Never Been a Time (2 page)

In his landmark 1899 study,
The Philadelphia Negro
, the young black sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois wrote that the rapid growth in the working-class population of the city caused by the industrial revolution and the economic recovery following the War of 1812, both of which provided new jobs that attracted many thousands to the city, would “prove disastrous to the Philadelphia Negro” beginning in the second decade of the nineteenth century. Du Bois wrote:

Philadelphia was the natural gateway between the North and the South, and for a long time there passed through it a stream of free Negroes and fugitive slaves toward the North, and of recaptured Negroes and kidnapped colored persons toward the South. By 1820 the northward stream increased [and] new installments of Pennsylvania freedmen, and especially their children, began to flock to Philadelphia. At the same time the stream of foreign immigration to this country began to swell, and by 1830 aggregated half a million souls annually [creating] a fierce economic struggle … The new industries attracted the Irish, Germans and other immigrants; [Native-born] Americans, too, were flocking to the city, and soon to natural race antipathies was added a determined effort to displace
Negro labor—an effort which had the aroused prejudice of many of the better classes, and the poor quality of the new black immigrants, to give it aid and comfort. To all this was soon added a problem of crime and poverty. Numerous complaints of petty thefts, house-breaking, and assaults on peaceable citizens were traced to certain classes of Negroes.
³

W. E. B. Du Bois

During that period, blacks never made up more than 9.5 percent of the city's population. But there were much higher percentages of blacks in some neighborhoods, and those tended to be the neighborhoods where recent immigrants and other poor people lived. Poor whites and blacks also were competing for the same menial jobs. And there was a widespread and partly accurate belief among white working men that blacks were so desperate for work and so beaten down by slavery they would take the most menial jobs for less money, thus driving wages down.

At the same time, the militance of Philadelphia's many abolitionists—some of whom went so far as to suggest that blacks should not only be free but equal in all ways to whites, which was unthinkable even to many
opponents of slavery—aroused equally passionate opposition among many whites. As Du Bois put it, “The agitation of the Abolitionists was the match that lighted this fuel.”

In 1819, three white women stoned a black woman to death on a Philadelphia street. There were further attacks on blacks in the 1820s, and anti-abolitionist and antiblack riots broke out in 1829, in 1833, and most terribly in 1834, when, in the heat of August, hundreds of white men and boys, inflamed by a fight between white policemen and blacks, marched into black neighborhoods wielding clubs, brickbats, and paving stones. They attacked people on the streets and wrecked houses and churches, killing one black working man and seriously injuring several others. The riot lasted for three days. The rioters, who called what they were doing “hunting the nigs,” succeeded in driving many black families out of their homes into other parts of Philadelphia, into rural Pennsylvania, and across the Delaware River into New Jersey. It took three hundred special constables and a troop of armed militia to stop the rioting.
⁴

A committee that investigated the riot reported that the rioters felt the blacks were flooding the labor market, driving down wages, and taking jobs away from whites. The rioters were also angry because some blacks, particularly in the worst slum neighborhoods where criminals held great power, refused to turn black lawbreakers over to the police. One of the complaints heard from rioters suggests that violence against blacks was so easily provoked that it could even spring from a seemingly inoffensive difference in religious practices. The report cited white objections to “the disorderly and noisy manner in which some of the colored congregations indulge, to the annoyance and disturbance of the neighborhood in which such meeting houses are located.” The goal of the rioters, the committee determined, was to drive blacks out of the city.
⁵

Racism and racial violence were ingrained in the makeup of the United States, starting with European settlers taking possession of the continent by racial slaughter, telling themselves that the bronze-skinned people who already lived there were not really human, and thus the land was essentially unoccupied. Even a difference in skin color was hardly necessary for tribal prejudice to emerge in a land enmeshed in an experiment that had never been tried before—bringing together from across the seas millions of people who had previously lived in nations or states or regions or cities or tribal enclaves that had been battling one another across ever-shifting borders for hundreds
and even thousands of years. If a white man whose family had lived for generations in the British Isles burned with hatred for another white man whose family was also from the British Isles but from a different clan, how much more easily might his animosity be aroused by a black man who he thought wanted his job.

The Philadelphia rioters were in great part Irish immigrants. They were Irish Catholics, not the Protestants known as Scotch Irish, who had begun immigrating to America somewhat earlier, encountering in their turn the prejudice and the territorial resistance from native-born Americans that seems to be a part of the American immigrant experience going back to Revolutionary days. Even Benjamin Franklin, thought of as a great egalitarian, referred to the Scotch Irish as “white savages.”
⁶

Thousands of Irish Catholics crossed the Atlantic every year in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The number increased when the British removed all legal barriers to immigration in 1827, and jumped again around 1845, when the potato blight produced a famine. Irish immigrants crowded into the cities of the Northeast, often living close to poor blacks. The newcomers found themselves under attack, not from blacks but from other whites. American-born Protestants staged ugly anti-Irish and anti-Catholic riots in Philadelphia, Boston, New York, and other American cities. They blamed the Irish Catholics for taking away jobs from “native Americans” (their term for native-born whites) and causing an increase in crime, public drunkenness, and pauperism, and a general lowering of the standards of this nation founded by Puritans.

The Irish had come to this country expecting “a sort of Halfway stage to Heaven,” according to Thomas Grattan, the Irish-born British consul in Boston in the period. Instead, they found a nightmarish existence in crowded and disease-ridden slums, slaving from dawn to dusk in the most menial sort of labor, when they could find work at all. An Irish immigrant who found a life of “shame and poverty” in the United States wrote home that he had recently heard a black man say, “My master is a great tyrant, he treats me as badly as if I was a common Irishman.”
⁷

Like the blacks they encountered in the slums, the Irish who were pouring into Philadelphia were poor and badly educated, came mostly from rural areas, and had little or no training or skills in the new industries that were coming to dominate the American economy. Irish immigrants discovered
bitterly that they had to compete with blacks for low-paying jobs, and they were enraged that some employers seemed to prefer blacks and that some blacks appeared to be rising above them—in a few cases, well above them—in society. Blacks became the scapegoats for the failure of the Irish immigrants to achieve anything remotely resembling the American dream.

The three-day riot in 1834 in Philadelphia mentioned above was similar in a striking number of ways to later race riots in American cities, including the racial massacres of the World War I period in East St. Louis and other cities. Most of the rioters were young men and boys, many of them still in their teens. They were mainly from lower social classes. A newspaper referred to them as “the most brutish and lowest caste of society,” although also among those arrested were two house painters, a cabinet maker, a carpenter, and several other artisans.

Rioters, as well as many whites who did not take part, justified the riots as a defensible vigilante response to an increase in black crime. However, many white participants in the riot were recognized thieves, hoodlums, and ex-convicts. The
Philadelphia Inquirer
remarked, “There was little doubt that a large portion of the offenders were actuated solely from motives of plunder, as the pockets of some of the most active were found on examination filled with silver spoons and other valuables stolen from the blacks.”

There was a large group of onlookers, generally older and of a higher social class than the actual rioters, whose presence contributed to the mayhem. One observer of the Philadelphia riot said that it appeared that the “large body of spectators” who did nothing to stop the violence gave the rioters “more than common confidence in themselves.” It seemed as if the spectators “countenanced their operations and in one or two instances coincided with their conduct by clapping”—their approval encouraging the rioters to beat blacks savagely with clubs and bricks and demolish their homes and churches.

Initially the rioters seemed to focus mainly on young black men and places where they assembled, but as the riot progressed, according to one eyewitness, “The mob exhibited more than fiendish brutality, beating and mutilating some of the old, confiding and unoffending blacks, with a savageness surpassing anything we could have believed men capable of.”

And there was yet another crucial similarity to the attacks on blacks by mobs of whites that would follow in decades to come: Although sixty white
rioters were arrested, only ten actually appeared in court and none of them was fined, jailed, or otherwise punished.
⁸

In 1835, a mob of whites burned down an entire row of houses in a black neighborhood, and hundreds of black women and children fled Philadelphia, fearing a racial massacre was soon to come. Three years later, a riot erupted at the dedication of Pennsylvania Hall, a large abolitionist meeting place. The hall was burned to the ground. The next night, a mob burned down the Shelter for Colored Orphans. Antiblack riots continued into the next decade. In 1842, more than one thousand African Americans marched in Philadelphia to support the temperance and abolition movements, often allied in those days. They were met downtown by a mob of whites—mostly Irish—attacked, and beaten. The mob burned down a black meeting hall and church and looted homes until finally the militia was able to stop it by bringing in artillery.

In this and other riots in Philadelphia and elsewhere, the frequent attacks on churches, homes, and well-dressed blacks in particular seems to suggest that the rioters were in part motivated by resentment against the rise of a black middle class in a city with so many poor whites. But there seems to be no question that black crime was among the precipitating factors. The riots, Du Bois wrote, “received their chief moral support from the increasing crime of Negroes; A Cuban slave brained his master with a hatchet; two other murders by Negroes followed, and gambling, drunkenness and debauchery were widespread wherever Negroes settled.”
⁹

Du Bois, who had been commissioned by the University of Pennsylvania in 1896 to study what was generally referred to as “the Negro problem,” lived in Philadelphia's Seventh Ward, the predominantly black area he studied. The young sociologist, who ventured forth every day from the one-room, second-floor apartment he shared with his wife into a rough but vital African American neighborhood, did not—could not—deny that crime in the city's black slums was a real problem. It was one that neither his polite if threadbare upbringing in the Massachusetts Berkshires nor his education at Fisk, Harvard, and the University of Berlin did much to prepare him for. Although he noted that arrest and prison records could be misleading because blacks traditionally had been arrested “for less cause and given longer sentences than whites,” Du Bois still argued in
The Philadelphia Negro
that “the problem of Negro crime in Philadelphia from 1830 to 1850 arose from the
fact that less than one-fourteenth of the population was responsible for nearly a third of the serious crimes committed.”

He wrote that there were unquestionably special causes for the prevalence of crime among African Americans. The black man “had lately been freed from serfdom, he was the object of stinging oppression and ridicule, and paths of advancement open to many were closed to him. Consequently, the class of the shiftless, aimless, idle, discouraged and disappointed was proportionately larger.” At the root of the Negro problem, Du Bois said, was racial discrimination. “How long can a city teach its black children that the road to success is to have a white face?” he asked.

“Such discrimination is morally wrong, politically dangerous, industrially wasteful and socially silly. It is the duty of the whites to stop it, and do so primarily for their own sakes … [T]he cost of crime and pauperism, the growth of slums, and the pernicious influence of idleness and lewdness, cost the public far more than would the hurt to the feelings of a carpenter to work beside a black man, or a shop girl to start beside a darker mate.”
¹⁰