02.07.2021 | W.E.B. DU BOIS (1868 - 1963)
W.E.B. Du Bois
First published Wed Sep 13, 2017
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868–1963) believed that his life acquired its only deep significance through its participation in what he called “the Negro problem,” or, later, “the race problem.” Whether that is true or not, it is difficult to think of anyone, at any time, who examined the race problem in its many aspects more profoundly, extensively, and subtly than W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois was an activist and a journalist, a historian and a sociologist, a novelist, a critic, and a philosopher—but it is the race problem that unifies his work in these many domains.
Du Bois contributes to our specifically philosophical understanding of race and the race problem, because he treats these themes as objects of philosophical consideration—indeed, it is largely through an engagement with Du Bois’s work that many contemporary philosophers have come to appreciate race and race-related concerns as fruitful topics of philosophical reflection. Through his work in social philosophy, political philosophy, and the philosophy of art, Du Bois, for all intents and purposes, invented the field of philosophy and race, thereby unsettling and revising our views of the proper scope and aims of philosophical inquiry.
The times and life of W.E.B. Du Bois at Penn
In 1896, Du Bois was appointed an assistant instructor at Penn and began his investigation of the Seventh Ward of Philadelphia—research that he would turn into his groundbreaking work, “The Philadelphia Negro.”
Photo courtesy: W.E.B Du Bois Collection, Special Collections and University Archives, UMass Amherst Libraries
Ever since Africans were stolen from their homeland and forced to come to America as slaves, the United States has had what it used to call the “Negro Problem.”
During their enslavement, the foremost problem for African Americans, or “Negroes” as they were called at the time, was the inhumane institution of slavery itself: a legalized system of kidnapping, assault, mutilation, child abuse, rape, and murder.
Following emancipation in 1865, the “Negro Problem” manifested as a set of grave social ills affecting African Americans, such as crippling poverty, poor health and living conditions, and a wrath of crime, many a byproduct of generations of bondage, a failed Reconstruction, and continued racial violence and prejudice.
Black people were in Pennsylvania when William Penn, a slave-owner, first landed in 1682. Africans were brought to the region as slaves by the Swedes and Dutch.
In 1700, there were around 1,000 enslaved African Americans in Penn’s colony. By the middle of the century, when slavery in Pennsylvania reached its zenith, it had between 6,000 and 11,000 enslaved blacks. Most worked in factories in the Southeastern Pennsylvania region and entered the colony through the port of Philadelphia. The corner of Front and Market streets was once a thriving slave marketplace. The wealthiest Philadelphians owned two to four slaves.
Pennsylvania passed a law that gradually abolished slavery in 1780. By 1790, the time of the first census, there were 10,274 blacks in the state: 3,737 enslaved and 6,537 free.
Quasi-freedom in the Commonwealth caused a steady stream of free African Americans and fugitive slaves from the South to migrate to Philadelphia. By 1830, there were around 15,600 blacks in the city and county, mostly crowded in narrow backstreets and alleys.
Anti-black riots forced many African Americans to flee the city in the 1830s and ’40s. They returned during the 1850s, and increased following the Civil War, totaling 22,147 in 1870.
Big-city opportunities in the postwar period caused an influx of African Americans; in 1896, Philadelphia was home to around 45,000 blacks, and more than 1 million whites.
The city’s African-American population was the second largest among the 10 largest cities in the country, outnumbering Southern cities like Richmond, Va., Charleston, S.C., Atlanta, Ga., and Memphis, Tenn.
Widely spread across all wards of the city, a fifth of the city’s blacks congregated by mass in the crowded and dense, thickly populated Seventh Ward, where they formed 42 percent of the population.
Into this isolated and beleaguered, but burgeoning black world came famed author, scholar, sociologist, and activist W.E.B. Du Bois, before the accolades, before the fame, to study the “Negro Problems” of Philadelphia.
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