Work · African & Africana Philosophy
The Philadelphia Negro
A door-to-door survey of Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward: one of the first empirical community studies in American sociology, tracing Black poverty to discrimination and history rather than to “race”.
Introduction
Du Bois carried out the study in 1896–97 for the University of Pennsylvania, which employed him as an “assistant in sociology” without a regular faculty post. Assisted by Isabel Eaton, who contributed a report on domestic service, he visited about 2,500 households in the Seventh Ward himself and combined these interviews with maps, census data and history. The book describes occupations, family life, health, crime, churches and associations, and also the class differences within the Black population. Its conclusions address duties of both white Philadelphians and Black residents. Long ignored by white academic sociology, it is now regarded as one of the first major empirical studies of an urban community in the United States.
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