The Philadelphia Negro

W. E. B. Du Bois

ene 2007 · Cosimo, Inc.

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Originally published in 1899, The Philadelphia Negro is a sociological study of the blacks living in Philadelphia in 1896-7. DuBois was hired by the University of Pennsylvania to conduct the study, under what some believe to be false pretenses. Some suspect that the study was meant, by those funding it, to show how the black community was responsible for a number of problems within the city. The report they received, however, was of quite a different nature. The Philadelphia Negro was the first sociological study of black urban Americans ever conducted. It detailed their lives, their social structures, their education, their marriages, and their jobs. The study sought to illuminate ways in which philanthropy could help the people living in Philadelphia's Seventh Ward. It did not presume, as many people did at the time, that blacks lived in poor conditions due to an innate weakness in their race. This scholarly work serves as an excellent reference for students of history and sociology. American writer, civil rights activist, and scholar WILLIAM EDWARD BURGHARDT DUBOIS (1868-1963) was the first black man to receive a PhD from Harvard University. A cofounder of the NAACP, he wrote a number of important books, including Black Folk, Then and Now (1899) and The Negro (1915).

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Civil rights leader and author, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts on February 23, 1868. He earned a B.A. from both Harvard and Fisk universities, an M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard, and studied at the University of Berlin. He taught briefly at Wilberforce University before he came professor of history and economics at Atlanta University in Ohio (1896-1910). There, he wrote The Souls of Black Folk (1903), in which he pointed out that it was up to whites and blacks jointly to solve the problems created by the denial of civil rights to blacks. In 1905, Du Bois became a major figure in the Niagara Movement, a crusading effort to end discrimination. The organization collapsed, but it prepared the way for the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), in which Du Bois played a major role. In 1910, he became editor of the NAACP magazine, a position he held for more than 20 years. Du Bois returned to Atlanta University in 1932 and tried to implement a plan to make the Negro Land Grant Colleges centers of black power. Atlanta approved of his idea, but later retracted its support. When Du Bois tried to return to NAACP, it rejected him too. Active in several Pan-African Congresses, Du Bois came to know Fwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana, and Jono Kenyatta the president of Kenya. In 1961, the same year Du Bois joined the Communist party, Nkrumah invited him to Ghana as a director of an Encyclopedia Africana project. He died there on August 27, 1963, after becoming a citizen of that country.