First Colored "Fellow" Appointed.
    PHILADELPHIA, Sept. 29.—Dr. W. E. Dubois, colored, who was graduated from Harvard College several years ago, and who studied in the German universities, has been appointed to a Fellowship in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the first one of his race to hold such a position in this university. He will be on assistant to Dr. Samuel Lindsay in sociology. Dr. Dubois will not be considered a member of the Faculty, and will not lecture at college. His work will be among the colored population of Philadelphia. He will make a house-to-house investigation of the colored settlements, giving to the university authorities the results of his observations.
————————

 Robert Williams' Notes: The double quotation marks around ' Fellow ' in the title are presented here as printed in the original text. Also, DuBois's name did not have an uppercase 'B' in the original text.

     "Dr. DuBois read a scholarly paper treating of the social condition of the Negro. He reviewed the great national upheaval in the interests of his people and outlined the problems consequent therefrom. The present he viewed as the critical period in the development of the Negro." [p.292]

  201      WILLIAM E. BURGHARDT DU BOIS    The Philadelphia Negro  A Social Study. Philadelphia: Published for the University, Ginn &: Co., Selling Agents, Boston, 1899

---

 An Afro-American intellectual, Harvard's first Negro Ph.D., and a teacher in Southern Black colleges, Du Bois brought a unique perspective to American scholarship. He had worked under George Santayana and William James at Harvard, and was strongly influenced by Charles Booth and Beatrice Webb, British activists who sought to understand and alleviate the condition of the urban poor. In 1896, while an assistant in sociology at the University of Penn­sylvania, Du Bois and his young wife moved into the Seventh Ward, which ran from Spruce to South streets and from Seventh Street to the Schuylkill River, the historic center of the local Black settlement.
     Assisted by workers from the nearby College Settlement House, he charted the neighborhood and surveyed the population, investigating occupations, health, population statistics, the family, education, crime, religion, social life and interracial relations. "l determined to put science into sociology," he wrote of The Philadelphia Negro; "I was going to study the facts, any and all facts . . . and by measurement and comparison, and research, work up to any generalizations which I could."
     Du Bois' study marshalled facts contradicting the prevailing racist assump­tions. He depicted the Philadelphia Negro community in all its diversity. He had no anti-historical bias, and so used 18th and early 19th-century material that had been largely ignored. And, according to his bibliography, he foundimportant resources in the Library Company, as have students of the Afro-American experience ever since. Our copy of the rare first edition was given us by the University of Pennsylvania shortly after it was published.
————————

 Robert Williams's Note: Excluded here is a facsimile of the title page of The Philadelphia Negro that was displayed on p.270.

African American scholar, educator, and activist. A founder of the NAACP. From 1896-1897, he lived in the College Settlement House at 617 Carver (now Rodman) Street while collecting data for his classic study, published in 1899, The Philadelphia Negro.

 In stressing circumstance and contingency, Du Bois demonstrated structural inequities of which many whites were largely unaware, in the process leveling a powerful rejoinder to then prevalent arguments that used race theory, evolutionary science, and scriptural interpretation to justify discrimination. Du Bois hoped this work would be supplemented by similar studies of other cities, yet what began as a local study came, by default, to stand for all of urban Black America. Most of Du Bois’s methods lay dormant, re-emerging only in the 1920s—in Chicago again, with the rise of the Chicago School of Sociology. A fair hearing for his forthright and formidable conclusions, meanwhile, waited longer still. Du Bois’s study has enjoyed a renaissance in contemporary scholars’ investigations of poverty, race, and political economy, and The Philadelphia Negro continues to inform readers with its poignant representation of one of the great forgotten communities in modern American history, whose vitality, diversity, and challenges still linger in its pages.

    The first of these works is not merely a credit to its author and to the race of which he is a member; it is a credit to American scholarship, and a distinct and valuable addition to the world's stock of knowledge concerning an important and obscure theme. It is the sort of book of which we have too few, and of which it is impossible that one should have too many. That the "negro problem" is among the gravest and most involved, and difficult, of American life, is increasingly obvious; it ought by this time to be equally obvious that we can derive no considerable help toward its solution from the sentimental or prejudiced writings which abound, both north and south, on the subject. Here is an inquiry, covering a specific field and a considerable period of time, and prosecuted with candor, thoroughness, and critical judgment, its results being interpreted with intelligence and sympathy. We have no space to report or discuss the contents of the work, but we have long held that it is in monographs like this that we shall be likely to find the most trustworthy help in solving our great racial problem. If a similar study could be made in a score of cities, in various parts of the country, and in particular rural districts of the south, a basis of accurate and detailed knowledge concerning the condition of the race would be laid, on which conclusion could safely be founded.
    Mr. Washington's work is not that of a scholar, but of a shrewd, sane and tactful leader of the people and administrator of affairs. He knows both races, and both sections of the country, and seeks to be a mediator between extreme opinions and programs. His book is a contribution, not to knowledge, but to that good temper and good sense which is perhaps of equal importance. ————————

 Robert Williams's Note 1: "Negro" is not capitalized in the original text. Moreover, we might wonder about Du Bois's reaction to the tone of the review, which -- although laudatory of Du Bois' efforts -- did not fully escape a patronizing tenor.
R.W.'s Note 2: It can be observed that W.F. Blackman seemed to be in agreement with the research agenda that Du Bois had written about in his "Preface" to the 1899 edition of The Philadelphia Negro (TPN). With reference to TPN and his recent "Negroes of Farmville, Virginia" study [info], Du Bois wrote in TPN's Preface:
R.W.'s Note 3: Washington's The Future of the American Negro can be downloaded in several formats at the Internet Archive [here].

     Very much of current discussion of the negro problem is wide of the mark because it is based on fragmentary observations and inadequate materials. There is great need of systematic and thorough local studies of the conditions of life under which colored people live in our great cities. A model for such studies is found in the brilliant essay of a colored student and teacher who has won distinction by his writings. Professor W. E. B. Du Bois has collected a vast amount of information in relation to the Philadelphia negro, his history, domestic relations, education, occupations, health, organized associations, crime, pauperism, social consideration and opportunities, and political outlook. Miss Isabel Eaton, fellow of the College Settlements' Association, has added a valuable report on the domestic service of the colored people. When similar local studies are made, as they ought to be made, in other cities, and in rural communities, the general plan of this investigation will be found very useful.
————————

 Robert Williams's Note: "Negro" is not capitalized in the original text.

 The trouble with the standard account of American sociology’s birth is that it happened not at the University of Chicago in the 1920s, but at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1890s; rather than being led by a group of classically influenced white men, it was directed by W. E. B. Du Bois, a German-trained African American with a Ph.D. from Harvard. His 1899 study, The Philadelphia Negro, anticipated in every way the program of theory and research that later became known as the Chicago School. Although not generally recognized as such, it represented the first true example of American social scientific research, preceding the work of Park and Burgess by at least two decades. Were it not for the short-sighted racism of Penn’s faculty and administration, which refused to acknowledge the presence -- let alone the accomplishments of a black man or to offer him a faculty appointment, the maturation of the discipline might have been advanced by two decades and be known to posterity as the Pennsylvania School of Sociology. Instead, Du Bois went on to a distinguished career as a public intellectual, activist, and journalist, and the University of Chicago, not the University of Pennsylvania, came to dominate the field.

     In The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois set out to provide a comprehensive analysis of Philadelphia's Seventh Ward, then the largest concentration of blacks in the city. He developed six interview and enumeration protocols. He rejected the reigning ideas in social science which would have faulted basic black capabilities for the impoverished condition of most blacks. Instead, he crafted a historically grounded portrait of blacks whose circumstances, by and large, had clear social or environmental roots. Although this is necessarily a compacted treatment, his analytical framework stressed the interplay of six factors: (1) a history of enslavement, servitude, and oppression; (2) demographic trends and compositional factors (for example, disproportion of women to men); (3) economic positioning and competition with free whites both native born and European immigrants; (4) racial prejudice and discrimination; (5) the resources, internal structure, dynamics, and leadership of the black community itself; and (6) moral agency and black self-determination. Of all these, the burden of slavery and the weak position of blacks in the economic structure were surely the primary factors in Du Bois's model. Du Bois was thus careful to not make prejudice the central or most important variable in his analysis. Yet the force of prejudice was ubiquitous and of unavoidable consequence in his analysis of the dynamics of race relations in Philadelphia.  [pp.188-189]

     A century ago, Du Bois published The Philadelphia Negro, a work now recognized as a sociological classic. He developed a highly detailed portrait of black social life in Philadelphia. Part of the legacy of his analysis has lost the theoretical holism which linked structural issues of the economy and labor market dynamics to more social psychological and microsocial issues of prejudice and interpersonal discrimination. Sociology would do well to revisit the model Du Bois established.  [p.198]

. . .Du Bois drew on the idea of heterogeneity, specifically within the urban context, to illustrate Black communities as complex and organized arrangements of a diverse though marginalized population. As Du Bois sought to show the Black community was diverse despite being otherwise thought of as homogeneous. Using the examples of Philadelphia Negroes, Du Bois demonstrated that the Black community is comprised of varying arrangements of diverse though equally racialized constituents and practices.

This article demonstrates that the various frameworks for class, politics, and religion emergent in Du Bois's The Philadelphia Negro rely heavily on the notion of heterogeneity to provide new sociological knowledge. Du Bois's use of heterogeneity demonstrates the importance and influence of the economic and political regimes of cities, religious diversity, and variations in social class while also affirming and asserting the importance of race, history, and Black agency. Furthermore, Du Bois demonstrates that issues of access rely on the sociologist's understanding and use of heterogeneity to analyze and refer to research subjects such as the "Philadelphia Negro."

 address the question of what racial and class relations DuBois's apparently pro-feminist discourse constructed. To answer ... the question requires us to regard masculinity as not fixed but fluid and constructed in relation to representations of woman, and to analyze how DuBois positioned his own elite black male agency through pro-feminist discursive practices.

  [W]hat are some of the lasting sociological contributions associated with this pioneering empirical study of urban life? In his classic 1938 study, "Urbanism as a Way of Life," Wirth identified size, density and heterogeneity as three fundamental identifying characteristics of urban society. While Du Bois did not directly address density issues in The Philadelphia Negro, he did investigate the size and the heterogeneous nature of Philadelphia's African American community. Distinct social classes within the Seventh Ward were specified, and Du Bois particularly addressed the circumstances of the "submerged tenth," a group comprised of the urban poor and criminal classes. This group appears to foreshadow Wilson's (1996; 1987) discussions of an urban "underclass" (Bobo, 2007).
 Du Bois also identified and evaluated additional structural factors impacting African American quality of life in urban settings, like organizational support networks, family structure, living conditions, and racial discrimination. However, rather than taking a "system-blame" or "culture-blame" approach to the study of social problems, Du Bois focused on the interaction between structural inequality and "social uplift." These social forces were perceived as being complimentary rather than mutually exclusive. [. . . .] Methodological triangulation is utilized to provide a comprehensive analysis of life in Philadelphia's Seventh Ward just before the turn of the nineteenth century. Census data, a survey of the Seventh Ward and ethnographic description were combined in this inductive study of a particular social group in a specific social environment.
 Within this seminal study, the reader encounters early formulations of the theory of ethnic succession, the role of economic enclaves in minority communities, a functional analysis of the Black Church and an awareness of the inverse association between mortality and social class. The Philadelphia Negro also provided a case study for demonstrating how quantitative and qualitative data analysis can be employed as complimentary research approaches.
————————

 Robert Williams' Note 1: An Internet search for Louis Wirth's "Urbanism as a Way of Life" (American Journal of Sociology, 44:1 (July 1938): 1-24) may yield (un)expected dividends: e.g., via Google.
Note 2: Citations to Wilson and Bobo, as referenced in the text, are:
* Bobo, Lawrence. 2007. "Introduction." In The Philadelphia Negro, by W.E.B. Du Bois, xxv-xxx. New York: Oxford University Press.
* Wilson, William Julius. 1987. The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
* Wilson, William Julius. 1996. When Work Disappears. New York: Knopf.

 Note 1: Within the text and in the footnotes DuBois cited ASI by the year 1848 (ex., pp. 200, 287, 304). In TPN's bibliography he specified the correct year of publication as 1849 (p. 421). Also notice that the book title spelled "Colour" so and not, as DuBois did, "Color".
Note 2: The following list presents the places in TPN where DuBois cited ASI; the list is extensive but not necessarily complete.