INTRODUCTION

After a century of systematic exclusion from the sociological canon, W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899) (hereafter The Philadelphia Negro) has started to gain respect and recognition among social scientists (e.g., Anderson Reference Anderson1996; Hunter Reference Hunter2013a, Reference Hunter2013b; Katz and Sugrue, Reference Jones, Katz and Sugrue1998; Morris Reference Molotch2007, Reference Morris and Calhoun2015; Rabaka Reference Pizer2010). In the realm of classical urban sociology, this groundbreaking volume has long been overshadowed by works such as Georg Simmel’s “The Metropolis and Mental Life” ([1903] 2002), Max Weber’s The City ([1921] 1958), and Robert Park and Ernest Burgess’s The City (1925). The omission of Du Bois’s contributions to early urban theory is doubly problematic: not only did Du Bois advance crucial theoretical concerns that were overlooked by his contemporaries, but The Philadelphia Negro preceded all of these canonical works.

Prior to the swell of renewed interest in Du Bois’s sociology, The Philadelphia Negro was often cast—along with the other major sociological work of Du Bois’s early career, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)^{Footnote 1}—into the “social realist” literature with works such as Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives (1890) and Jane Addams’ edited volume Hull House Maps and Papers (1895) (e.g., Castronovo Reference Castronovo2007; Pizer Reference Pattillo1995).^{Footnote 2} The bracketing of Du Bois’s scholarship as realist literature rather than social science has downplayed the theoretical significance of The Philadelphia Negro and Du Bois’s oeuvre more broadly. Contemporary scholars who have revisited and attempted to revive Du Bois’s sociological contributions have largely praised The Philadelphia Negro on its empirical and methodological grounds (e.g., Bay Reference Bay, Katz and Sugrue1998; Saint-Arnaud Reference Roedinger2009; Williams Reference Webster2006; Wilson Reference Williams2006; Zuberi Reference Yu1998). While Du Bois’s achievements on these fronts were truly revolutionary in the context of late nineteenth-century social science (Bay Reference Bay, Katz and Sugrue1998), the emphasis that contemporary Du Boisian scholars have placed on the work’s empiricism and methodology rather than its theoretical contributions obscures the far-reaching implications of The Philadelphia Negro (Lewis Reference Lassiter1993). Furthermore, the privileging of theory over empiricism in mainstream sociology (e.g., Krippner Reference Katz and Sugrue2001; Sallaz and Zavisca, Reference Saint-Arnaud2007) reproduces Du Bois’s contemporary marginality, as the alleged lack of theoretical coherence and “generalizability” in his work (e.g., Mouzelis Reference Morris1997; Saint-Arnaud Reference Roedinger2009) keeps The Philadelphia Negro from its rightful place alongside the urban-theoretical work of Simmel, Weber, and the Chicago School.

In this paper, I outline the urban theory of W. E. B. Du Bois as presented in The Philadelphia Negro. Building on Marcus Anthony Hunter’s (Reference Hunter2013b) efforts to synthesize Du Bois’s urban-theoretical contributions, I argue that Du Bois provided the most comprehensive analysis of the role of race and racial inequality in modern cities among early sociologists. Du Bois’s understanding of how the socially-constructed racial hierarchy of the United States was shaping the material conditions of industrial cities prefigured important later work (e.g., Massey and Denton, Reference Marable1993; Pattillo Reference Park and Burgess2007; Sugrue Reference Stuart1996) and represented a theoretically richer conceptualization of “the modern city” than the canonized classical urban theorists. Given that contemporary urbanists have demonstrated that it is impossible to conceive of the modern city without foregrounding race and other dimensions of socio-spatial difference (e.g., Harvey Reference Harvey1989; Spain Reference Smithsimon1993; Wacquant Reference Wacquant2008), this represents a major shortcoming in the urban-theoretical work of Park, Simmel, and Weber.^{Footnote 3}

An important difference between Du Bois and other early sociologists is that Du Bois’s theoretical contributions are understated. No explicit theoretical model is to be found in the pages of The Philadelphia Negro. As scholars have argued, Du Bois’s focus on empirical investigation reflected the intellectual context within which he worked—one in which biological racism, rather than sociological investigation, formed the “scientific” consensus about African Americans (Lewis Reference Lassiter1993; Morris Reference Morris and Calhoun2015). Thus, The Philadelphia Negro’s dense statistics, maps, and ethnographic data reflect in part Du Bois’s effort to use social facts to repudiate Social Darwinists’ racist conjecture.

The consequences of Du Bois’s rhetorical choices are clear: if the century-long marginalization of Du Bois’s work within American sociology was the result of racism and the entrenched interests of powerful academic institutions (Morris Reference Morris and Calhoun2015; Rabaka Reference Pizer2010), then the density of The Philadelphia Negro has no doubt played a role in marginalizing Du Bois’s theoretical insights even as the masterwork has enjoyed a small-scale revival in sociological circles since the 1990s. Following David Levering Lewis (Reference Lassiter1993), Hunter argues that “Du Bois’s sociological analysis [is] . . . layered and embedded” (2013b, p. 4). Therefore, like Hunter, I present some of Du Bois’s key theoretical contributions and thereby make Du Bois’s layered arguments more explicit.

Hunter introduces the notion of “ecological conundrum” to highlight Du Bois’s analysis of the racial-spatial dynamics of American cities’ housing and labor markets—the ways that “the geography of opportunity (cultural, political, economic, or otherwise) is tied to the racial geography of the city” (2013b, p. 3). Focusing on Black agency and American racial history in the urban context, Hunter illustrates how The Philadelphia Negro has informed much contemporary sociology and can serve as a useful “bridge” between competing schools of urban-sociological thought in the present day. In other words, Du Bois’s insights into the racialization of urban spaces can integrate contemporary ecological models (e.g., Sampson Reference Sallaz and Zavisca2012; Sampson and Morenoff, Reference Sampson1997) with economically-driven models (e.g., Dear Reference Dear2002; Zukin Reference Zuberi, Katz and Sugrue1995), as well as add historical depth to studies of urban poverty and racial segregation (e.g., Massey and Denton, Reference Marable1993; Sharkey Reference Self2013).

Here, I build on Hunter’s efforts by placing Du Bois’s work alongside the canonized urban-sociological works of the early twentieth century. What I present demonstrates that Du Bois’s theorizations about Black life in a Northern city extend far beyond ghetto walls and explain much about the broader social conditions of modern cities. I focus on two key elements of Du Bois’s urban theory: (1) racial stratification and (2) urbanization and migration. While these were far from the only theoretically generative elements of The Philadelphia Negro—as others have argued, the work’s contributions in areas such as poverty, the labor market, criminology, the family, and religion have much relevance for scholars today (e.g., Anderson Reference Anderson1996; Hunter Reference Hunter2013b; Jones Reference Ignatiev1998; Rabaka Reference Pizer2010)—I focus on these two aspects because they highlight Du Bois’s fundamental argument: the processes of urbanization and industrialization that occurred between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries were essentially shaped by the mass urban migration of Southern Blacks and the ensuing racial stratification that was reified in the spaces of the modern city. Crucially, Du Bois’s analysis of racial stratification and urbanization/migration offer important correctives to the work of the other classical urban sociologists. Socio-spatial stratification by race/ethnicity was mostly absent in the work of Simmel and Weber; attempts by Park and the Chicago School to comprehend this phenomenon were often problematic (Morris Reference Morris and Calhoun2015; Rabaka Reference Pizer2010; Yu Reference Young and Deskins2002). In short, it was Du Bois—not Park, Weber, or Simmel—who put forth a critical sociological explanation of the intersection of race and the modern city and prefigured the dominant theoretical and empirical traditions of contemporary urban sociology.

THE PHILADELPHIA NEGRO AS GENERALIZABLE URBAN THEORY

One of the implications of the above-mentioned praise for Du Bois’s methodological innovations in The Philadelphia Negro is that the work presents as a purely empirical work, rather than a theoretical one. However, Du Bois made clear that Philadelphia represented an ideal type in the study of cities, a place that he saw as a lens into the effects of racial stratification and migration in the industrial cities of the United States. With Philadelphia’s history of Black inhabitants dating to 1638, slavery, emancipation, industrialization, and immigration had all shaped the social conditions of Philadelphia and its surrounding communities. As a result, Du Bois argued, “Few states present better opportunities for the continuous study of a group of Negroes than Pennsylvania” (1899, p. 10).

Du Bois argued that Philadelphia—and specifically, the city’s Black Seventh Ward—offered generalizable knowledge about the conditions of American urban life at the turn of the twentieth century. Philadelphia’s geographic location near the Mason-Dixon line made it “the natural gateway between the North and the South” (1899, p. 25), and the city was a major destination for both Black migrants and European immigrants. Du Bois noted that the city “rank[ed] high in the absolute and relative number of its Negro inhabitants,” with the second-highest Black population in the United States, behind Baltimore, and the third-highest proportion of Black inhabitants, behind Baltimore and St. Louis (1899, p. 50). In short, Du Bois argued, “the Seventh Ward present[ed] an epitome of nearly all the Negro problems . . . . [E]very class is represented, and varying conditions of life” (1899, p. 62). While he cautioned against “draw[ing] too broad conclusions from a single ward in one city,” Du Bois contended: “[T]hat the social problems affecting Negroes in large Northern cities are presented here in most of their aspects seems credible” (1899, p. 62).

To further bolster the theoretical implications of the case study, Du Bois (Reference Du Bois1899) enlisted statistical comparisons with other cities in the United States and Europe. Philadelphia’s racial composition was compared against American cities such as Washington, Atlanta, and Boston. Du Bois tracked poverty rates in Philadelphia’s Black community against Charles Booth’s (1889-1891) London studies. Health statistics were weighed against evidence from England, France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Italy. Black literacy rates were juxtaposed with those of Philadelphia’s immigrant populations from Italy, Russia, Poland, Hungary, Ireland, and Germany. These comparisons illustrate Du Bois’s contention that Philadelphia’s Black community did not exist in isolation, but rather was bound up in global processes of capitalism, racialization, industrialization, and migration.

The density of figures and statistics on Black Philadelphians, coupled with extensive maps and ethnographic data, signals to some contemporary sociologists that Du Bois’s study lacked the “generalizability” and theoretical coherence of other early urban-sociological texts such as Weber’s The City ([1921] 1958). Yet, questions could certainly be raised about the “generalizability” of the canon of early urban theory. The unitary theories of cities offered by Weber and Park and Burgess, for example, were heavily influenced by their respective contexts. Park and Burgess’s “concentric zone” model (1925), for example, is derived from the conditions of early twentieth-century Chicago (see Dear Reference Dear2002). Weber’s unitary theory is rooted in the history of Western European cities—note, for example, his broad dismissal of non-Western cities: “An urban ‘community’ in the full meaning of the word, appears as a general phenomenon only in the Occident. Exceptions occasionally were to be found in the Near East . . . but only occasionally and in rudiments” ([1921] 1958, p. 80). These pieces of evidence suggest that the sociological standard for “generalizability” has been applied inconsistently at best. The Philadelphia Negro indeed offers the requisite “generalizability” because Du Bois sought to explain ubiquitous late nineteenth-century processes of urbanization, migration, and racial stratification, and further, he made clear how both Philadelphia and the Seventh Ward were located within a network of American and European cities.

DU BOIS ON RACE AND THE MODERN CITY

In The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois argued that the social spaces of modern American cities were reproducing racial inequalities; he outlined the social, political, and economic factors that were creating dense clusters of Black residents in urban neighborhoods such as Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Seventh Ward had “emerged as one of the largest concentrations of Blacks” in the United States (Hunter Reference Hunter2013a, p. 9). In that context, Du Bois analyzed the interconnections among issues affecting the life chances of Black urbanites, such as education, poverty, public health, employment, and housing.

Du Bois argued that the racialization of Black urbanites differed from the racialization of other urban migrants, who in some circumstances were able to “assimilate” into the dominant White group: “No differences of social condition allowed any Negro to escape from the group, although such escape was continually the rule among Irish, Germans, and other whites” (Du Bois Reference Du Bois1899, p. 11). This insight separated Du Bois’s theoretical framework from the “ecological” models that would later be developed by Park and the Chicago School. Like Du Bois, Park’s sociology of the city was concerned with migration and intergroup conflict; the Chicago School’s ecological urban theory, however, described these urban processes as “natural” (Park and Burgess, Reference Park1925). Compared to the work of Park and his colleagues, Du Bois’s analysis—which predated Park’s by over two decades—offered a more empirically valid theory of urban processes, which helped explain the role of socially constructed racial hierarchies in shaping the material conditions of industrial cities in the United States:

Du Bois was especially concerned with the economic and political processes that were reinforcing racial stratification in American cities. Anticipating work such as Edna Bonacich’s (Reference Bonacich1976) “split labor market” approach, Du Bois examined how urban labor markets and political conflicts were producing a bifurcation of the working classes—White immigrants from Europe were “assimilating” and gaining political power (i.e., completing racial projects; see Bashi Reference Bashi1998; Ignatiev Reference Hunter1995; Roedinger Reference Riis1991), while Black migrants were constrained by racist structures:

Du Bois considered how working-class White European immigrants were able to leverage their privileged standing in the American racial hierarchy at the expense of Black laborers, themes picked up by later researchers on race and labor organizing in the city (e.g., Ignatiev Reference Hunter1995; Roedinger Reference Riis1991; Wilson Reference Wilson1987):

For the “talented tenth” of Black urbanites, discrimination in the labor market circumscribed their upward mobility:

Ultimately, Du Bois argued, for Black urbanites, there was no Weberian “calling” ([1905] 2001) to aspire to:

Du Bois argued that the effects of structural discrimination hastened the formation of a distinct socio-spatial form: the Black ghetto. Du Bois’s analysis illustrates how the Chicago School’s so-called “natural” processes of “invasion and succession” (Park and Burgess, Reference Park1925, p. 50) were, for Black urbanites, highly circumscribed. The intergenerational out-migration from the city center to the suburbs and upscale urban neighborhoods was simply not possible under the spatially embedded and violently enforced American racial hierarchy.

The emphasis on racial stratification in Du Bois’s urban theory complicates Park and Burgess’s “concentric zone” model (1925, pp. 50–53), where there is no acknowledgement of how racialized power relations undergird racially- and socioeconomically-segregated urban areas (Hunter Reference Hunter2013b). In this theoretical model, Park and Burgess consider the modern city to be comprised of five distinct zones that radiate from the city’s center: (1) “The Loop”; (2) a “Zone of Transition”; (3) a “Zone of Workingmen’s Homes”; (4) a “Residential Zone”; and (5) a “Commuters Zone” (1925, pp. 50–51). Park and Burgess argue that over time, urban migrants work their way from the slums in the inner city to a “residential zone” that is “inhabited by workers who have escaped from the area of deterioration” (1925, p. 50).^{Footnote 4} Their model proposed that processes of intergenerational socio-spatial mobility were equivalent for all urban migrants; indeed, the fact that Black urbanites were relatively “stuck in place” seems to underlie Park’s lament that, “The Negro is, by natural disposition, neither an intellectual nor an idealist . . . . His metier is expression rather than action. The Negro is, so to speak, the lady among the races” (1919, pp. 129–130).

Written decades earlier, Du Bois’s analysis repudiates the Chicago School’s model by framing the ghettoization of Blacks within a racialized socio-spatial power structure:

Additionally:

Despite these forces of ghettoization, Du Bois illustrated that upwardly mobile Blacks made attempts to move beyond the inner city:

Du Bois noted, however, that even the best efforts were typically thwarted by the discrimination that impacted Blacks in the housing and labor markets:

One of the insights that sets Du Bois apart from other early urban theorists is the focus on race and racial inequality as critical structures of modern cities. No discussion of race is to be found in the canonical urban theory of Simmel ([1903] 2002), and Weber mentioned ethnoracial segregation only in passing reference to Europe’s Jewish ghettos ([1921] 1958). While Park discussed race in the urban context, his approach is tinged with biological essentialism and Social Darwinism (e.g., Park Reference Park1914, Reference Mouzelis1919, Reference Park1931; Park and Burgess, Reference Park1925; see also Deegan Reference Deegan1988; Morris Reference Morris and Calhoun2015; Rabaka Reference Pizer2010; Yu Reference Young and Deskins2002). Many of Park’s theoretical devices were borrowed from the biological sciences, leading him to ignore racialized power relations and political economy in his analysis of modern cities (Dear Reference Dear2002; Smith Reference Simmel, Bridge and Watson1995). While Park was clearly attuned to segmentation by race and national origin, his equating of migration, mobility, and stratification to “natural” processes is patently asociological. Park’s models lacked the sophistication of Du Bois’s analysis on many issues, such as the circumscribed mobility of Black urbanites. Park and Burgess argued in The City:

The following passages illustrate Park and the Chicago School’s predilection for Social Darwinism and overreliance on biological metaphors to explain sociological phenomena. In “The Conflict and Fusion of Cultures with Special Reference to the Negro,” Park stated:

In The City, Burgess argued:

Invoking the language of the Eugenics movement, Park wrote of rural White migrants:

Further evidence of the Chicago School’s sympathy for the Eugenics movement is found in a bibliographic section in Park and Burgess’s The City (1925, pp. 214-217) called “Eugenics of the City,” wherein Louis Wirth recommends titles such as “Urban Sterilization” and “The Danger of Deterioration of Race from the Too Rapid Increase of Great Cities.”

On these points, Tukufu Zuberi argues, “Decades before the Chicago School of sociology rose to prominence, Du Bois had shown the uniqueness of the African experience in the United States generally and in the urban setting in particular” (1998, p. 183). Park and the Chicago School, in contrast, “confounded race . . . with ethnicity . . . . They interpreted . . . the urban plight of African Americans as comparable to the challenge European immigrants faced in adjusting to American life” (Zuberi Reference Yu1998, p. 183). Indeed, whereas Du Bois emphasized the structural roots of Black marginalization in Northern ghettos, Park located racial segregation in “[p]ersonal tastes and convenience, vocational and economic interests” (Park and Burgess, Reference Park1925, p. 5) rather than racialized power relations.

Overall, Du Bois’s theoretical analysis of the ghettoization of Blacks in modern American cities illustrates the group’s circumscribed urban mobility. He argued that structural racism and racialized economic competition with White European immigrants, coupled with the historic underdevelopment of Blacks vis-à-vis slavery, combined to reify the marginalized status of Blacks in a distinct socio-spatial form—the ghetto. In The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois (Reference Du Bois1899) examined at length the social and economic impacts of Black ghettoization—topics such as educational and occupational segregation; poor housing conditions; wage discrimination; and the ghetto’s parallel institutions. Du Bois also hinted at the ghetto’s system of super-exploitation, a concept later illustrated by scholars such as Manning Marable (Reference Lyman1983). Du Bois’s analysis also anticipated recent scholarship on “the spatialization of race” (see Bonnett and Nayak, Reference Bonnett, Nayak, Anderson, Domosh, Pile and Thrift2003; Delany Reference Delaney2002); in chapter 7, he illustrated how White society’s perception of Blacks as “one homogeneous mass” (1899, p. 73) flattens difference in the Black community and creates the perception that all Blacks are “deviant” and “criminal,” a phenomenon Elijah Anderson (Reference Anderson2012) would later term the “iconic ghetto.”

In sum, Du Bois’s theoretical contributions on race and the modern city alone should place The Philadelphia Negro in the canon of classical urban theory. By accurately comprehending how race was shaping the social structures of the modern city, Du Bois not only prefigured much of today’s most influential and widely cited urban social science (e.g., Massey and Denton, Reference Marable1993; Pattillo Reference Park and Burgess2007; Sugrue Reference Stuart1996), but also introduced a stronger framework for examining the interactions between race and the modern city than Park, Simmel, or Weber.

DU BOIS ON MIGRATION AND URBANIZATION

In The Philadelphia Negro, W. E. B. Du Bois makes important theoretical contributions at the intersection of race, urbanization, and urban migration—processes that largely defined the rise of the modern city. In this section, I illustrate how the Du Boisian urban-theoretical framework complements other classical works and adds to the sociological understanding of these processes.

Urbanization represented one of the foundational analytical frames of early sociological theory (Sassen Reference Sampson, Morenoff, Brooks-Gunn, Duncan and Lawrence Aber2000; Tonkiss Reference Thomas and Znaniecki2005). Classical sociologists suggested that the modern city represented a fundamental reordering of social relations (e.g., Durkheim [1912] Reference Durkheim and Cladis2008; Simmel [1903] Reference Sharkey2002; Tönnies [1887] Reference Tonkiss1957). These theorists often looked to cities to explain the transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft and from mechanical to organic solidarity.

Du Bois was similarly concerned with the sociological implications of the rapid urbanization and urban migration that took place between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. In The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois argued that the metropoles of the North represented spaces where human “raw material”—Southern Blacks and European immigrants—were “transformed” by the industrial social order (1899, p. 80). Du Bois analyzed urbanization with an eye toward these streams of migration and the coterminous rise of the industrial-capitalist economy. He wrote:

Du Bois’s attention to the historical dimensions of urbanization mirrors Weber’s historiographical framing of European urban development. Like Du Bois, Weber focused on the economic dimension of cities—“the ‘city’ is a market place” (Weber [1921] Reference Wacquant1958, pp. 65-68)—in addition to locating urban migration as a defining feature of the modern city: “Everywhere that it made its first appearance . . . the city arose as a joint settlement by immigration from the outside” (Weber [1921] Reference Wacquant1958, p. 92).

Additionally, Du Bois argued that the city was a space of intergroup conflict, where Black migrants and European immigrants were cast into bitter competition on the labor market and subject to the caprice of global capitalism. Here, Du Bois’s arguments find affinity with key points made by Simmel and Weber. Simmel’s ([1903] 2002) theory of the city was highly attuned to the city as a space of conflict, though he focused more on how intergroup animus manifested itself at the individual level. On the urbanite’s “blasé attitude,” he wrote:

Weber, in contrast, concentrated on inter-city conflict, i.e., conflict among autonomous urban principalities and the city as a “fortress” ([1921] 1958, p. 75; see also pp. 76–80, 119–120, 181–183). For Black urbanites, Du Bois argued, these intergroup and interpersonal struggles were compounded by structural racism and individual prejudice. Within this sphere of conflict, Du Bois discussed the uneven development of human capital among various racial groups. Prefiguring work such as William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged (1987) and Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton’s American Apartheid (1993), Du Bois argued that slavery and racism—not biology or culture, as in the Chicago School’s model (e.g., Park Reference Park1914, Reference Mouzelis1919; Park and Burgess, Reference Park1925; see also Morris Reference Morris and Calhoun2015; Rabaka Reference Pizer2010)—had impeded the ability of Black migrants to collectively transition into industrial society:

Du Bois also considered how modern industrial cities socialized migrants with regard to criminality. For both Black migrants and European immigrants, Du Bois held that the social structure of the city channeled newcomers into crime-ridden areas, which he argued had a problematic effect on their socialization into the industrial order: “The new immigrants usually settle in pretty well-defined localities in or near the slums, and thus get the worst possible introduction to city life” (1899, p. 81). Du Bois argued that this process was linked to the social production of crime:

Du Bois argued that for Black migrants, the socialization to the city vis-à-vis slum areas was especially problematic due to what Loïc Wacquant (Reference Wacquant2005) would later term “the conflation of Blackness and criminality”:

For Du Bois, such “serious mistakes” included racial profiling—“So frequent have these crimes become that sometimes Negroes are wrongfully suspected; whoever snatches a pocketbook on a dark night is supposed to be black” (1899, p. 263)—in addition to racial discrimination in the court system, anticipating later work by scholars such as Wacquant (Reference Tönnies and Loomis2001) and Michelle Alexander (Reference Alexander2010):

The urbanization processes that Du Bois documented in The Philadelphia Negro were largely in reference to the mass movement of people into industrial cities—Black migrants, White rural migrants, and European immigrants. Specifically, Du Bois focused on the “push and pull factors” that were spurring the mass urban migration of Blacks from the American South. Two decades before the publication of William Thomas and Florian Znaniecki’s The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918), Du Bois outlined the social and economic forces that were driving rural Blacks from the Jim Crow South toward industrial Northern cities such as Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Negro served as an urban-focused complement to Du Bois’s study “The Negroes of Farmville, Virgnia: A Social Study” (1898), which offered an in-depth examination of the migratory streams of the American South—illustrating “the conditions of Southern Blacks in a small-town way station between rural life and city life” (Jones Reference Ignatiev1998, p. 114).

Du Bois considered the movement of Blacks from the South to be a product of three primary factors: racist violence, de jure discrimination, and lack of economic opportunity. He wrote, “Back of that stream is the world-wide desire to rise in the world, to escape the choking narrowness of the plantation, and the lawless repression of the village, in the South” (Du Bois Reference Du Bois1899, p. 354). He further predicted:

Du Bois also examined the “pull” factors that were underpinning Black migration to cities. Framing his analysis historically, he considered the impact of small-scale emancipations in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, such as Pennsylvania’s Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery, passed in 1780. Du Bois argued:

In addition, Du Bois was interested in the act of migration itself. Marshalling data from his in-depth survey of Philadelphia’s Black community, Du Bois drew several conclusions about the conditions of migration. Examining the age segmentation of recent Black migrants, he argued that the majority of the newcomers were single young adults who had come to the city in search of better employment opportunities, in addition to married individuals who were supporting families elsewhere:^{Footnote 7}

Additionally:

Du Bois also argued that migration to the North represented a more protracted process than numbers alone suggested:

Further, he argued:

In spite of what he considered the problematic elements of urbanization—racial segregation, increased crime, and the reification of the socially constructed American racial hierarchy—Du Bois held that the city was a potentially liberating space, especially for Black migrants escaping the Jim Crow South. For Du Bois, the thin line between liberation and marginalization underscored the reflexive relationship between the Northern ghetto and the Southern plantation:

In sum, the central emphasis that Du Bois placed on urbanization and urban migration mirrors, in multiple, concrete ways, and improves upon other classical theorists’ inquiries into these processes. Like Weber, Simmel, and Park, Du Bois conceived the modern city as a reordering of social relations; as I have outlined, Du Bois’s framework shares many theoretical concerns with these authors. Critically, Du Bois’s insertion of racialized power relations into an analytic of urbanization and urban migration offers an important corrective to the other classical works, all of which ignored (Simmel and Weber) or misdiagnosed (Park and the Chicago School) this crucial dimension of modern cities. Rather than conceiving urban processes as “natural” or market-driven (as in Park’s model), state-driven (as in Weber’s model), or focused at the individual level (as in Simmel’s model), Du Bois asserts the primacy of a socially constructed racial hierarchy and the systems of power that enforce and reproduce racial divisions in modern society. This crucial insight provides further context for Du Bois’s broader contributions on race and cities and reiterates my contention that Du Bois should be considered a canonical urban theorist.