168 A HISTORY OF AMERICA IN 100 MAPS
At the turn of the twentieth century, Philadelphia
had the largest and oldest African American urban
population in the North. Most of the 40,000 blacks
residing in the city were concentrated in a long
narrow strip that stretched from Seventh Street to
the Schuylkill River in the narrow band from Spruce
to South streets. Despite this substantial presence,
blacks remained even more segregated than the
waves of immigrants who arrived throughout the late
nineteenth century. One of the leading intellectuals
of the era, W. E. B. DuBois, sought to investigate this
curious pattern.
DuBois was raised in Vermont, and graduated
from Fisk University before earning his graduate
degree at Harvard. While in Cambridge he spent
time with the intellectual luminaries William James
and Charles Sanders Peirce, who exposed him to new
ideas in philosophy, sociology, and history. They also
insisted that it was culture, and not heredity or race,
that defined individuals. And if one’s culture could be
changed, so too could one’s behavior and identity.
Despite his extraordinary education, DuBois
faced tenacious discrimination and struggled to
gain stable academic work in his field of sociology.
Upon landing a position at the University of
Pennsylvania, he immediately launched an
ambitious sociological study of Philadelphia’s black
population, which remained mired in poverty, crime,
and unemployment. For the next two years, his
research team conducted one of the most thorough
inventories of an African American community
to date, investigating everything from work and
education to the presence of churches and
family structure.
Social reformers considered themselves to be
neutral arbiters whose education equipped them
to see problems with a reasoned, detached, and
morally enlightened eye. As DuBois himself wrote,
“we must study, we must investigate, we must
attempt to solve.” In this framework, maps were
exciting tools of observation that could replace
misinformation with a more objective picture. Yet
the map reveals DuBois’ own assumptions. He
mapped African Americans according to their social
and economic condition, classifying the “vicious
and criminal” classes in black, the poor and working
classes in blue and green respectively, and the middle
and upper classes in red. DuBois’ profile of the black
neighborhood showed considerable variation, with
some rough blocks very near prosperous ones. But
even economically comfortable blacks, he found,
were invisible in a segregated city.
Like all progressive reformers, DuBois had values
of his own, and his study is full of admonitions to
both the white and the black communities. He held
African Americans responsible for a significant
amount of the city’s crime, which constituted “a
menace to a civilized people.” He stressed an ethic
of thrift and industry, and commented extensively on
what he saw as the profligate and immoral ways of
lower-class blacks, who shunned traditional family
life and middle-class values. It was incumbent on
the white community, he wrote, to examine its own
racism and bigotry. But it was the “talented tenth”
whom he addressed most pointedly, advocating an
intellectual and moral aristocracy of black leaders
that would challenge white perceptions and raise up
all African Americans.
The larger importance of DuBois study—and his
map—was the emphasis placed on the malleability
of society and the importance of circumstance.
Black poverty, he insisted, had less to do with
innate inferiority than the persistent segregation
and discrimination that inhibited mobility. If such
arguments seem patently obvious to us today, it is
because DuBois brought a more detached lens to
the study of race. Despite his own assumptions, he
insisted that both racial attitudes and behaviors had
been learned, and could therefore be changed.RACE AND THE LIMITS OF MOBILITY
W. E. B. DuBois, “The Seventh Ward
of Philadelphia,” in The Philadelphia
Negro, 1899