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An emblematic image of the Great Migration of African American families leaving the Jim Crow South in search of better economic and social opportunities in Northern cities, 1915–1970.
The chapel at Olive Cemetery, a Black cemetery in West Philadelphia on Girard Avenue between Marion and Belmont avenues. Cemetery gates such as these were safeguards against body snatching.
“Bone rooms,” like this one at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, ca. 1920, were central parts of nineteenth and twentieth century anatomy laboratories.
Paul Robeson and unidentified actress in Eugene O’Neil’s play All God’s Chilluns Got Wings.
Baseball entrepreneur Ed Bolden, shown here in 1924, when he controlled the Eastern Colored League, which would collapse in 1928. Bolden would go on to form the Philadelphia Stars. The Stars joined the new Negro National League and played its 1933 and 1934 seasons at Passon Field, before moving to Penmar Park in West Philadelphia’s Parkside neighborhood.
Opened in 1872, Presbyterian Hospital soon expanded. This aerial photo from 1925 shows the facility spread between 38th and 39th streets north of Market. The east-west street is Powelton Ave.
Inspired by the displays at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, William P. Wilson, biology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, conceptualized and organized the Philadelphia Commercial Museum.
This sheet music contains the music and lyrics for “Ol’ Man River,” a song from the 1927 Broadway musical, with Paul Robeson controversially singing the role of Joe the Riverman.
This historic Bromley map from the mid-1920s shows the neighborhood that would become the Black Bottom. A landmark building that would figure prominently in the creation of the University City Science Center was the Stephen Greene Printing Plant (bottom right).
This Bromley map shows the location of the Wistar Institute as it appeared in the mid-1920s. The building stands independent of the University of Pennsylvania.