Black Metropolis. A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City. By St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co. 809 pp. $5.00

For over a half century, perhaps the best scholarly work exploring African American life in large, industrialized, northern cities with expanding populations has been St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton's Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1945). However, a formal history examining businesses as part of an institutional structure, the role of a professional class, religion and the church, and political organization was never undertaken in Black Metropolis. The present volume presents the contributing factors that produced the contemporarily recognized dynamism of the period between 1920 and 1929 as well as the many impediments encountered. Hindsight has produced a view of life in this vibrant area of settlement, one that was not yet the “ghetto” that future historians in the 1960s would envision and write about.

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BeforeThe Philadelphia Negro: Residential Segregation in a Nineteenth-Century Northern City

Social Science History ◽

10.1017/ssh.2016.27 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 40 (4) ◽

pp. 683-706 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

John R. Logan ◽

Benjamin Bellman

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

Social History ◽

Residential Segregation ◽

Spatial Configuration ◽

Class Composition ◽

Black Residents ◽

Northern Cities ◽

Black Populations ◽

The Philadelphia Negro ◽

Northern City

Although some scholars treat racial residential segregation in northern cities as a twentieth-century phenomenon, recent research on New York and Chicago has shown that black-white segregation was already high and rising by 1880. We draw on data from the Philadelphia Social History Project and other new sources to study trends in this city as far back as 1850 and extending to 1900, a time when DuBois had completed his epic study of The Philadelphia Negro. Segregation of “free negroes” in Philadelphia was high even before the Civil War but did not increase as the total and black populations grew through 1900. Geocoded information from the full-count data from the 1880 Census makes it possible to map the spatial configuration of black residents in fine detail. At the scale of the street segment, segregation in that year was extraordinarily high, reflecting a micropattern in which many blacks lived in alleys and short streets. Although there was considerable class variation in the black community, higher-status black households lived in areas that were little different in racial and class composition than lower-status households.

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This Liberal City

10.1093/oso/9780197530474.003.0009 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 114-124

Author(s):

Laura Arnold Leibman

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

Jewish Life ◽

People Of Color ◽

Religious Leader ◽

The South ◽

Free People Of Color ◽

The Caribbean ◽

Free People ◽

Northern City

In July of 1820, Isaac Lopez Brandon and his mother landed in Philadelphia, where they joined the growing community of wealthy free people of color who flocked to the northern city from the South and the Caribbean. As in New York, in Philadelphia gradual emancipation led to new opportunities and instigated a racial backlash. While some Jewish Philadelphians worked on behalf of abolition, others owned the print shops and newspapers that published articles fomenting anti-Black ire. Money would ease the Brandons’ path. Philadelphia would be the first place that Isaac’s mother positioned herself not as Lopez or Gill, but as Mrs. Brandon, despite the fact there is no evidence she married Abraham Rodrigues Brandon. Behind the scenes, Abraham helped his niece’s husband secure a job as hazan (religious leader) of the congregation. As in New York, Sarah’s in-laws helped smooth their transition into Jewish life.

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