WRPR 116: Black Philadelphia (HC)

In 1897 the promising young sociologist William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963) was given a temporary post as Assistant in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania in order to conduct a systematic investigation of social conditions in the seventh ward of Philadelphia. The product of those studies was the first great empirical book on the Negro in American society.

W.E.B. DuBois immortalized Philadelphia's Black Seventh Ward neighborhood, one of America's oldest urban black communities, in his 1899 sociological study The Philadelphia Negro. In the century after DuBois's study, however, the district has been transformed into a largely white upper middleclass neighborhood.Black Citymakers revisits the Black Seventh Ward, documenting a century of banking and tenement collapses, housing activism, black-led anti-urban renewal mobilization, and post-Civil Rights political change from the perspective of the Black Seventh Warders.

Colored Amazons is a groundbreaking historical analysis of the crimes, prosecution, and incarceration of black women in Philadelphia at the turn of the twentieth century.

Lisa Levenstein reframes highly charged debates over the origins of chronic African American poverty and the social policies and political struggles that led to the postwar urban crisis. Countering stereotypes that have long plagued public debate, Levenstein offers a new paradigm for understanding postwar U.S. history.

Through a postcolonial lens, this story captures the lived resistances, highlights the socio-historical context, and examines the discourse of former members of the Black Panther Party and local residents of Philadelphia from 1968-1974. Overall, this book provides insight from a multiplicity of sources to better capture the identity(-ies) and complexity of the organization. Not only does this text resolve a dearth in the literature that highlights the multiple facets of the Black Panther Party (especially at the local level), but it serves as a template on effective strategies for researchers, educators, and policymakers to implement on their quest for social and educational transformation.

In this book, Richard Kent Evans tells the story of MOVE - a story that has been virtually lost outside of Philadelphia. What was MOVE? Many MOVE members thought of themselves as belonging to a religion, and they sought legal recognition. But to others, including other religious groups like theQuakers and, more importantly, the courts, MOVE was anything but a religion. Evans dives deep into how we decide what constitutes a genuine religious tradition, and the enormous consequences of that decision.

Michael Awkward's Philadelphia Freedoms captures the energetic contestations over the meanings of racial politics and black identity during the post-King era in the City of Brotherly Love. Awkward closes his examination of racial trauma and black identity with a discussion of candidate Barack Obama's speech on race at Philadelphia's Constitution Center, pointing to the conflict between the nation's ideals and the racial animus that persists even into the second term of America's first black president.

A study of the circumstances surrounding the University of Pennsylvania's decision to increase its black enrolment, and the consequences that followed. Focusing on the role of black student activism, it traces the controversy and debate over issues such as assimilation and integration.