“If we needed a capital of Blackness, we’d make it Philadelphia.” So says Charles D. Ellison in his 2019 prose poem, “Philadelphia, Where Blackness Transcends.”
Ellison’s piece is the final entry in a new anthology, A Black Philadelphia Reader: African American Writings About the City of Brotherly Love, published by Penn State University Press. The editor of this collection, Louis J. Parascandola, is neither Black nor a Philadelphian. He is a professor of English at Long Island University in Brooklyn, New York with a deep interest in the Harlem Renaissance and experience editing anthologies.
Parascandola noticed that several prominent Harlem Renaissance writers–Alain Locke, Alice Dunbar Nelson–had Philadelphia ties. This led him to search for other works by African Americans from Philadelphia. Parascandola was surprised by how many there were and further surprised that there was no anthology of Black Philadelphia writers. Such a collection is certainly needed, given that Black people have had a continuous presence in the city since the mid-1600s, and Philadelphia is over 40 percent Black, the highest percentage of any major American city.
In the introduction, Parascandola explains that “the focus here is not just on writers with a Philadelphia connection, but on the authors’ views of the city itself.” The cumulative effect of reading the essays, letters, poems, memoirs, short stories, and novel excerpts is a multi-faceted, multi-generational, multi-voiced portrait of the city over time.
The writings are organized chronologically and divided into four sections: Early Black Settlement Until the Pre–Civil War Years (Beginnings – 1849), The Pre–Civil War Years Through World War II (1850 – 1949), Decline, Racial Turmoil, and the Development of the Post–Industrial City (1950-1999), and Philadelphia in the Twenty-first Century and Beyond (2000 to the present).
Before each section, Parascandola includes a brief description of relevant Philadelphia history during the period to be covered. As a person who has taught, studied, developed curriculum, produced films, and written about local African American history for 20 years, I realize that this was no small feat. It was researching this history, rather than choosing the writings, that took the bulk of his efforts during the six years it took him to complete the book.
Parascandola reached out to me when he heard about my book Black History in the Philadelphia Landscape: Deep Roots, Continuing Legacy that was published by Temple University Press in February 2024. His book was published the next month. We both recognized that my research would have benefitted enormously from his book and vice versa.
City of Neighborhoods
The corner of 23rd and South Streets in 1975. | Photo courtesy of Temple University Libraries, Special Collections Research Center
Like most anthologies, one can choose readings selectively based on one’s purpose or interest. I looked at the book through a Hidden City lens and focused on aspects of the built environment as I read. A Black Philadelphia Reader reveals a great deal about changes to the spatial dimensions of the city’s African American population.
In the earliest portion of the book, nearly all the writers–James Forten, Absalom Jones, Robert Purvis, and William Whipper–lived in the neighborhoods we now call Society Hill. Richard Allen, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal church, described purchasing a lot on the corner of 6th and Lombard Streets, a parcel of land that has remained in Black hands for longer than any other in the nation and is still home to Mother Bethel AME Church.
As the 19th century progressed, Blacks moved to other parts of the city, a process described in an excerpted portion of W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. In this 1899 publication, Du Bois explains, “There was time in the memory of living men when a small district near Sixth and Lombard streets comprehended the great mass of the Negro population of the city. This is no longer so. Very early the stream of the black population started northward, but the increased foreign immigration of 1830 later turned it back. It started south also but was checked by poor houses and worse police protection. Finally with gathered momentum the emigration from the slums started west, rolling on slowly and surely, taking Lombard street as its main thoroughfare, gaining early foothold in West Philadelphia, and turning at the Schuylkill River north and south to newer portions of the city.”
During the decades following World War II, African Americans lived in many parts of the city, but the corridors of Lombard Street and South Street remained cultural hubs. For example, in an excerpt of William Gardner Smith’s 1954 novel South Street, a character named Claude who has married a white woman and moved away, finds himself drawn back. “One evening, while out alone, walking, Claude felt again the pull of South Street—the need, if only for one evening, to go back to the old loved neighborhood and see the old, familiar faces, and old, familiar bars. He walked along South Street, peered into a few of the bars and in the Postal Card, and then turned into Broad and walked to Lombard Street, and down the stairs to the Showboat.”
David Bradley’s 1975 novel, also titled South Street, describes a similar scene: “There was no one on the corner where Gray’s Ferry met Twenty-second and Twenty-second met South: the police, spying any of the local citizens, assumed they were there to rob the liquor store or the food market, and ran the duly convicted offender away. But a little way downtown, near the junction of a nameless alley and South Street, was a dim entranceway, a hole in the wall with a thick wooden door hanging open, and out of it came belches of heavy-beating jukebox music and stale tobacco smoke.”
Children playing in an entryway of James Weldon Johnson Housing Project at 25th and Norris Streets in 1949. | Photo courtesy of Temple University Libraries, Special Collections Research Center
During the post-war era, North Philadelphia became an increasingly Black neighborhood. Former Black Panther Party chairperson Elaine Brown was born in North Philly in 1943. Her 1992 memoir, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story, describes her 13th birthday party which took place shortly after she and her mother had moved from York Street to the James Weldon Johnson Housing Project at 25th and Norris Streets. “All the ‘youngbloods’ from the ‘Avenue’ arrived in a pack. The Avenue was the street gang that controlled the territory that included 21st and York Streets. They had named the gang after Susquehanna Avenue, the main street running through the territory. Even though I now lived in Norris Street gang territory, I was, in spirit, part of life on York Street, part of the Avenue.”
In his 1994 novel Losing Absalom, Alexs Pate describes a fictional North Philadelphia street. “The 2500 block of West Whither Street, as in most of North Philadelphia, the surface of summer sunlight that reflected hope was deceiving. The internal hemorrhage of unemployment, the open flow of drugs, and governmental indifference all added to the gradual deterioration that was affecting the neighborhood.”
Not surprisingly, several works deal with the MOVE bombing on Osage Avenue in West Philadelphia. Parascandola includes an excerpt from John Edgar Wideman’s 1990 novel Philadelphia Fire. In her 1987 poem “elegy (for MOVE and Philadelphia)”, Sonia Sanchez writes:
c’mon girl hurry on down to osage st
they’re roasting in the fire
smell the dreadlocks and blk/skins
roasting in the fire.
West Philadelphia is also the setting for other pieces of writing such as “4951 Walnut Street” by poet Yvonne Chism-Peace. Asali Solomon’s short story “Secret Pool” is about the University City Swim Club. Yolanda Wisher’s poem “5 South 43rd Street, Floor 2” evokes the multicultural spirit of the 21st century neighborhood:
Once we went into a store sunk into the street,
owned by a Cambodian woman. She sold everything,
from evening gowns to soup. Over to Walnut and 45th,
where the Muslim cat sells this chicken wrapped in pita,
draped in cucumber sauce. The pregnant woman
behind the counter writes our order out in Arabic.
We grab a juice from the freezer, some chips,
eye the bean and sweet potato pies.
Pretty much every neighborhood with a sizable Black population, from Germantown to Wynnefield, makes some appearance in the pages of this anthology.
The Right to Ride
The route 23 trolley passes Vernon Park in 1976. | Photo courtesy of Temple University Libraries, Special Collections Research Center
Another leitmotif of the book is public transportation. William Still’s 1867 A Brief Narrative of the Struggle for the Rights of the Colored People of Philadelphia in the City Railway Cars is an impassioned argument against the status quo in which Black people paid a fare, but had to stand outside of the streetcars, exposed to the elements. Still recounts, “Riding on the platform of a bitter cold day like this I need not say is almost intolerable, but to compel persons to pay the same as those who enjoy comfortable seats inside by a good fire, seems quite atrocious.”
Similarly, Harriet Jacobs, author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, goes from elation at her newfound freedom to deep disappointment when she boards a train from Philadelphia to New York after fleeing enslavement in North Carolina. Upon learning that Black people were prohibited from riding in first-class rail cars, she writes, “This was the first chill to my enthusiasm about the Free States. Colored people were allowed to ride in a filthy box behind white people, at the south, but there they were not required to pay for the privilege.”
The Route 23 trolley/bus, known as the longest, busiest route in the city, makes four separate appearances in the book, including in a heartbreaking short story by Becky Birtha entitled “Route 23: 10th and Bigler to Bethlehem Pike.” The narrator has aroused her children from sleep to ride the trolley through the night because there is no heat in their North Philadelphia apartment. “Cherise, sugar, we at the end of the line again. Go up there and put these quarters in the man box. No, Junie. This trolley gonna keep running all night long. Time just come for the man to turn the thing around. We ain’t getting off. This trip ain’t over yet.”
City of Brotherly Love?
Children swim in the fountains along the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1979. | Photo courtesy of Temple University Libraries, Special Collections Research Center
As a lifelong Philadelphian reading this collection, I gained a deeper insight into the struggles and righteous anger experienced by the city’s Black residents over centuries. The book also increased my admiration for the creativity, resilience, energy, and craft of Black people who have written in every genre about the place that we call home. Although many landmarks and institutions in the book are particular to Black residents, plenty of others, from Wanamaker’s to 30th Street Station, from Girls’ High to Reading Terminal, are universal Philadelphia touchstones. Pulitzer Prize winner Gregory Pardlo’s “Philadelphia Negro,” exemplifies aspects of living here that override race and unite us as residents of the city:
…as a youngster, I thought every American a Philadelphian
Negro, blue-eyed soulsters and southpaws alike getting
strong now, mounting the art museum steps together
like children swept up in Elton’s freedom from Fern Rock
to Veteran’s Stadium, endorphins clinging like liberty
themed tourist trolleys unloading outside the Penn Relays…”
Author Louis Parascandola will discuss his book at the Parkway Central Branch of the Free Library on Saturday, February 1, 2025 at 1 p.m.
