A Portrait of Black Philadelphia in the 1930s

In 1938 William Strong and a companion named Egan spent months crisscrossing Philadelphia. Their mission was to photograph the city’s Black community, its culture, and its history. In February, they snapped students socializing in the Berean Manual Training and Industrial School’s cafeteria and energetic children playing instruments at the Wharton Centre settlement house. That April, they visited the Octavius V. Catto Lodge building to document the city’s “First Colored Food Show” and shot rows of vibrant booths and uniformed attendants. In September, they ventured to 17th Street where they photographed an exuberant group of men playing checkers outdoors.

A group of men playing checkers at the corner of 17th and South streets in Philadelphia, September 1938.
Pennsylvania State Archives, RG-13

The photographs Strong and Egan took that year were intended for a guidebook tentatively titled “The Negro in Philadelphia.” Like the photographs, each chapter would document and celebrate an aspect of the city’s Black community.

But the guidebook was never published. Today the original manuscript and its photographs sit quietly in storage in the Pennsylvania State Archives. These fragile pages, marked with copyedits and still bearing the writer’s margin notes, are largely forgotten today.

The guidebook was the brainchild of the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), a government arts initiative created in depths of the Great Depression. Using Works Progress Administration funds, thousands of unemployed historians, writers, editors and artists were hired to write books and articles on all facets of American history and society. FWP director Henry Alsberg called this work a “self-portrait of America.”

The greatest achievement of FWP was its American Guide series, a collection of guidebooks on each state and several major American cities. John Steinbeck, one of the many authors employed by the project, later called these guides the “most comprehensive account of the United States ever got together.” In Pennsylvania, FWP staff worked with the Pennsylvania Historical Commission (today Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission) to publish guidebooks on the state, Philadelphia and Erie.

An exhibitor displays Rainey’s O-Ke-Doke potato chips and snacks at a food show in Philadelphia, March 1938.
Pennsylvania State Archives, RG-13

But FWP’s success was short lived. Like many other New Deal programs, FWP struggled with funding. In 1939 congressional critics eliminated funding, making unfounded claims that FWP employed communists and produced anti-American material. In Pennsylvania, state support allowed a few FWP projects to continue briefly but by 1941 it had ended.

“The Negro in Philadelphia” was one of the unfinished FWP projects remaining when funds ran out. It was part of a series of planned ethnic guides intended to complement the general Pennsylvania guidebook. Other unfinished guides would have documented the Black community in Pittsburgh, Jews, Poles and the Pennsylvania Dutch.

Though the nearly complete original manuscript still survives, there are some mysteries surrounding its creation. Most passages are anonymous or only identified with authors’ last names. The only acknowledged authors are a Philadelphia reporter named Alonzo Millberry, researcher John Roane Jr., and writer Kenton Jackson. The book’s editor is referred to only as “Pinkett.”

No matter who wrote “The Negro in Philadelphia,” it’s clear the authors were intimately familiar with the city’s Black history and culture. Each chapter highlights the “development” of Philadelphia’s Black community in economic, cultural, recreational, athletic and social terms. Passages build off earlier studies of Black Philadelphia written by scholars like W.E.B. DuBois and Sadie Tanner Mossell and include detailed statistics linking historical trends in Philadelphia to conditions as they were in the 1930s.

Many passages celebrate successful Black Philadelphians. Prominent authors like Arthur Fauset and Alice Dunbar Nelson are described in detail, as are Black entrepreneurs who invented the catering business in early-19th-century Philadelphia. Other sections focus more on everyday life and describe how neighborhoods squeezed into barbershops to hear Joe Louis box on the radio or gathered under tents watching “sidewalk” checkers games: “On almost any warm day one can see eager, enthusiastic crowds gathered about a checkerboard, where two serious players are testing each other’s strategy.”

Children playing on the Wharton Centre settlement house’s playground, February 1938.
Pennsylvania State Archives, RG-13

Importantly, the manuscript candidly discusses discrimination Black Philadelphians faced and its impact on housing, education and business. Profiles of Underground Railroad officers and tenants’ unions pepper the manuscript, recounting how Black people resisted prejudice and fought for civil rights from colonial times to the early 20th century.

“The Negro in Philadelphia” includes a telling quote from writer Alain Locke that sums up this guide: “Negro life is not only establishing new contacts and founding new centers, it is finding a new soul. . . . We have, as the heralding sign an unusual outburst of creative expression.”

Though it was never finished, “The Negro in Philadelphia” is an important snapshot of Philadelphia’s Black community in the 1930s. In a time when racial prejudice was on the rise in the United States and a “melting pot” mentality often excluded minorities from discussions of American society, this guidebook insisted that Black Philadelphia was worth celebrating, studying and sharing with the American people.

The original “Negro in Philadelphia” manuscript and other unpublished ethnic and racial studies of Pennsylvania communities can be found in the Pennsylvania State Archives in Record Group 13, Records of the Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission.

Tyler Stump is an archivist at the Pennsylvania State Archives.