The history of African Americans or Black Philadelphians in the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania has been documented in various sources. People of African descent are currently the largest ethnic group in Philadelphia. Estimates in 2010 by the U.S. Census Bureau documented the total number of people living in Philadelphia who identified as Black or African American at 644,287, or 42.2% of the city's total population.
Originally arriving in the 17th century as enslaved Africans, the population of African Americans in Philadelphia grew during the 18th and 19th centuries to include numerous free Black residents who were active in the abolitionist movement and as conductors in the Underground Railroad. During the 20th and 21st centuries, Black Philadelphians actively campaigned against discrimination and continued to contribute to Philadelphia's cultural, economic and political life as workers, activists, artists, musicians, and politicians.
Between the 1920s and 1940s, North, West, and South Philadelphia saw an increase of the Black population when white flight occurred in Philadelphia. More than 50,000 African immigrants live in the Philadelphia metro area. Most of them are from Ethiopia, Nigeria, Ghana, and Liberia.
History
1639 to 1800
Enslaved Africans arrived in the area that became Philadelphia as early as 1639, brought by European settlers. When the slave trade increased due to a shortage of European workers during the 1750s and 1760s, approximately one to five hundred Africans were sent to Philadelphia each year. In 1765, there were roughly fifteen hundred Black Philadelphians; of these, one hundred were free. By the time the American Revolution broke out in 1775, enslaved individuals were one-twelfth of the roughly sixteen thousand people who lived in Philadelphia./
Black people served on both the Loyalist and Patriot sides during the American Revolution. Two of the individuals supporting the Patriot side were Cyrus Bustill, who worked as a ship's baker during the Revolution and later became a prominent Philadelphia businessman and activist, and James Forten, who served on a privateer at the age of fourteen and became a wealthy sailmaker and abolitionist.
The Pennsylvania Abolition Society was founded by white Quakers in 1775 and eventually became a biracial organization."Founding of Pennsylvania Abolition Society". Africans in America. PBS. In 1780, a policy of gradual emancipation was instituted in Pennsylvania. During this period, enslaved people were freed through manumission; others managed to escape or buy their own freedom. By 1783, the free Black community in Philadelphia surpassed one thousand residents, while four hundred residents remained enslaved.
Richard Allen and Absolom Jones founded the Free African Society in 1787, a mutual aid society, and Allen, with his wife Sarah Allen, established the Bethel African Methodist Church in 1794.Diemer, Andrew Free Black Communities, Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia / During the 1793 Philadelphia Yellow Fever Epidemic, Black residents were mistakenly believed to be immune to the disease, so they worked as carriers of the dead and tended to the sick and dying inside their homes. Kidnapping of free Black residents to be sold back into slavery was a risk that continued into the 19th century, especially for children.
The Quakers established a Burying Place For All Free Negroes or People of Color in Byberry Township. This African Burial Ground remains an obscure anomaly, largely forgotten today although it was placed on the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places.
Most of the Black population in Philadelphia were living as freemen and women by 1811, although some remained enslaved until the 1840s. The free community was joined by runaways from the South and refugees from the Haitian Revolution.
1800 to Civil War
The growing free Black community was instrumental in making Philadelphia a hotbed of abolitionism by the 1830s. Wealthy Black entrepreneur James Forten gave white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison funding so he could start the anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator and contributed articles to it. In 1818, a group of African Americans led by Derrick Johnson attempted to organize a volunteer fire company under the name African Fire Association. The effort was abandoned after opposition from white fire companies, members of the public, and some prominent Black leaders, including James Forten. Black activists were founders and members of the national biracial group the American Anti-Slavery Society, created in Philadelphia in 1833, and the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, created in 1838. In December 1833, after women were excluded from the American Anti-Slavery Society, a group of black and white women, which included Cyril Bustil's daughter Grace Douglass, and James Forten's daughters, Sarah, Harriet and Margaretta launched the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society (PFASS).Ira V. Brown, Cradle of Feminism: The Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, 1833-1840 The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography Vol. 102, No. 2 (Apr., 1978), pp. 143-166 University of Pennsylvania Press
While some African Americans in Philadelphia worked in professional jobs that catered to the Black community like teachers, doctors, ministers, barbers, caterers, and entrepreneurs, most Black Philadelphians at that time worked at physically demanding and low-paying jobs. They competed with working class whites, especially new Irish immigrants, for jobs, which led to racial conflict. In 1834, a race riot broke out at a local tavern that was popular with both black and white Philadelphians. A white mob attacked Black homes, businesses, and churches. In 1838, another white mob attacked Pennsylvania Hall, where black and white abolitionists were meeting, and burned it down. Also in 1838, Pennsylvania's newly ratified constitution officially disfranchised African Americans. In 1842, white mobs again attacked blacks during the Lombard Street Riots.
Despite the risks and racism they encountered, African-Americans continued to come to Philadelphia, since it was the closest major city to the Southern States, where slavery was still legal. In the years leading up to the Civil War, Philadelphia had the largest black population outside the slave states. There were 15,000 black Philadelphians in 1830, 20,000 by 1850, and 22,000 by 1860. Most lived in South Philadelphia near what is today Center City, but there were smaller populations in Northern Liberties, Kensington, and Spring Garden. They came because of Philadelphia's reputation as a thriving political, cultural, and economic center for African Americans.
The city was also a major stop on the Underground Railroad, especially for slaves escaping through Maryland and Delaware. Robert Purvis, president of the biracial Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society from 1845 to 1850, was also chairman of the General Vigilance Committee from 1852 to 1857, which gave direct aid to fugitive slaves. With his wife Harriet Forten Purvis, he worked as a conductor of the Underground Railroad. Purvis estimated that from 1831 to 1861, they helped one slave per day achieve freedom, assisting more than 9,000 slaves to escape to the North. They used their own house, then located outside the city, in Byberry Township, as a place where fugitives could hide."ROBERT PURVIS DEAD.; Anti-Slavery Leader Expires in Philadelphia, Aged 87 -- His Work for the Black Race" (PDF). The New York Times. April 16, 1898. Retrieved April 26, 2014 Purvis built Byberry Hall across the street from his home, on the edge of the Quaker-owned Byberry Friends Meeting campus, to host anti-slavery speakers. It still stands today.Bacon (2007), But One Race, p. 106
Civil War to 1900 During the Civil War, eleven African American Philadelphia regiments fought for the North, after the passage of the 1862 Second Militia Act allowing blacks to be enlist in the Army.Lucien Holmess, United States Colored Troops , Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, retrieved March 5, 2021
After the Civil War, African Americans in Philadelphia, including Octavius V. Catto (1839–1871), organized to end segregation of the city's schools and streetcars and regain the right to vote. Their efforts paid off; in 1867, streetcar segregation was ended throughout the state, and legal segregation of schools ended in 1881 (although de facto segregation continued into the 20th century). The Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gave Pennsylvania Black Americans the right to vote in 1870. But Catto himself was shot and killed while trying to cast his ballot in 1871.
In 1879, painter Henry Ossawa Tanner enrolled as the first African American student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. After travels abroad, he would return to Philadelphia in 1893 to paint his most famous work, The Banjo Lesson.Finkelman, Paul, ed. (2006). Encyclopedia of African American History 1619-1895. 3. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 224. Also in 1893, Philadelphia high school student Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller created an art project that was included in The World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago and led to her future success as a multi-disciplinary artist.Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller". American National Biography Online. Retrieved March 11, 2017.
The Black population rose to nearly 32,000 in 1880. In 1884, there were approximately 300 black-owned businesses, including the Philadelphia Tribune (started in 1884) and Douglas Hospital (opened in 1895). By 1900, the Black population at 63,000 people, had nearly doubled.Wolfinger, James . "African American Migration". Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, 2013. Retrieved March 5, 2021.
In 1896, Philadelphia poet, suffragist, and abolitionist Frances Harper helped found the National Association of Colored Women and served as its vice president.Bacon, Margaret Hope (1989). "One Great Bundle of Humanity": Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911)". The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. 113 (1): 21–43. ISSN 0031-4587. JSTOR 20092281. By then, she had already had a long career as a published writer, including works like her poem Bury Me In a Free Land, Sketches of Southern Life, and the novel Iola Leroy.
Published in 1899 by the University of Pennsylvania and conducted by W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study was the first sociological race study of the African American community in the United States. The aim of the social study was to identify "The Negro Problems of Philadelphia," the problems facing black communities not only in Philadelphia, but all over the country as well. The study focused on Philadelphia's Seventh Ward (currently Center City Philadelphia) and the socioeconomic conditions of black churches, businesses and homes within the neighborhood. Using statistics Du Bois created from his survey data, Du Bois compared the occupation, income, education, family size, health, drug use, criminal activity, and suffrage of black and white residents living in the Seventh Ward and to Philadelphia's other wards. Du Bois used statistical evidence to highlight the socioeconomic inequalities the black community faced and make the black community's suffrage known to whites. In turn, he disproved stereotypes surrounding the black community which were cited as the sources of "The Negro Problem."
1900 to 1950s
World War I brought an influx of black migrants from the rural South, who moved to Philadelphia lured by wartime jobs there during the Great Migration. As a result, the black population of Philadelphia doubled again from 63,000 in 1900 to 134,000 in 1920.Most of the new residents came from rural backgrounds and were working poor.