Frankford, Philadelphia: A 19th-Century Urban Black Community

In the last two decades, American historians interested in Black history have focused increasingly on both the slave and free Black communities. These scholars have sought to explain how, in the face of white hostility and, at times because of it, Blacks have managed to create a viable setting for themselves and their children. By examining the web of social relationships and cultural traditions that provides the fiber of the Black community, contemporary studies have attempted to show how the community has been shaped by the “damage” inflicted upon it by white society and by the “achievement” of Blacks themselves. In essence, this study seeks to discover the relationships that make the individual Black community a functioning whole, more than just a random collection of individuals living close to one another.

Frankford, a small enclave of northeastern Philadelphia, provides and appropriate setting for the study of an urban Black community during its critical years of initial growth. Blacks began to settle in the area in the mid-eighteenth century, but not until some six decades later was the Black population large enough to permit the beginnings of a social community. By the end of the nineteenth century, the individual Black residents of the locale, while functioning in a white world of indifference and occasional hostility, had fashioned an internally coherent community around the institutions of school, church, and family.

I

Frankford’s history as a semi-autonomous political unit was short. Although settled as early as 1682, the “village” of Frankford remained a non-self-governing part of Philadelphia County until 1800, when the borough of Frankford was created. It remained such until 1854, when it was incorporated into the City of Philadelphia as part of the Twenty-third Ward.

Frankford’s relatively short period as an identifiable political unit must be contrasted with its more conspicuous role as a cog in the commercial and industrial operations of the Philadelphia region. Until the second quarter of the nineteenth century, farming dominated the area’s economy, but, by mid-century, cotton and woolen mills, dyeing plants, brickmaking firms, and umbrella-manufacturing concerns had appeared, significantly altering the economic character of the borough. In 1850, over eight hundred workers, about one-seventh of the population of Frankford, were engaged in manufacturing. Thirty years later, over thirty-two hundred men and women held industrial jobs, about one-fifth of the area’s population. Measured in these terms, the development of Frankford’s manufacturing sector approximated that of Philadelphia County.

The industrial growth of the region was paralleled by a concomitant population expansion. In 1810, the first year its residents were enumerated separately from surrounding Oxford Township, only 1,233 people lived in the locale. By 1880, almost sixteen thousand individuals resided there. As significant, the social character of the area also changed. At the top levels of society, a new group of industrial entrepreneurs began to challenge the old landed elite for political and social power. At the lower rungs, an emerging class of factory operatives began to make life more and more unpleasant for civil authorities, who were forced to cope with increasing public drunkenness and periodic “riotous assemblages of young men.”

As the nineteenth century progressed, however, Frankford’s ethnic make-up remained remarkably constant. The inhabitants of English, German, Scotch-Irish, and Irish descent who resided in the area in the early part of the century maintained the proportion of each group in the population. In 1850, the first year for which we have reliable census figures for ethnicity, over two thirds of the area’s inhabitants were native-born whites. Three decades later, the proportion had increased to slightly over seventy per cent. The Frankford Black community of the nineteenth century thus developed in an area which was progressing from an almost typical rural village to a bustling urban-industrial town, while, at the same time, retaining an ethnocultural mix heavily dominated by native-white Americans.

II

The Black presence in Frankford, although never large, was not insignificant either. In 1810, the number of Blacks first exceeded one hundred, steadily increasing to almost eight hundred by 1880. Whites in Frankford, however, were experiencing an even greater demographic expansion, and the proportion of the Black population to the whole declined from almost nine per cent in 1810 to slightly over five per cent in 1880.

The social and cultural nature of this small Black com­munity is revealed to some extent by the characteristics of its household heads. Household heads and their families moved from place to place, much as their white counter­parts in numerous other nineteenth-century American towns and cities. Blacks, like whites, were constantly on the move, rarely staying in one place long enough to be enu­merated in two successive ten-year censuses. In the first eight decades of the nineteenth century, no more than forty-five per cent of Black male household heads stayed in Frankford long enough to appear in two successive census reports, and in two decades only thirty per cent stayed the necessary length of time.

The geographic origins of the household heads, both male and female, of Black Frankford provide further evi­dence that the community was not insulated from the out­side world. Between 1850 and 1880, the only years for which reliable data exist, the proportion born in northern states other than Pennsylvania remained small but constant in each of the census years, never exceeding ten per cent. The proportions born in Pennsylvania and in the South, however, showed greater change. Between 1850 and 1870, the percentage of household heads born in Pennsylvania increased from about thirty-six per cent to fifty-seven per cent; the proportion which was southern-born conversely declined. With emancipation, though, the freedmen of the South began to drift north and, by 1880, Black Frankford was once again dominated by southern-born household heads.

Most northern-born Black male heads had wives from the same regions as did most southern-born male heads. This was true in the period of years between 1850 and 1880. A sizable group of southern-born men, like Elias Carey. did find wives in Frankford, however. Carey was born a slave in Fredericksburg, Virginia, in 1837, escaped to the North in 1862, and joined with a regiment of Black troops, predominantly from Frankford. After the war, he returned to Frankford and married a local girl, Sarah Anne Jeffers.

The economic status of the Black residents of Frank­ford was much like that of Blacks elsewhere in the North. Blacks found themselves dependent upon white employers, restricted to occupations in the service and unskilled sectors of the local economy, and denied access to better-paying jobs in the skilled trades and in manufacturing. The slave system, which existed in Frankford during the eighteenth century, gradually disappeared between 1780 and 1810, but even after this time, Blacks were limited to the same kinds of jobs in personal service and menial labor. This general situation continued through 1880. Indeed, at each census year from 1850 to 1880, over seventy per cent of the Black households were headed by an individual engaged in unskilled work.*

Entrance into more lucrative manufacturing jobs occur­red only in the brickmaking industry. In 1860, of sixty­-nine households, three household heads were brickmakers; in 1870, of 101 households, the number was thirteen; by 1880, of 197 households, seventeen Black household heads worked in the brickyards.

Involvement of Blacks in other skilled labor was also gradual. A local historian, R. C. Allen, claims that “James Horrocks was the first manufacturer in Frankford to em­ploy colored persons to perform skilled labor.” Horrocks, a co-owner of a dyeworks, employed four Blacks in his establishment sometime before 1850. By 1850, 4.5 per cent of all independent Black households were headed by an artisan; in 1880, the proportion increased to 15.7 per cent.

The development of a Black proprietary and professional class had to await the marked post-Civil War increase in population. In 1850, the population census includes no storekeepers, barbers, or professionals amongst Frank­ford’s Black household heads; the 1860 census includes four such individuals; the 1870 census has seven; and the 1880 census reports sixteen. By 1880, some seven per cent of Frankford’s Black households were headed by a member of the professional and proprietary class. This figure, while not large, represents a sizable increase over the 1850 proportion of less than two per cent.

The distribution of wealth in the community changed somewhat more dramatically than did the occupational structure. In 1850, almost half the households of Black Frankford possessed real property, which when contrasted with most nineteenth-century Black communities, suggests a rather egalitarian distribution of wealth. The proportion declined slightly in 1860, but, by 1870, only about a quarter of the households owned any real property. During the same period, the average amount of property held by households having property increased from $400 to $1,130. Thus, at the same time that proportionately fewer members of the community owned property, the value of the property holdings of this emerging “elite” was increasing. This trend was found in other nineteenth-century urban Black communities.

Black Frankford, therefore, was not a stagnant com­munity. During the first three quarters of the nineteenth century, it gained new members through in-migration, lost many to out-migration, and underwent some degree of cultural (as measured by place of birth) and economic change. But some things did not change. The numerically and economically dominant white society continued to affect the shape of such Black institutions as the school, church, and family. The dynamics and structures of those institutions would not have been the same had whites reacted differently to Blacks.

The easiest measure of the consistency and quality of race contact can be gauged by how closely Blacks and whites lived near each other. Available historical evidence allows us to approach this subject in two ways: first, by measuring the extent to which Blacks lived either in white households or in independent Black households and, secondly, by determining the extent to which Blacks in independent households lived closer to one another than they did to whites. Although we feel that residential seg­regation has many pernicious effects on the group, in some respects the more isolated the group is from the larger society, the easier it is for that group to develop its own identity, its own sense of community, and the greater its need to establish its own social institutions and organiza­tions.

The proportion of the Black population living in in­dependent Black households steadily advanced between 1790 and 1880. By 1810, a majority of Blacks were living independent of whites, and after 1840 over ninety per cent lived apart from white households. Household separa­tion was thus achieved early in the nineteenth century and was maintained at a consistently high rate throughout the rest of the century.

The separation of households was accompanied by the creation of distinct neighborhoods. The physical boundaries of Frankford’s Black community were established early and maintained through 1880. Between 1800 and 1880, the community was confined to the northeast corner of Frank­ford and was bounded by Foulkrod Street to the north, Oxford (now Kinsey) Street to the west, Tackawanna Street to the south, and by Paul Street to the east. Within this generalized location, Blacks tended to remain on the same streets for the duration of the period studied. R. C. Allen records that Blacks in the post-1780 era first settled on Foulkrod Street and Bowser Lane. Maps of neighbor­hood residential patterns in 1860, 1870, and 1880, com­piled from information found in the Philadelphia City directories and federal manuscript census schedules, con­firm the essentially stable location of the Black community. In 1860, the Black community remained situated on Foulkrod Street and Bowser Lane and had expanded to the tower portion of Meadow Street. By 1880, the increase in population forced an expansion along Willow and Tackawanna streets, but the community continued to be centered on Bowser, Meadow, and Foulk­rod streets. In both 1850 and 1880, over seventy-five per cent of all Blacks in Frankford lived within this re­stricted area. In essence, this enclave formed the core of Black Frankford during our period of study and still does today.

Alongside the tendency of Blacks and whites to live in separate general locations was the tendency for individuals within the two groups not to live next door to members of the other group. This is not to say that Blacks and whites did not live in some proximity to one another. It is to suggest, however, given the small size of the Black community, that Blacks and whites attempted a rough sort of separation.

A good way to measure residential segregation is to discover the extent to which Blacks lived on all-Black or nearly all-Black blocks. Between 1860 and 1880, it is clear that Blacks and whites did not live next to one another, though they might live on opposite sides of the street. As late as 1880, about two-thirds of the blocks on which Blacks lived (later referred to as “Black blocks”) contained over eighty per cent Black dwellings. Twenty years earlier, the figure was over ninety per cent.

IV

Physical separation was accompanied by political and civil impotence. Pennsylvania Blacks were disfranchised between 1838 and 1870 and, as far as we can tell, no Frankford Blacks were elected to the borough council before 1838 or selected to represent the Twenty-third Ward in the Philadelphia city councils between 1870 and 1880. With no political representation, Blacks were es­sentially at the mercy of their white neighbors.

The white civic and political hierarchy exhibited an ambivalent attitude towards the Black citizens. Not openly hostile to Blacks, members of the political-elite preferred to remain largely indifferent to their Black neighbors. The aloofness appeared to diminish during the 1870’s when the Black population increased drastically, but it definitely seemed to characterize white attitudes towards Blacks in the period before 1860. In the Frankford borough council minutes from 1839 to 1854, the only years for which such records remain, Blacks received only sporadic attention from local civic authorities.

The references in the council minutes that do pertain to Blacks or Black affairs reflect the ambivalence of the political leaders to the Black population. Government officials, on occasion, did make decisions favorable to Frankford Blacks. In October 1839, the borough council received “from sundry persons Inhabitants of the Borough of Frankford” a petition requesting some land for the establishment of a school for Black children. The council accepted the document and leased part of the Public Burial Ground to the trustees of the African Colored School, mostly Quakers, for the purpose of erecting a schoolhouse. Ten years later, the council minutes record the complaints of the “colored people” concerning a dead horse that “had been buried too superficially in a Jot beyond the Public Burial Ground.” The council found the protests to be justified and “ordered that the person who buried the horse should be notified to bury it over with an additional depth of earth amounting to at least two feet.”

The relationship between the council and the Black community, however, was not always so positive. In June 1849, the council Committee on Vice, Immorality, and Nuisances, while surveying general environmental condi­tions in the borough, determined that the property sur­rounding the homes of three Black residents on Oxford Street was in need of immediate repair. The committee found that the “sidewalk was too low” and “that a deep pool of stagnant water” had collected in the street which was “not only dangerous to travelling, but extremely offensive.” In addition, the committee reported that “the gutter between John Pride and Jacob Fry’s Stable yard” was “in a very bad condition” and ordered the gutter repaired “within forty-eight hours.” Significantly, the denunciations of the conditions of the property were more rigorous than those directed at white offenders and the time limit given for repairs was repeated in only one other instance. The next committee report complained about a cellar with a “large body of water” in the home of a Black woman and ordered the removal of the water “as soon as possible.” Th is second demand was less hostile than that directed in the first case, but no less firm.

The attitude of the council towards the African Methodist Episcopal Church reflected an even less sympathetic posture towards the Black community, Founded in 1817 and located in a permanent structure on Oxford Street in 1848, the church constituted the primary social and re­ligious institution of the Black community, at least until the 1870’s. The attempts of the council to take certain legal actions against the church and its members thus must be regarded as a serious affront to Frankford Blacks. In May 1850, the borough council passed an ordinance making it ” unlawful for persons to obstruct the footways or corners of any of the streets, lanes or alleys … by standing together or in any other manner preventing the citizens to pass peacefully, and unmolested over said footways .. . ” The second section of the ordinance had special relevance to the Black community in stating that it was the responsibility of the High Constable to enforce the anti-loitering law “in particular so far as it may be applicable to that portion of Oxford Street in the immediate vicinity of the African Church … ” Less than three years later, the borough council decided to allow Levi Foulkrod to bring suit against the church for its failure to pave the sidewalk area “in front of the Lot … in possession” of the church. The result of the suit was not given.

The indifference of the political elite towards the Black community was shared by the local press. Although the Frankford Herald increased its coverage of area Blacks in the 1870’s, the newspaper generally tended to neglect the Black community in its reporting. As the borough council members, the local publishers seemed neither openly hostile nor sympathetic to the Black residents of the region. In 1852, the paper reported “a mean and contemptible trick … practiced on a poor woman … by some colored people in ‘Niggertown.'” In 1854, however, the newspaper offered a sympathetic account of the death of a Black man’s baby. In 1874, the Herald gave fairly extensive coverage to the opening of the all-Black Wilmot Public School and the dedication of a new Black Masonic Hall in Frankford.

As one might surmise, the social contacts between Blacks and whites were quite limited. The interplay that did take place was probably characterized by as much separation as possible. Blacks frequented the same shops as whites, but were tolerated only as they acted out the stereotypes white men created for them. During the Civil War, Frankford boys of both races organized separate quasi-military companies and played at being soldiers. One white resident later recalled that in his youth he had participated in a skirmish against the company of Black youths, when “we had a terrific battle, in which oyster shells were used for ammunition.” A white Presbyterian minister described a more serious incident resulting from the social separation of the two races. In 1863, an elderly Black minister of the A.M.E. Church was returning home to Frankford on one of the city’s streetcars. Because he was Black, the minister was forced to stand on the outside platform of the car. To his misfortune, the streetcar collided with a horse-drawn wagon and the minister suffered mortal injuries.

V

While the political and civic “elite” frequently either ignored or mistreated Blacks residing in their midst, the relations between other members of the white and Black community were characterized by constant daily contact that often produced cordial, if not egalitarian, personal, economic, and institutional associations. It is thus not surprising that the social institutions of school, family, and church that formed the backbone of Black Frankford served both to divide and to unite whites and Blacks. Indeed the social ambiguities of Black-white relations were reflected in the very institutions that served the Black inhabitants in this northeastern section of Phila­delphia.

The school system in the borough constituted the only institution in which Blacks and whites interacted with some frequency and with some degree of equality. To be sure, integration did not occur at the students’ level. Between 1837 and 1880, and probably even before this period, Black pupils attended only segregated schools. Rather, racial interaction existed at the administrative level where Blacks and whites worked together to provide the children with an education. Because the school system was the only formal institution that induced cooperation between the white and Black communities for any ex­tended length of time, it merits careful analysis.

In 1837 local Hicksite Quakers initiated attempts to establish a formal but separate school for Blacks. In June of that year, the Friends created a committee “to con­sider and if practicable report a plan for the organization and support of a school for the colored children of the vicinity.” The committee later reported success in their venture and declared, in January 1838, that they had set up a school “in the colored meeting house .. . with about thirty scholars,” all of whom were Black.

The Black school met in the A.M.E. Church for some two years but, in 1840, the borough of Frankford leased part of the public burial ground to the trustees of the school for the purpose of erecting a permanent school­house. The structure was quickly built and, by 1841, Jacob Buzby was already instructing a group of Black pupils. In 1842, the borough established a public school for white grammar and primary school children, but ex­cluded Blacks. Nevertheless, public authorities were un­willing to end efforts to educate Blacks and they pro­vided public funds for the Quaker school. The African Colored School continued under private direction with partial public financing until 1874, when the institution was officially incorporated into the public school system as the Wilmot Public School. Even after its inclusion into the city school network, however, it remained segregated.

Although the African Colored School was for Black children only, the institution itself provided an organiza­tional setting in which whites and Blacks in the community could and did interact. To be sure, whites dominated the administrative structure. The Quaker committee charged with oversight of the school was completely white as was the instructional staff at the school for the entire period up to 1880. But Blacks played a significant role in the establishment of the school too. Mary Wright, a local historian, reports that the money to build the schoolhouse on Meadow Street “was collected by George Lockwood, an intelligent colored man, who went from house to house soliciting subscriptions for the purpose.” Similarly, we know from census schedules that at least two of the five original trustees of the school were Black. Finally, and most important, the steadily increasing attendance at the school between 1844 and 1880 suggests that Black parents were sufficiently satisfied with the school to send their children there. This situation alone implies some degree of contact, however informal, between the Black residents of Frankford and the white administrators and teachers.

Except for the African Colored School, however, the institutional development of Black Frankford was carried out for Blacks by Blacks. In no institution is this point made so clearly as in the case of the Black church. Cer­tainly, there was little interracial mixture in the churches of the community. Churches founded by Blacks were all­Black and churches founded by whites were essentially all-white. Evidence does exist suggesting that the Frankford Baptist Church, a white-established and white-run church, may have “welcomed” a group of Blacks in the 1860’s to worship with its white congregation. However, the twenty­-seven Blacks who received the invitation “decided of their own volition to find their own church.”

As in other free Black communities, the Black church was the first formal institution created by Frankford Blacks. The first church in the area was the “Second Bethel” Church, an offshoot of Richard Allen’s “Bethel” congrega­tion in central Philadelphia. Twenty-eight Blacks, represent­ing about a quarter of the Black population in Frankford, organized the church in 1817 in Sarah Congo’s home on Bowser Lane. From its beginnings, then, this church, later named the Campbell African Methodist Episcopal Church, occupied a significant place in the lives of Frankford Blacks.

The A.M.E. Church, which was rebuilt in 1848 and 1870, was the only all-Black church in the area until 1869. In that year, Blacks founded the Second Baptist Church; two years later, they established St. Thomas Methodist Episcopal Church; in the spring of 1877, Blacks started the Trinity A.M.E. Zion Church. Nevertheless, for the period up to 1880, Campbell A.M.E. Church was the major Black religious institution in Frankford.

The church congregation appeared to draw members from all economic and cultural groups in the community. Richard Robinson, pastor of the church in the 1860’s, held $900 in real and personal property in 1860. Henderson Davis, a frequent performer at church social affairs, had $40 In personal property in 1860. In addition, from tomb­stones in the A.M.E. Church cemetery, we know that other members or relatives of the “economic elite” were church participants: Edward Smith, Sr., the mother of Peter Brake, the wife of Isaiah Harrison, Letitia Bowser, James C. Watson, and his wife Almintia. Unfortunately, we have little direct evidence pertaining to the membership of non-elite Blacks. We do know that Rhoda Pleasant, whose husband Jesse is listed as propertyless in 1870, was buried in the A.M.E. Church cemetery, and we suspect, given the usual social makeup of A.M.E. churches, that many other non-propertied Blacks were also church participants. The geographic origins of some of the congregants also gave some indication of diversity. Of the eight known members of the church, six were southern-born, two were northern-born.

As in most A.M.E. churches, services were a vibrant phenomenon reflecting the usual style of Black evangelical Christianity.

They held quarterly meetings and no one can just describe the doings. Worshipers came from the long distances and services lasted all day and part of the night. When spirits got high it was no unusual thing for them to jump, almost reaching the ceiling in their enthusiasm for religion.

So one white resident described the gathering, thus showing his own discomfort with the emotional aspect of person­ality. The Black church in Frankford, as elsewhere, rec­ognized this side of its members and produced the oppor­tunity for them to experience the emotional, intellectual, and social interaction necessary for alt people.

The church building served as a general meetinghouse for the entire community. As we have already seen, be­tween 1838 and 1840 it held the first classes of the African Colored School. It also functioned as a social meeting place, providing a “forum in which the colored youth of the town gave exhibitions of their talents by singing at concerts and declaiming.” Similarly, it fulfilled the role of of a gathering place where the children of the community could meet for picnics or where adults could collect to hold a memorial meeting for a revered friend of Black Americans, Charles Sumner.

The school and church served as the principal formal institutions in the Black community. Aside from their educational and religious functions, they fulfilled the role of cementing the community by engaging its members in periodic social activities. Moreover, the Quaker teachers and Black ministers who staffed these organizations im­parted social and cultural values to the children and adults with whom they came in contact. This particular function is crucial to the strength and continuity of any community and the part played by the African Colored School and the Campbell A.M.E. Church was not insignificant.

Perhaps the most vital social institution, however, was the family. Black families in Frankford gained autonomy early in the nineteenth century when a large proportion of Blacks began to break away from white households and establish independent families. In 1800 a very small percentage of Frankford’s Black population lived in inde­pendent households, but by 1810 the proportion had in­creased to some sixty per cent, and by 1840, the figure reach over ninety per cent. This phenomenon occurred despite the continued dependence of Blacks upon whites for service jobs, positions that might have resulted in a high proportion of live-in servants. While there may have been many factors involved, such as competition for live-in positions, it is probably true also that Blacks preferred to live apart from whites.

Living separately from whites, while providing a setting for stable family life, does not, in itself, insure it. A high incidence of couple-headed and/or expanded Black families (families which include aunts, uncles, etc.) included in nineteenth-century Frankford implies stability. At each census year between 1820 and 1880, over two-thirds of all independent Black households were headed by a male and female. The percentage of female-headed households did increase over time, reaching about twenty-five per cent by 1880, but this structural form did not dominate the Black family experience. Moreover, except for 1830, over three­-fourths of the Black households were either nuclear (at least one or two adults alone, or adult[s] plus children) or expanded (nuclear family plus boarders and/or relatives). Thus, in a period when Frankford experienced massive industrialization and the Black community witnessed significant population growth and population turnover, Black family structure remained essentially unchanged.

It is not easy to determine exactly what values were transmitted between generations and by which institutions. But the genealogical records of old family Bibles bear testimony to the importance of family in shaping values. Existing in a white world from which they could expect little or no assistance, the Black family focused on the survival and enrichment of Black people and developed the social institutions necessary for that purpose.

Conclusion

The Black residents of Frankford who entered the last fifth of the nineteenth century lived in a much different world from that of their predecessors a hundred years before. No longer a quiet agricultural village, Frankford, by 1880, had become a noisy, urbanized, industrialized settle­ment. But for Frankford Blacks, it was not only the larger social environment that had changed, it was their im­mediate social existence as well. In the first eighty years of the nineteenth century, the Black inhabitants had created and nourished a community. They built a viable social world for themselves replete with religious, educational, and secular institutions capable of satisfying their social and emotional needs. If Black people still had to face the realities of life in a white world, marked by constant social and economic crises, they had, at least, molded a social unit that could help them deal with their changing fortunes.

* In each census year a proportion of household heads did not give an occupation; thus the occupational percentages in the text will not add up to 100 per cent for each census year.

The two authors wish to thank Dr. Theodore Hershberg, Director of the Philadelphia Social History Project, University of Pennsylvania, for his assistance in the preparation of this essay. Some of the data used are from the Project. The PSHP is funded by the Center for Studies in Metropolitan Problems of the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Science Foundation. Mr. Williams and Mr. Ulle also wish to thank Rae Alexander-Minter and Dr. Peggy Reeves Sanday for giving them permission to use the data they collected for the Frankford Bicentennial Project.

The authors were employed by the Frankford Bicentennial Project, 1975-76.

Robert Ulle is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a research associate of the Philadelphia Social History Project, a project which is analyzing census data from 1837 to 1880, and is also employed by the Germantown Mennonite Corporation. He has published articles on both Mennonites and Blacks in Pennsylvania.

Henry Williams is a research associate of the Social History Project. His senior thesis at Princeton University on the Black response to American Marxism in the 1920’s has been published.