demands
that in his case this lesson be learned sooner (pp. 316-17).
In emphasizing the need for a properly functioning class
structure within the Negro community, DuBois was anticipating
xxviii Introduction to the 1967 Edition
one of the major themes of the late E. Franklin Frazier s classic
study of the emerging Negro middle class in America. Half a
century after DuBois' study of Philadelphia, Professor Frazier
(the first Negro to be elected president of the American Soci
ological Society) wrote in his Black Bourgeoisie:
Because of its struggle to gain acceptance by whites, the
black bourgeoisie has failed to play the role of a responsible
elite in the Negro community . . . they have no real interest in
education and genuine culture and spend their leisure in
frivolities and in activities designed to win a place in Negro
"society." The single factor that has dominated the mental
outlook of the black bourgeoisie has been its obsession with the
struggle for status. 29
In the long run, one of the most important contributions of
this book, as more than one reviewer at the time of its publication
noted, may well be the fact that it is the best documented his
torical record of an urban and Northern Negro community in
existence. Fortunately, DuBois was well trained in, and devoted
to, the historian's craft. But it was also fortunate that the city of
Philadelphia possessed the oldest and, in 1896, the largest
Northern Negro community in the nation, exceeded in population
only by the three Southern Negro communities of New Orleans,
Washington, D;C., and Baltimore (a border city).
In fact, Negroes had been brought up the Delaware by the
Swedes before Penn founded the Colony in 1682. In the city
where the Declaration of Independence was written and the
nation founded, the Negroes also had an important history, which
DuBois carefully documented: here in Philadelphia was the first
expression against the slave trade, the first organization for the
abolition of slavery, the first legislative enactments for the
abolition of slavery, the first attempt at Negro education, the first
Negro convention, and so forth.
Since DuBois himself, in this study and in many others, con
tributed so much to the understanding of his people's history, it
seems most appropriate to close this introduction with a brief
history of some of the more important sociological changes in the
29. E, Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie, pp. 235-36.
Introduction to the 1967 Edition xxix
Philadelphia Negro community since the turn of the nineteenth
century.
The Philadelphia Negro Since DuBois
The most striking thing about the development of the Phil
adelphia Negro community since DuBois' day is its steady
increase in size. In fact, the steady migration of Southern Negroes
to Philadelphia began in the decade of the 1890 ? s ( see Table 1 )
Table 1
PHILADELPHIA NEGRO POPULATION
Increase by Decades (1890-1960)
INCREASE
DECADE POPULATION NUMBER PER CENT
1880
31,699
1890
39,371
7,672
24
1900
62,613
23,242
60
1910
84,459
21,846
33
1920
134,229
49,770
58
1930
219,599
85,370
63
1940
250,880
31,281
14
1950
376,041
125,161
50
1960
529,239
153,198
30
and kept up throughout the twentieth century. DuBois saw this
increasing pace of migration and consequently went to Virginia
during the first summer of his study in order to see how the
Negroes lived in the rural areas, the better to understand their
problems of adjustment to urban life. The pace of migration, of
course, was greatly increased during World War I and the 1920's.
At the same time, anti-Negro attitudes increased, producing racial
strife, increasing segregation in public places, and a rapid rise in
residential ghettoization. Migration slowed down during the
1930's, then increased again during World War II and the
postwar years, until today the Negroes constitute over one fourth
XXX
Introduction to the 1967 Edition
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THE PHILADELPHIA NEGRO.
CHAPTER I.
THE SCOPE OF THIS STUDY.
1. General Aim. This study seeks to present the results
of an inquiry undertaken by the University of Pennsylvania
into the condition of the forty thousand or more people of
Negro blood now living in the city of Philadelphia. This
inquiry extended over a period of fifteen months and sought
to ascertain something of the geographical distribution of
this race, their occupations and daily life, their homes, their
organizations, and, above all, their relation to their million
white fellow-citizens. The final design of the work is to
lay before the public such a body of information as may be
a safe guide for all efforts toward the solution of the many
Negro problems of a great American city.
2. The Methods of Inquiry. The investigation began
August the first, 1896, and, saving two months, continued
until December the thirty-first, 189.7. The work com
menced with a house-to-house canvass of the Seventh
Ward. This long narrow ward, extending from South
Seventh street to the Schuylkill River and from Spruce
street to South street, is an historic centre of Negro popu
lation, and contains to-day a fifth of all the Negroes in
this city. 1 It was therefore thought best to make an
1 1 shall throughout this study use the term " Negro," to designate all
persons of Negro descent, although the appellation is to some extent
illogical. I shall, moreover, capitalize the word, because I believe that
eight million Americans are entitled to a capital letter.
(i)
2 The Scope of This Study. [Chap. L
intensive study of conditions in this district, and afterward
to supplement and correct this information by general
observation and inquiry in other parts of the city.
Six schedules were used among the nine thousand
Negroes of this ward ; a family schedule with the usual
questions as to the mimber of members, their age and sex,
their conjugal condition and birthplace, their ability to
read and write, their occupation and earnings, etc. ; an
individual schedule with similar inquiries ; a home
schedule with questions as to the number of rooms, the
rent, the lodgers, the conveniences, etc. ; a street schedule
to collect data as to the various small streets and alleys,
and an institution schedule for organizations and institu
tions ; finally a slight variation of the individual schedule
was used for house-servants living at their places of employ
ment. 2
This study of the central district of Negro settlement
furnished a key txxthe situation in the city ; in the other
wards therefore a general survey was taken to note any
striking differences of condition, to ascertain the general
distribution of these people, and to collect information and
statistics as to organizations, property, crime and pauperism,
political activity, and the like. This general inquiry, while
it lacked precise methods of measurement in most cases,
served nevertheless to correct the errors and illustrate the
meaning of the statistical material obtained in the house-
to-house canvass.
Throughout the study such official statistics and histori
cal matter as seemed reliable were used, and experienced
persons, both white and colored, were freely consulted.
3. The Credibility of the Results. The best available
methods of sociological research are at present so liable to
inaccuracies that the careful student discloses the results
of individual research with diffidence ; he knows that they
are liable to error from the seemingly ineradicable faults of
2 See Appendix A for form of schedules used.
Sect, 3.] The Credibility of the Results. 3
the statistical method, to even greater error from the
methods of general observation, and, above all, he must
ever tremble lest some personal bias, some moral conviction
or some unconscious trend of thought due to previous
training, has to a degree distorted the picture in his view.
Convictions on all great matters of human interest one
must have to a greater or less degree, and they will enter
to some extent into the most cold-blooded scientific research
as a disturbing factor.
Nevertheless here are social problems before us demand
ing careful study, questions awaiting satisfactory answers.
We must study, we must investigate, we must attempt to
solve ; and the utmost that the world can demand is, not
lack of human interest and moral conviction, but rather
the heart-quality of fairness, and an earnest desire for the
truth despite its possible unpleasantness.
In a house-to-house investigation there are, outside the
attitude of the investigator, many sources of error : mis
apprehension, vagueness and forgetfulness, and deliberate
deception on the part of the persons questioned, greatly
vitiate the value of the answers ; on the other hand, con
clusions formed by the best trained and most conscientious
students on the basis of general observation and inquiry-
are really inductions from but a few of the multitudinous
facts of social life, and these may easily fall far short of
being essential or typical.
The use of both of these methods which has been
attempted in this study may perhaps have corrected to
some extent the errors of each. Again, whatever personal
equation is to be allowed for in the whole study is one
unvarying quantity, since the work was done by one inves
tigator, and the varying judgments of a score of census-
takers was thus avoided. 3
3 The appended study of domestic service was done by Miss Isabel
Eaton, Fellow of the College Settlements Association. Outside of this
the- work was done by the one investigator.
4 The Scope of This Study. [Chap. I.
Despite all drawbacks and difficulties, however, the
main results of the inquiry seem credible. They agree, to
a large extent, with general public opinion, and in other
respects they seem either logically explicable or in accord
with historical precedents. They are therefore presented
to the public, not as complete and without error, but as
possessing on the whole enough reliable matter to serve as
the scientific basis of further study, and of practical reform.
CHAPTER II.
THE PROBLEM.
4. The Negro Problems of Philadelphia. In Phila
delphia, as elsewhere in the United States, the existence of
certain peculiar social problems affecting the Negro people
are plainly manifest. Here is a large group of people
perhaps forty-five thousand, a city within a city who do
not form an integral part of the larger social group. This
in itself is not altogether unusual ; there are other unassim-
ilated groups : Jews, Italians, even Americans ; and yet
in the case of the Negroes the segregation is more con
spicuous, more patent to the eye, and so intertwined with
a long historic evolution, with peculiarly pressing social
problems of poverty, ignorance, crime and labor, that the
Negro problem far surpasses in scientific interest and social
gravity most of the other race or class questions.
The student of these questions must first ask, What is
the real condition of this group of human beings ? Of
whom is it composed, what sub-groups and classes exist,
what sort of individuals are being considered ? Further, the
student must clearly recognize that a complete study must
not confine itself to the group, but must specially notice
the environment ; the physical environment of city, sec
tions and houses, the far mightier social environment the
surrounding world of custom, wish, whim, and thought
which envelops this group and powerfully influences its
social development.
Nor does the clear recognition of the field of investiga
tion simplify the work of actual study ; it rather increases
it, by revealing lines of inquiry far broader in scope than
first thought suggests. To the average Philaclelphian the
(5)
6 The Problem. [Chap. II.
whole Negro question reduces itself to a study of certain
slum districts. His mind reverts to Seventh and Lombard
streets and to Twelfth and Kater streets of to-day, or to
St. Mary's in the past. Continued and widely known
charitable work in these sections makes the problem of
poverty familiar to him ; bold and daring crime too often
traced to these centres has called his attention to a prob
lem of crime, while the scores of loafers, idlers and pros
titutes who crowd the sidewalks here night and day
remind him of a problem of work.
All this is true all these problems are there and of
threatening intricacy ; unfortunately, however, the interest
of the ordinary man of affairs is apt to stop here. Crime,
poverty and idleness affect his interests unfavorably and
he would have them stopped ; he looks upon these slums
and slum characters as unpleasant things which should in
some way be removed for the best interests of all. The
social student agrees with him so far, but must point out
that the removal of unpleasant features from our compli
cated modern life is a delicate operation requiring know
ledge and skill ; that a slum is not a simple fact, it is a
symptom and that to know the removable causes of the
Negro slums of Philadelphia requires a study that takes
one far beyond the slum districts. For few Philadelphians
realize how the Negro population has grown and spread.
There was a time in the memory of living men when a
small district near Sixth and Lombard streets compre
hended the great mass of the Negro population of the
city. This is no longer so. Very early the stream of the
black population started northward, but the increased
foreign immigration of 1830 and later turned it back.
It started south also but was checked by poor houses and
worse police protection. Finally with gathered momen
tum the emigration from the slums started west, rolling on
slowly and surely, taking Lombard street as its main
thoroughfare, gaining early foothold in West Philadelphia,
Sect. 4.] The Negro Problems of Philadelphia. j
and turning at the Schuylkill River north and south to
the newer portions of the city.
Thus to-day the Negroes are scattered in every ward of
the city, and the great mass of them live far from the whilom
centre of colored settlement. What, then, of this great
mass of the population? Manifestly they form a class
with social problems of their own the problems of the
Thirtieth Ward differ from the problems of the Fifth, as
the black inhabitants differ. In the former ward we have
represented the rank and file of Negro working-people ;
laborers and servants, porters and waiters. This is at pres
ent the great middle class of Negroes feeding the slums
on the one hand and the upper class on the other. Here
are social questions and conditions which must receive the
most careful attention and patient interpretation.
Not even here, however, can the social investigator stop.
He knows that every group has its upper class ; it may be
numerically small and socially of little weight, and yet its
study is necessary to the comprehension of the whole it
forms the realized ideal of the group, and as it is true that
a nation must to some extent be measured by its slums, it
is also true that it can only be understood and finally judged
by its upper class.
The best class of Philadelphia Negroes, though some
times forgotten or ignored in discussing the Negro prob
lems, is nevertheless known to many Philadelphians.
Scattered throughout the better parts of the Seventh
Ward, and on Twelfth, lower Seventeenth and Nineteenth
streets, and here and there in the residence wards of the
northern, southern, and western sections of the city is a class
of caterers, clerks, teachers, professional men, small mer
chants, etc., who constitute the aristocracy of the Negroes.
Many are well-to-do, some are wealthy, all are fairly edu
cated, and some liberally trained. Here too are social
problems differing from those of the other classes, and
differing too from those of the whites of a corresponding
8 The Problem. [Chap. II.
grade, because of the peculiar social environment in which
the whole race finds itself, which the whole race feels, but
which touches this highest class at most points and tells
upon them most decisively.
Many are the misapprehensions and misstatements as to
the social environment of Negroes in a great Northern city.
Sometimes it is said, here they are free ; they have the
same chance as the Irishman, the Italian, or the Swede ; at
other times it is said, the environment is such that it is
really more oppressive than the situation in Southern cities.
The student must ignore both of these extreme statements
and seek to extract from a complicated mass of facts the
tangible evidence of a social atmosphere surrounding
Negroes, which differs from that surrounding most whites ;
of a different mental attitude, moral standard, and economic
judgment shown toward Negroes than toward most other
folk. That such a difference exists and can now and then
plainly be seen, few deny ; but just how far it goes and
how large a factor it is in the Negro problems, nothing but
careful study and measurement can reveal.
Such then are the phenomena of social condition and
environment which this study proposes to describe, analyze,
and, so far as possible, interpret.
5. Plan of Presentment. The study as taken up here
divides itself roughly into four parts : the history of the
Negro people in the city, their present condition considered
as individuals, their condition as an organized social group,
and their physical and social environment. To the history
of the Negro but two chapters are devoted a brief sketch
although the subject is worthy of more extended study
than the character of this essay permitted.
Six chapters consider the general condition of the
Negroes; their number, age and sex, conjugal condition,
and birthplace; what degree of education they have
obtained, and how they earn a living. All these subjects
are treated usually for the Seventh Ward somewhat
Sect. 5.] Plan of Presentment. 9
minutely, then more generally for the city, and finally such
historical material is adduced as is available for com
parison.
Three chapters are devoted to the group life of the
Negro ; this includes a study of the family, of property, and
of organizations of all sorts. It also takes up such phe
nomena of social maladjustment and individual depravity
as crime, pauperism and alcoholism.
One chapter is devoted to the difficult question of en
vironment, both physical and social, one to certain results
of the contact of the white and black races, one to Negro
suffrage, and a word of general advice in the line of social
reform is added.
CHAPTER III.
THE NEGRO IN PHILADELPHIA, 1638-1820.
6. General Survey. Few States present better oppor
tunities for the continuous study of a group of Negroes
than Pennsylvania. The Negroes were brought here early,
were held as slaves along with many white serfs. They
became the subjects of a protracted abolition controversy,
and were finally emancipated by gradual process. Al though >
for the most part, in a low and degraded condition, and
thrown upon their own resources in competition with white
labor, they were nevertheless so inspired by their new free
dom and so guided by able leaders that for something like
forty years they made commendable progress. Meantime,
however, the immigration of foreign laborers began, the
new economic era of manufacturing was manifest in the
land, and a national movement for the abolition of slavery
had its inception. The lack of skilled Negro laborers for
the factories, the continual stream of Southern fugitives
and rural freedmen into the city, the intense race antipathy
of the Irish and others, together with intensified prejudice
of whites who did not approve of agitation against slavery
all this served to check the development of the Negro,
to increase crime and pauperism, and at one period resulted
in riot, violence, and bloodshed, which drove many Negroes
from the city.
Economic adjustment and the enforcement of law finally
allayed this excitement, and another period of material
prosperity and advance among the Negroes followed. Then
came the inpouring of the ne^ ""y emancipated blacks from
the South and the economic struggle of the artisans to main
tain wages, which brought on a crisis in the city, manifested
again by idleness, crime and pauperism.
(10)
Sect. 7.] Transplanting of the Negro, 1638-1760. n
Thus we see that twice the Philadelphia Negro has, with
a fair measure of success, begun an interesting social devel
opment, and twice through the migration of barbarians a
dark age has settled on his age of revival. These same
phenomena would have marked the advance of many other
elements of our population if they had been as definitely
isolated into one indivisible group. No differences of social
condition allowed any Negro to escape from the group,
although such escape was continually the rule among Irish,
Germans, and other whites.
7. The Transplanting of the Negro, 1638-1760. The
Dutch, and possibly the Swedes, had already planted
slavery on the Delaware when Penn and the Quakers
arrived in i682. 1 One of Penn's first acts was tacitly to
recognize the serfdom of Negroes by a provision of the
Free Society of Traders that they should serve fourteen
years and then become serfs a provision which he himself
and all the others soon violated. 2
Certain German settlers who came soon after Penn, and
who may or may not have been active members of the
Society of Friends, protested sturdily against slavery in
1688, but the Quakers found the matter too " weighty." 3
Five years later the radical seceders under Kieth made the
existence of slavery a part of their attack on the society.
Nevertheless the institution of slavery in the colony con
tinued to grow, and the number of blacks in Philadelphia
so increased that as early as 1693 we find an order of the
1 Cf. Scharf-Wcstcott's " History of Philadelphia," I, 65, 76. DuBois'
" Slave Trade/' p. 24.
2 Hazard's "Annals," 553. Thomas' "Attitude of Friends Toward
Slavery," 266.
3 There is some controversy as to whether these Germans were actually
Friends or not; the weight of testimony seems to be that they were.
See, however, Thomas as above, p. 267, and Appendix. " Pennsylvania
Magazine," IV, 28-31 r The Critic, August 27, 1897. DuBois' "Slave
Trade," p. 20, 203. For copy of protest, see published fac-simile and
Appendix of Thomas. For further proceedings of Quakers, see Thomas
and DuBois, passim.
12 Negro in Philadelphia, 1638-1820. [Chap. III.
Council against the "tumultuous gatherings of the negroes
of the towne of Philadelphia, on the first dayes of the
weeke." 4
In 1696 the Friends began a cautious dealing with the
subject, which in the course of a century led to the abolition
of slavery. This growth of moral sentiment was slow but
unwaveringly progressive, and far in advance of contem
porary thought in civilized lands. At first the Friends
sought merely to regulate slavery in a general way and
prevent its undue growth. They therefore suggested in
the Yearly Meeting of 1696, and for some time thereafter,
that since traders " have flocked in amongst us and . . .
increased and multiplied negroes amongst us," members
ought not to encourage the further importation of slaves,
as there were enough for all purposes. In 1711 a more
active discouragement of the slave trade was suggested,
and in 1716 the Yearly Meeting intimated that even the
buying of imported slaves might not be the best policy,
although the Meeting hastened to call this u caution, not
censure."
By 1719 the Meeting was certain that their members
ought not to engage in the slave trade, and in 1730 they
declared the buying of slaves imported by others to be
" disagreeable.'' At this milestone they lingered thirty
years for breath and courage, for the Meeting had evidently
distanced many of its more conservative members. In
1743 the question of importing slaves, or buying imported
slaves, was made a disciplinary query, and in 1754,
spurred by the crusade of Say, Woolman and Benezet,
offending members were disciplined. In the important
gathering of 1758 the same golden rule was laid down as
that with which the Germans, seventy years previous, had
taunted them, and the institution of slavery was categor
ically condemned/ Here they rested until 1775, when,
* " Colonial Records," I, $80-81.
5 Thomas, 276; Whittier Intro, to Woolman, 16.
Sect 7.] Transplanting of the Negro, 1638-1760. 13
after a struggle of eighty-seven years, they decreed the
exclusion of slaveholders from fellowship in the Society.
While in the councils of the State Church the freedom
of Negroes was thus evolving, the legal status of Negroes
of Pennsylvania was being laid. Four bills were intro
duced in 1700: one regulating slave marriages was lost;
the other three were passed, but the Act for the Trial of
Negroes a harsh measure providing death, castration and
whipping for punishments, and forbidding the meeting
together of more than four Negroes was afterward disal
lowed by the Queen in Council. The remaining acts
became laws, and provided for a small duty on imported
slaves and the regulation of trade with slaves and ser
vants. 6
In 1706 another act for the trial of Negroes was passed
and allowed. It differed but slightly from the Act of 1700 ;
it provided that Negroes should be tried for crimes by two
justices of the peace and a jury of six freeholders ; rob
bery and rape were punished by branding and exportation^
homicide by death, and stealing by whipping ; 7 the meeting
of Negroes without permission was prohibited. Between
this time and 1760 statutes were passed regulating the sale
of liquor to slaves and the use of firearms by them ; and
also the general regulative Act of 1726, u for the Better
Regulation of Negroes in this Province." This act was
especially for the punishment of crime, the suppression of
pauperism, the prevention of intermarriage, and the like
that is, for regulating the social and economic status of
Negroes, free and enslaved. 8
Meantime the number of Negroes in the colony con
tinued to increase; by 1720 there were between 2500 and
5000 Negroes in Pennsylvania ; they rapidly increased
until there were a large number by 1750 some say 11,000
*See Appendix B.
7 ' ' Statutes-at-Large, ' ' Ch. 143, 8Si . See Appendix B.
8 " Statutes-at-Large, M III, pp. 250, 254; IV, 59 ff. See Appendix B.
14 Negro in Philadelphia, j6jS-/S2O. [Chap. III.
or more when they decreased by war and sale, so that the
census of 1790 found 10,274 in the State. 9
The slave duties form a pretty good indication of the
increase of Negro population. 10 The duty in 1700 was
from 6^. to zos. This was increased, and in 1712, owing
to the large importations and the turbulent actions of
Negroes in neighboring States, a prohibitive duty of ^20
was laid. 11 England, however, who was on the eve of
signing the Assiento with Spain, soon disallowed this act
and the duty was reduced to ^5. The influx of Negroes
after the English had signed the huge slave contract
with Spain was so large that the Act of 1726 laid a restrict
ive duty of ;io. For reasons not apparent, but possibly
connected with fluctuations in the value of the currency,
this duty was reduced to 2 in 1729, and seems to have
remained at that figure until 1761.
The ^10 duty was restored in 1761, and probably helped
much to prevent importation, especially when we remem
ber the work of the Quakers at this period. In 1773 a
prohibitive duty of ^20 was laid, and the Act of 1780
finally prohibited importation. After 1760 it is probable
that the efforts of the Quakers to get rid of their slaves
made the export slave trade much larger than the
importation.
Very early in the history of the colony the presence of
unpaid slaves for life greatly disturbed the economic con
dition of free laborers. While most of the white laborers
were indentured servants the competition was not so much
felt ; when they became free laborers, however, and were
joined by other laborers, the cry against slave competition
was soon raised. The particular grievance was the hiring
out of slave mechanics by masters ; in 1708 the free
white mechanics protested to the Legislature against this
'DuBois* " Slave Trade/' p. 23, note, XJ. S. Census.
10 See Appendix B. Cf. DuBois' <* Slave Trade," passim.
11 PuBois* " Slave Trade," p. 206.
Sect. 8.] Emancipation, 1760-1780.
custom, 12 and this was one of the causes of the Act of
in all probability. When by 1722 the number of slaves had
further increased, the whites again protested against the
" employment of blacks," apparently including both free
and slave. The Legislature endorsed this protest and
declared that the custom of employing black laborers and
mechanics was " dangerous and injurious to the repub
lic." 13 Consequently the Act of 1726 declared the hiring
of their time by Negro slaves to be illegal, and sought to
restrict emancipation on the ground that " free negroes
are an idle and slothful people," and easily become public
burdens. 14
As to the condition of the Negroes themselves we catch
only glimpses here and there. Considering the times, the
system of slavery was not harsh and the slaves received
fair attention. There appears, however, to have been
much trouble with them on account of stealing, some
drunkenness and general disorder. The preamble of the
Act of 1726 declares that "it too often happens that
Negroes commit felonies and other heinous crimes," and
that much pauperism arises from emancipation. This act
facilitated punishment of such crimes by providing indem
nification for a master if his slave suffered capital punish
ment. They were declared to be often " tumultuous " in
1693, to be found "cursing, gaming, swearing, and com
mitting many other disorders " in 1732 ; in 1738 and 1741
they were also called "disorderly n in city ordinances. 15
In general, we see among the slaves at this time the low
condition of morals which we should expect in a barbar
ous people forced to labor in a strange land.
8. Emancipation, 1760-1780. The years 1750-1760
mark the culmination of the slave system in Pennsylvania
I'Scharf-Westcott's " History of Philadelphia," I, 200.
*s Watson's ''Annals," (Ed. 1850) I, 98.
u See Appendix B.
*Cf, Chapter XIII.
1 6 Negro in Philadelphia, 1638-1820. [Chap. III.
and the beginning of its decline. By that time most
shrewd observers saw that the institution was an economic
failure, and were consequently more disposed than formerly
to listen to the earnest representations of the great anti-
slavery agitators of that period. There were, to be sure,
strong vested interests still to be fought. When the /io
duty act of 1761 was pending, the slave merchants of the
city, including many respectable names, vigorously pro
tested ; " ever desirous to extend the Trade of this Prov
ince," they declared that they had " seen for some time
past the many inconveniencys the Inhabitants have suffered
for want of Labourers and Artificers," and had conse
quently u for some time encouraged the importation of
Negroes." They prayed at the very least for delay in
passing this restrictive measure. After debate and alterca
tion with the governor the measure finally passed, indi
cating renewed strength and determination on the part of
the abolition party. 16
Meantime voluntary emancipation increased. Sandiford
emancipated his slaves in 1733, and there were by 1790 in
Philadelphia about one thousand black freedmen. A school
for these and others was started in 1770 at the instance of
Benezet, and had at first twenty-two children in attend
ance. 17 The war brought a broader and kindlier feeling
toward the Negroes ; before its end the Quakers had
ordered manumission, 18 and several attempts were made to
prohibit slavery by statute. Finally, in 1780, the Act for
the Gradual Abolition of Slavery was passed. 19 This act >
beginning with a strong condemnation of slavery, pro
vided that no child thereafter born in Pennsylvania should
be a slave. The children of slaves born after 1780 were to
be bond-servants until twenty-eight years of age that is.
""Colonial Records," VIII, 576; DuBois' ''Slave Trade/' p. 23.
"Cf. Pamphlet: "Sketch of the Schools for Blacks/' also Chapter VIII.
I8 Cf, Thomas' "Attitude of Friends," etc., p. 272.
i* Dallas' "Laws," I, 838, Ch, 881; DuBois' " Slave Trade," p, 225.
Sect. 9.] The Rise of the Freedman, 1780-1820. 17
"beginning with the year 1808 there was to be a series of
emancipations. Side by side with this growth of emanci
pation sentiment went an increase in the custom of hiring
out Negro slaves and servants, which increased the old
competition with the whites. The slaves were owned in
small lots, especially in Philadelphia, one or two to a
family, and were used either as house servants or artisans.
As a result they were encouraged to learn trades and seem
to have had the larger share of the ordinary trades of the
city in their hands. Many of the slaves in the better
families became well-known characters as Alice, who for
forty years took the tolls at Dunk's Ferry ; Virgil Warder,
who once belonged to Thomas Penn, and Robert Venable,
a man of some intelligence. 20
9. The Rise of the Freedman, 1780-1820. A careful
study of the process and effect of emancipation in the
different States of the Union would throw much light on
our national experiment and its ensuing problems. Espe
cially is this true of the experiment in Pennsylvania ; to
be sure, emancipation here was gradual and the number
emancipated small in comparison with the population, and
yet the main facts are similar: the freeing of ignorant
slaves and giving them a chance, almost unaided from
without, to make a way in the world. The first result was
widespread poverty and idleness. This was followed, as
the number of freedmen increased, by a rush to the city.
Between 1790 and 1800 the Negro population of Philadel
phia County increased from 2489 to 6880, or 176 per cent,
against an increase of 43 per cent among the whites. The
first result of this contact with city life was to stimulate
the talented and aspiring freedmen; and this was the
easier because the freedman had in Philadelphia at that
time a secure economic foothold ; he performed all kinds
of domestic service, all common labor and much of the
skilled labor. The group being thus secure in its daily
*> Cf. Watson's "Annals" (Ed. 1850), I, 557, 101-103, 601, 602, 515.
1 8 Negro in Philadelphia, 1638-1820. [Chap. III.
bread needed only leadership to make some advance in
general culture and social effectiveness. Some sporadic
cases of talent occur, as Derham, the Negro physician,
whom Dr. Benjamin Rush, in 1788, found "very learned" 21
Especially, however, to be noted are Richard Allen, 22 a
former slave of the Chew family, and Absalom Jones, 23 a
Delaware Negro. These two were real leaders and actually
succeeded to a remarkable degree in organizing the freed-
men for group action. Both had bought their own freedom
and that of their families by hiring their time Allen
being a blacksmith by trade, and Jones also having a trade.
When, in 1792, the terrible epidemic drove Philadelphians
away so quickly that many did not remain to bury the
dead, Jones and Allen quietly took the work in hand,
spending some of their own funds and doing so well that
they were publicly commended by Mayor Clarkson in
I794- 24
The great work of these men, however, lay among their
own race and arose from religious difficulties. As in other
colonies, the process by which the Negro slaves learned the
English tongue and were converted to Christianity is not
clear. The subject of the moral instruction of slaves had
early troubled Penn and he had urged Friends to provide
meetings for them. 25 The newly organized Methodists soon
attracted a number of the more intelligent, though the
81 The American Museum, 1789, pp, 61-62.
22 For life of Allen, see his " Autobiography," and Payne's " History
of the A. M. E. Church."
28 For life of Jones, see Douglass' "Episcopal Church of St. Thomas.'*
24 The testimonial was dated January 23, 1794, and was as follows:
" Having, during the prevalence of the late malignant disorder, had
almost daily opportunities of seeing the conduct of Absalom Jones and
Richard Allen, and the people employed by them to bury the dead, I,
with cheerfulness give this testimony of my approbation of their pro
ceedings as far as the same came under my notice. Their diligence,
attention and decency of deportment, afforded me at the time much
satisfaction. WIWMAM CLARKSON, Mayor."
From Douglass' "St. Thomas' Church. "
35 See Thomas, p. 266.
Sect 9.] The Rise of the Freedman y 17801820* 19
masses seem at the end of the last century not to have been
church-goers or Christians to any considerable extent. The
small number that went to church were wont to worship at
St. George's, Fourth and Vine ; for years both free Negroes
and slaves worshiped here and were made welcome.
Soon, however, the church began to be alarmed at the
increase in its black communicants which the immigration
from the country was bringing, and attempted to force
them into the gallery. The crisis came one Sunday
morning during prayer when Jones and Allen, with a
crowd of followers, refused to worship except in their
accustomed places, and finally left the church in a body. 26
This band immediately met together and on April 12,
1787, formed a curious sort of ethical and beneficial brother
hood called the Free African Society. How great a step
this was, we of to-day scarcely realize ; we must remind
ourselves that it was the first wavering step of a people
toward organized social life. This society was more than
a mere club : Jones and Allen were its leaders and recog
nized chief officers ; a certain parental discipline was
exercised over its members and mutual financial aid given.
The preamble of the articles of association says : " Where
as, Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, two men of the
African Race, who for their religious life and conversation,
have obtained a good report among men, these persons
from a love to the people of their own complexion whom
they beheld with sorrow, because of their irreligious and
uncivilized state, often communed together upon this pain
ful and important subject in order to form some kind of
religious body ; but there being too few to be found under
the like concern, and those who were, differed in their
religious sentiments ; with these circumstances they labored
for some time, till it was proposed after a serious commu
nication of sentiments that a society should be formed
without regard to religious tenets, provided the persons
Allen's "Autobiography," and Douglass* "St. Thomas!"
20 Negro in Philadelphia^ 1638-1820. [Chap. III.
lived an orderly and sober life, in order to support one
another in sickness, and for the benefit of their widows
and fatherless children.'' 27
The society met first at private houses, then at the
Friends' Negro school house. For a time they leaned
toward Quakerism; each month three monitors were
appointed to have oversight over the members ; loose
marriage customs were attacked by condemning cohabita
tion, expelling offenders and providing a simple Quaker-
like marriage ceremony. A fifteen-minute pause for silent
prayer opened the meetings. As the representative body
of the free Negroes of the city, this society opened com
munication with free Negroes in Boston, Newport and
other places. The Negro Union of Newport, R. L, pro
posed in 1788 a general exodus to Africa, but the Free
African Society soberly replied: " With regard to the
emigration to Africa you mention we have at present but
little to communicate on that head, apprehending every
pious man is a good citizen of the whole world." The
society co-operated with the Abolition Society in studying
the condition of the free blacks in 1790. At all times they
seem to have taken good care of their sick and dead and
helped the widows and orphans to some extent Their
methods of relief were simple: they agreed "for the
benefit of each other to advance one-shilling in silver
Pennsylvania currency a month ; and after one year's sub
scription, from the dole hereof then to hand forth to the
needy of the Society if any should require, the sum of
three shillings and nine pence per week of the said money ;
provided the necessity is not brought on them by their
own imprudence. 1 ' In 1790 the society had ^42 9^. id.
on deposit in the Bank of North America, and had applied
for a grant of the Potter's Field to be set aside as a burial
ground for them, in a petition signed by Dr. Rush, Tench
Coxe and others.
"Douglass' "St. Thomas'"
Sect. 9.] The Rise of the Freedman, i?8o~i82o. 21
It was, however, becoming clearer and clearer to the
leaders that only a strong religious bond could keep this
untrained group together. They would probably have
become a sort of institutional church at first if the question
of religious denomination had been settled among them ;
but it had not been, and for about six years the question
was still pending. The tentative experiment in Quakerism
had failed, being ill suited to the low condition of the rank
and file of the society. Both Jones and Alle 
