During the 1970s, there were 3,907 homicides in Philadelphia. These tragedies are in part consequences of Philadelphia’s history of segregation, poverty, slum housing, job discrimination, and racially-biased policing that helped create the social conditions for these events to occur. Many social activists recognize that social inequality, not racial inferiority, is responsible for the racial disparity that exists between white and non-white communities in regard to poverty, violence, and crime. From as early as 1899, sociological studies like W.E.B. DuBois’s Philadelphia Negro explained that socioeconomic inequality, housing discrimination, and racial violence often created the conditions in which Black people fell into poverty, illiteracy, vice, and crime. DuBois also stressed that Black people were not inherently immoral or criminal, as influential pseudoscientists of the era asserted. Racist myths often encouraged wealthier residents to view the Black poor as threats to middle-class and all-white communities. This contributed to residents using the law and violence to strengthen residential segregation in their neighborhoods, notably during the Great Migration when 6.6 million Southern Black migrants inhabited Northern cities above the Mason-Dixon line where the percentage of African Americans was below 10% of the population.
From the 1890s onward, white and Black philanthropists, social workers, and college-aged volunteers established settlement houses like the Octavia Hill Association, the Whittier Centre, and the Wharton Centre to provide the Black poor with decent housing, employment, healthcare, and rehabilitation for juvenile delinquents. From the 1920s through the 1960s, sociologists discovered that youth in marginalized communities often became gang members because they felt ostracized in their society and desired to be accepted in some sort of community. Frederic Thrasher argued that poverty, social ostracism, and the desire for social belonging were influential factors in the formation of juvenile gangs. However, inclusive institutions with positive and influential mentors was a solution to gang activity.
During the 1940s and 1950s, Black social workers used participant observation to study, interact with, and rehabilitate gang members with athletics, weekly dances, trips, social clubs, and educational programs. This tradition of Black guardianship of juvenile gang members set a precedent for activists to utilize rehabilitative social welfare programs rather than tough-on-crime policing in response to gang violence. Policymakers, however, have often rejected rehabilitative social welfare in favor of punitive policies intended to quickly curb crime.
In the 1960s, sociologists like Lewis Yablonsky argued that youth gang activity was a reaction to community ostracism and socioeconomic disadvantage. While some gangs were “friendship organizations” with supposed codes of brotherhood, other gangs functioned as an outlet to channel [the] frustrations, aggressions, and hostilities they have about “school, family, the neighborhood, prejudice, or any other problems” into gang wars. Furthermore, as many social scientists have pointed out, including historian Eric Schneider, there is a correlation between social ostracism (based on race, class, and wealth) and violence that beckons us to pay attention if we are to preserve human life by ensuring racial equity.