ancient cities

238 Du Bois, W. E. B.
affecting African Americans in Philadelphia’s
Seventh Ward, which housed one fifth of the city’s
African American population. He set out to document
and interpret a range of social issues pertinent
to the Black experience in Philadelphia,
including northern migration, social conditioning,
the social institutions and lifestyles of the Black
community, and the enduring effects of slavery. Du
Bois employed a questionnaire on family structure,
income and wealth, and qualities of residential life.
He also observed public interaction in the community.
Finally he acquired or created diagrams and
blueprints of the physical structures throughout
the Seventh Ward in order to offer a comprehensive
account of unemployment, family decay, and
social hierarchies in the ward.
Du Bois’s commitment to empirical research
emerged during his studies in Germany, where
under Gustav von Schmoller he was exposed to
empiricism. The multiple method approach to data
collection, unparalleled in social research for years
afterward, blended structural analysis with microlevel
depictions of public interaction and behavior
in private settings. In The Philadelphia Negro, Du
Bois provided a masterful weaving of class and
racial effects in documenting the conditions of the
Seventh Ward in Philadelphia. Through such an
effort, he was able to argue that the urban slum
was a symptom, and not a cause, of the economic,
social, cultural, and political condition of African
American urban life. In the chapters where he presented
his agenda for Whites and Blacks, he divided
his discussion of what Black Americans must do
for racial advance into specific charges for the different
class segments of the African American community.
This effort reflected Du Bois’s reformist
inclinations. He aimed to produce not only a scholarly
contribution but an illustration of how scholarship
connects to a policy platform for redressing
problems, as in Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward.
His efforts here helped him to argue that slavery,
prejudice, and environmental factors were the three
principal causal factors affecting African American
life in Philadelphia. Moreover, he promoted a nonhomogeneous
depiction of African Americans by
elucidating the class distinctions along the behavioral
and organizational dimensions of social life.
The Philadelphia Negro was the first comprehensive
community study in American sociology. This
work reflected precisely the kind of communitycentered
sociology that appeared on the American
landscape in the following two decades (in large
part because its proponent, and one of the early
leaders of the University of Chicago school of sociology,
Robert Ezra Park, also studied under the
empiricists in Germany). The Philadelphia Negro
remains a pathbreaking community study that
helped establish a vernacular for writing about the
social conditions of Black Americans, despite its
moralistic claims and an elitist disposition taken
toward lower-income Black Americans.
Essentially, Du Bois regarded the city as the site
of great promise and opportunity for African
Americans as they escaped the ravages of slavery
and as an incubator of disease, filth, crime, vice,
and moral decay for its inhabitants who were not
yet following a path toward socioeconomic mobility
and stability. The city became Du Bois’s sociogeographical
backdrop for the processes of African
Americans’ adaptation to modernity. Accordingly,
for him any cultural advance for African Americans
would be reflected by the degrees to which they
turned away from vice, criminal activity, and folk
mores and moved toward the staples of American
modernity, which included securing employment
and cultivating stable families. The proliferation
of wage labor in the city’s emerging industrial
sphere and commitments to community-level
organizing for social betterment were two of the
mechanisms that Du Bois believed would firmly
position African Americans in modernity.
Critical Reactions
There was some critical reaction to Du Bois’s theories
of cultural advance for African Americans.
Some argued that he too aggressively embraced
White American standards for social conduct and
cultural inclinations in making his case for what
African Americans should strive for, both in and
beyond the confines of the city. Others, like Ross
Posnock, have argued that Du Bois did not equate
Whiteness, per se, with being culturally advanced
but that, instead, Du Bois was asserting that without
having suffered the burdens of being African
Americans, White Americans generally achieved a
level of cultural advancement that most Black
Americans had yet to acquire. Du Bois’s high