Du Bois outlined his course of action and prepared six different questionnaires: a family survey asking about family size, marriage, literacy, employment, income, place of birth, and the like; an individual survey with similar enquiries; a home survey noting home ownership, rent, those with running water, et cetera; a street survey to collect data from the various small streets and alleys; a survey for organizations and institutions; and a survey for house servants.
On Aug. Interviews lasted from 10 minutes to an hour. Over 15 months, Du Bois visited and spoke with at least 5, people. Leading a one-man research team, Du Bois worked tirelessly to complete his study, maintaining a strict, regimented daily schedule, and even missing the birth of his son , Burghardt, who was born while Nina was in Great Barrington. Seventh Ward residents were aware that Penn was conducting an investigation, but uncertain of its scope.
The University provided Du Bois with little support for the study; he was not given an office on campus, had no contact with students, and almost no interactions with any of the faculty, aside from regular consultations with Lindsay. He corroborated his work using colonial records, manuscripts, biographies and autobiographies, legal documents, census data, newspaper articles, correspondence, meeting minutes, publications, obituaries, private libraries, annuls, and in-person interviews and observations.
His findings present an insightful and intimate look at, and living testament of, African Americans in Philadelphia at the turn of the 20th century. African Americans in the Seventh Ward were a heterogeneous mix, showing the complexity of black life. Du Bois counted 9, souls: 4, men and 5, women.
Of those 15 years of age and older, More than half of the population was born in the South, mainly in Maryland, Virginia, and Delaware; only about one-third were native-born Philadelphians. Turning to women of the same age, the largest percentages worked as domestic servants, housewives, and day laborers, such as cooks, maids, and seamstresses. The poorest residents lived in the area of 7th and Lombard streets.
Although impoverished, the Seventh Ward was abuzz with black-owned businesses. Thirteen schools in the ward were staffed by 64 teachers.
Among black children of the ward who were school-age, The problem of lateth century Philadelphia was the problem of the color line. Because of their black skin, African Americans were shut out of the best jobs, the best schools, the best houses, and the best neighborhoods. Their children were often discriminated against in public schools, in matters of admission and transfers, and prohibited from attending private, music, and high schools.
Nor were they allowed to obtain occupational training. In employment, African Americans were, on the whole, limited to a small number of low-skilled, low-paying occupations, causing a relentless struggle for the few available positions, and driving down wages. Blacks who were able to find decent work had little to no chance for promotion. Learned careers, such as lawyers, doctors, or professors, and positions of authority, were, with rare exceptions, closed at the very outset to African Americans because of their skin color.
Black women in the city had but three employment choices: domestic service, sewing, or married life. The Negro finds it extremely difficult to rear children in such an atmosphere and not have them either cringing or impudent.
The few blacks admitted were forbidden from new and better-paying industries. In , only 1. African Americans in the Seventh Ward, and Philadelphia altogether, were restricted in where they could live, largely relegated to the worst houses in the most unsafe, unsanitary, and unhealthy neighborhoods.
Real estate agents in many sections refused to rent to African Americans under any circumstances, and landlords refused to repair and refit homes, knowing that blacks had nowhere else to go. For their substandard living spaces, African Americans had to pay relatively higher rents. In order to make ends meet, many families had to sub-rent space to lodgers—transients every so often passing through town.
The practice, known as lodging, was popular in the Seventh Ward, including among the 35 percent of families who lived in one room. Despite paying high rental fees, possibly 30 percent of the black homes in the ward lacked the basic accommodations necessary for health and decency.
Only It is a lurking menace, ever-present, and lingering. After Pennsylvania abolished the slave trade in , African Americans suffered a delayed and deceitful freedom. The law, when enacted, freed no one, and applied only to African Americans born in the state after the legislation was passed.
Black people still had to remain enslaved until they reached age Though Pennsylvanians were barred from importing slaves, they could still buy and sell those who were registered. The state held African Americans in bondage until the s. More than half of African Americans in the Seventh Ward in were born in the South—assuredly former slaves, or the children or grandchildren of slaves—and the horrors of the evil institution followed them up North.
Du Bois makes no mention of slavery, but slaves caught reading or writing were commonly punished with vicious whippings. In other aspects of African-American life, slavery was entrenched, especially in the black family.
Du Bois mentions prejudice often in his writings about African Americans in the city and Seventh Ward. The chapter personifies the word, conveying actual cases of discrimination experienced by black residents of the Seventh Ward.
Residents confided to Du Bois instances when white employees refused to work with black employees. Light-skinned African Americans who could pass as white were quickly terminated as soon as their blackness was discovered. A mother tried to get her daughter into kindergarten at a nearby school, but the teachers wanted to send her daughter to a predominately black school farther away.
He is now a waiter at the University Club, where his white fellow graduates dine. Penn did not offer Du Bois a professorship after his position expired. He was hired as a professor of history and economics at Atlanta University—now Clark Atlanta University—a historically black college in Georgia, where he began teaching in January of On Nov. In October of , when the book was in press, he sent a letter to Jacob C.
Following the death of his wife in , Du Bois married Shirley Graham the following year. In Du Bois officially joined the American Communist Party before leaving the country to live in Ghana at the invitation of its president and becoming a citizen there.
Du Bois first conceived of the Encyclopedia Africana in as a compendium of history and achievement of people of African descent designed to bring a sense of unity to the African diaspora. After Du Bois was invited to move to Ghana, he pledged to finally publish the work, but it was never realized before his death.
Du Bois died on August 27, in Ghana and was given a state funeral. University of Massachusetts. Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Du Bois: Biography of a Race — David Levering Lewis. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. Among prominent figures are Madam C. Walker, who was the first U.
Their attendance at the school was a test of Brown v. Board of Education, a landmark Supreme Court ruling that Marcus Garvey was a Jamaican-born Black nationalist and leader of the Pan-Africanism movement, which sought to unify and connect people of African descent worldwide.
In the United States, he was a noted civil rights activist who founded the Negro World newspaper, a shipping Booker T. Washington was born into slavery and rose to become a leading African American intellectual of the 19 century, founding Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute Now Tuskegee University in and the National Negro Business League two decades later. In , a group of prominent Black intellectuals led by W. Du Bois met in Erie, Ontario, near Niagara Falls, to form an organization calling for civil and political rights for African Americans.
He paid his way with money from summer jobs, scholarships and loans from friends. After completing his master's degree, he was selected for a study-abroad program at the University of Berlin.
While a pupil in Germany, he studied with some of the most prominent social scientists of his day and was exposed to political perspectives that he touted for the remainder of his life. He would be awarded an honorary doctoral degree from Humboldt decades later, in Du Bois published his landmark study — the first case study of an African American community — The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study , marking the beginning of his expansive writing career.
In the study, he coined the phrase "the talented tenth," a term that described the likelihood of one in 10 Black men becoming leaders of their race. While working as a professor at Atlanta University, Du Bois rose to national prominence when he very publicly opposed Booker T.
Washington 's "Atlanta Compromise," an agreement that asserted that vocational education for Black people was more valuable to them than social advantages like higher education or political office. Du Bois criticized Washington for not demanding full equality for African Americans, as granted by the 14th Amendment.
Du Bois fought what he believed was an inferior strategy, subsequently becoming a spokesperson for full and equal rights in every realm of a person's life.
0コメント