W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro : Lessons for Our Time

Criminologists rarely read W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899), a classic of enduring relevance. Rectifying that disciplinary blind spot requires an understanding of Du Bois’s remarkable life, from a Massachusetts boyhood to Fisk, Harvard, Berlin, and ultimately Philadelphia. White philanthropists, led by Susan P. Wharton, and University of Pennsylvania officials selected him to investigate “the Negro problem” in the city’s Seventh Ward. Building on Charles Booth’s London study and Jane Addams/Hull-House Residents’ Chicago study, Du Bois conducted 2,500 house-to-house surveys with 9,675 Black respondents. The project challenged racial stereotypes and showed that crime was the consequence of past and present discrimination. Much that he learned was specifically criminological. Decades before other scholars, Du Bois documented problems with official statistics and identified stable urban crime patterns. His insights on racial oppression lay the foundation for Black Criminology. The Philadelphia Negro has been interpreted differently across time and neglected for more than 125 years. The time has come to move it into the criminological canon and make it required reading.