The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study

2017 Reprint of 1899 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition software. The Philadelphia Negro is a sociological study of African Americans in Philadelphia written by W. E. B. Du Bois. Commissioned by the University of Pennsylvania and published in 1899 with the intent of identifying social problems present in the African American community, it was the first sociological case study of a black community in the United States and one of the earliest examples of sociology as a statistically based social science. Du Bois began to gather information for the study in August 1896. He deduced that, "the Negro problem looked at in one way is but the old-world questions of ignorance, poverty, crime, and the dislike of the stranger." He supports these claims with a statistical breakdown of the lives of African-Americans, their neighborhoods, incomes, etc. More than one hundred years after its original publication, The Philadelphia Negro remains a classic work. It is the first, and perhaps still the finest, example of engaged sociological scholarship—the kind of work that, in contemplating social reality, helps to change it.