posted by Heidi Smith

on July 28, 2006

In looking through Susan Wharton’s scrapbook of activities related to the College Settlement between 1894 and 1901, I came across a section devoted to a series of six lectures given at the College of Physicians shortly after the publication of The Philadelphia Negro. Wharton saved a small information pamphlet about the lecture series, and it is interesting to see that while it is acknowledged that the genesis of the series is The Philadelphia Negro, the actual title of the series is “The American Negro” and in the newspaper articles Wharton has saved, the book is not mentioned (nor is DuBois, most of the time). Using “The American Negro” both allowed people to neglect to mention his book, and also made the series open to several Southern white men who garnered quite a bit of coverage.

In the description of the series, one of the central issues is formulated in this way: “What are the ways in which his adjustment to our society has worked out?” (Italics mine). It is interesting to see the way in which African Americans were considered “them” by the (supposedly progressive) authors of the pamphlet, and thus excluded from the category “American.” The information about DuBois’s lecture (written by DuBois?) contains similar wording, although—importantly—the pressure is placed on white people and not black people: “Can the American people rise to the moral decency of treating the underdeveloped races which are in their power with a sacred regard to the best interests of those races?” This reminded me that African Americans were not thought of as Americans, although sometimes referred to as Afro-Americans (I am thinking of the book The Work of Afro-American Women, by Gertrude Bustill, 1908), and I wonder to what extend this was either internalized, or what kinds of decisions DuBois had to make word-wise when speaking to a white, or mixed race audience (as many black people attended the lectures).

Finding these clippings exclusively from Wharton’s scrapbook is getting selective information, so I am not certain whether Glenn and Blair (the men from the South) did get a lot of coverage or whether she was more interested in coverage of them, or whether these were the articles that came out of the newspapers she subscribed to. This extends to the information I have found about DuBois in her scrapbook. For example, in one article about the lecture series, from a newspaper called City