During the Great Migration (1916-1970), Black migration and settlement into all-white neighborhoods triggered resistance from white segregationists in the form of race riots, police power, and discriminatory housing laws. Additionally, Black people faced de facto segregation in Northern cities where they were banned from patronizing lunch counters, hotels, restaurants, and theaters. However, many African Americans were still able to overcome those racial barriers and achieve homeownership. From 1908 to 1935, many Black Philadelphians achieved middle-class status as teachers, policemen, businessmen, physicians, and clergymen. Black homeownership in Philadelphia increased by over 1,200%, making it an exceptional yet capitalist-driven city with the most Black homeowners above the Mason-Dixon line.
Prior to World War II, middle-class African Americans began to move away from the slums and into adequate housing in all-white neighborhoods for a chance at a better life. However, racial outbursts of residential violence forced many African Americans back into the impoverished slums which they fought to avoid. Moreover, white residents’ belief in racist stereotypes of African Americans as prone to “poverty, crime, and sexual promiscuity” justified their resistance to desegregation with violence, restrictive covenants, and white flight.2
Blackness and poverty were social stigmas often equated with immorality and crime. In sociologist W.E.B. DuBois’ 1899 monograph, The Philadelphia Negro, he discussed the competing theories of nature versus nurture in regard to the “submerged tenth,” a term coined by English theologian William Booth in his 1890 book, In Darkest England, and the Way Out, referring to the bottom tenth of the population that remained entrenched in poverty. DuBois argued that the intersecting stigmas of Blackness and poverty led to stereotyping African American residents of South Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward as inherently vulnerable to vice and crime. From August 1896 to December 1897, DuBois and his assistant Isabel Eaton conducted 5,000 interviews, mapped landmarks and social institutions, and administered questionnaires to residents. Through his research he determined that poor Black people were not a threat to the morality and safety of society. As DuBois explained, “ignorance, poverty, crime, and the dislike of the stranger” were factors supporting white racism against African Americans through socioeconomic inequality, housing discrimination, and racial violence that created conditions in which Black people fell into poverty, illiteracy, vice, and crime. Nevertheless, he concluded that while there were African Americans who engaged in crime, Black people were not inherently immoral or criminal because of their race, as pseudoscientists asserted. These racist myths encouraged many outside of the “submerged tenth” to view the Black poor as threats to middle-class and all-white communities.