posted by Tim Golden

on May 24, 2006

Today I read the section of the book on the heatlh of black Philadelphians and I am definitely seeing his findings in the census material. Yesterday I came across a black woman who was 30 years old, widowed and had zero of here seven children still living. She was living with her parents and not working. Du Bois (and Anna a couple of posts down) talks about the different mortality rates between whites and blacks, and in the couple blocks of census data that I've gone through, I can really see the difference. I am starting to come across more black families, and it is shocking to see how many children have been lost in comparison to immigrants from eastern Europe. Also, piggy backing off of what Amy said about the music, I loved the "city" children's songs/games on that CD. A section of that CD recreates a minstrel show, offering an idea of what the limited forms of black popular entertainment may have sounded like and been about. I had read about two black theaters (Dunbar (later Lincoln) and Standard theaters) that probably performed these types of shows, but couldn't find out more about them.