The Protestant Establishment Revisited by E. Digby Baltzell

Author:E. Digby Baltzell [Baltzell, E. Digby]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General, Social Classes & Economic Disparity
ISBN: 9781351475952
Google: VxwuDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-12T03:26:47+00:00

Note

1. Douglas F. Dowd, Thorstein Veblen (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966).

9

W.E.B. Du Bois and The Philadelphia Negro

In an appendix to his famous study of the American Negro, An American Dilemma, Gunnar Myrdal discussed the need for further research in the Negro community. “We cannot close this description of what a study of a Negro community should be,” he wrote, “without calling attention to the study which best meets our requirements, a study which is now all but forgotten. We refer to W.E.B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, published in 1899.”1 One would hardly expect a greater tribute to this early classic in American sociology. It is no wonder that there has not been a scholarly study of the American Negro in the twentieth century which has not referred to and utilized the empirical findings, the research methods, and the theoretical point of view of this seminal book.

A classic is sometimes defined as a book that is often referred to but seldom read. The Philadelphia Negro written by a young scholar who subsequently became one of the three most famous Negro leaders in American history, surely meets this requirement. Though always referred to and frequently quoted by specialists, it is now seldom read by the more general student of sociology. For not only has the book been out of print for almost half a century; it has been virtually unobtainable, as my own experience of almost twenty years of searching in vain for a copy in secondhand bookstores attests. Even at the University of Pennsylvania, under whose sponsorship the research was undertaken and the book published, although one copy has been preserved in the archives and one on microfilm, the sole copy listed in the catalogue and available for students in the library has been unaccountably missing from the shelves for several years. In writing this introduction, I am using a copy lent me by my good friend, Professor Ira Reid of Haverford College, a one-time colleague and friend of the late Professor Du Bois at Atlanta University. Modern students, then, will certainly benefit from a readily available paperback edition of this study of the Negro community in Philadelphia at the turn of the nineteenth century.

In order to gain a full understanding of any book, one ought to know something of the life and intellectual background of its author, the place of the book in the history of the discipline (in this case sociology), as well as the climate of intellectual opinion and the social conditions of the era in which the book was written. Because The Philadelphia Negro—like all his other writings—was so intimately a part of the life of W.E.B. Du Bois, I shall begin this introduction with a brief outline of his career. Du Bois himself wrote in his seventies: “My life had its significance and its only deep significance because it was part of a problem; but that problem was, as I continue to think, the central problem of the greatest of the world’s democracies and so the problem of the future world.

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