W.E.B. DuBois

W.E.B. Du Bois, shown here in 1919, published the results of his groundbreaking sociological survey of Philadelphia’s 7th Ward, The Philadelphia Negro, in 1899. Using rigorous sociological measures, Du Bois documented the poverty, poor health, woeful sanitation, and lack of social services experienced by the ward’s majority-African American residents. Providing a persuasive, though at the time little acknowledged, anti-racist refutation of turn-of-the-century stereotypes promoted by Frederick L. Hoffman and other white-coated, so-called objective, social scientists, Du Bois showed that racial discrimination lay at the core of what was called “the Negro Problem.”