Book Review

These nine essays are the polished yield of a two-day seminar at the University of Pennsylvania devoted to The Philadelphia Negro, W. E. B. Du Bois's once shamefully neglected study of race and urban poverty whose centennial was commemorated in 1998. The editors, Michael B. Katz and Thomas J. Sugrue, professors of history at the University of Pennsylvania, have grouped their contributors under three headings ("Du Bois and the Color Line," "Du Bois's Philadelphia," and "The Problem of the Twentieth Century"), to which they provide an insightful introduction to explain why Philadelphia's leading white citizens invited a twenty-eight-year-old scholar and Harvard University's first African American Ph.D. to assume an ambiguous two-year university appointment in order to investigate the generally deplorable conditions of people of color in the city's Seventh Ward. African American loyalty to the Republican political machine having greatly complicated prospects for civic reform, the leading citizens expected Du Bois's study to provide facts and figures that could be used to telling advantage in their next campaign to gain control of city hall.

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Mindful of his mandate and somewhat predisposed to blame victims of poverty and racism for their own predicament, Du Bois nevertheless intended his Philadelphia study (based on meticulously gathered evidence) to promote policies for racial understanding and gradual improvement of the material and cultural conditions of black people not only in the City of Brotherly Love but in the nation as well. The Rutgers University historian Mia Bay presents a particularly sensitive reading of the monograph and of its author's subtle strategy to subvert his sponsors' racialist expectations. Significantly titling her essay "The World Was Thinking Wrong about Race," a Du Bois quotation conveying his conviction of the power of ideas to transform society, Professor Bay writes lucidly of Du Bois's supreme confidence "in the ultimate convergence between science and justice" and of his disdain, therefore, for the theological underpinnings invoked by an older tradition of African American self-justification.

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