Still Image

Philadelphia General Hospital as it appeared on a City ward map in 1909. 

Blockley Almshouse. This Hexamer Survey Map, drawn in 1893, shows the almshouse and hospital a decade before the complex was officially renamed the Philadelphia General Hospital. 

The Philadelphia General Hospital, shown here in the 1940s, was the City’s only public hospital, the descendant institution of the Blockley Almshouse.   

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.”

At the turn of the twentieth century, Frederick L. Hoffman was the chief statistician for the Prudential Insurance Company. Hoffman fervently believed in the truth of statistics, that they were unalloyed, objective, value-free measures of the phenomena they measured. While he marshaled statistical data from the 1890 Census and other data sources that showed high rates of tuberculosis, alcoholism, and prostitution and other markers of criminal behavior for African Americans, he wrongly attributed these behaviors to Black biological and moral inferiority. Hoffman was a racist. Unfortunately, his ideologically misshapen interpretation, which ignored the social conditions (and social abandonment) African Americans were subjected to, swayed at least a generation of policy makers, foundations, and social workers to deny essential social and health services to densely packed, Black-segregated urban ghettos.

The 1890 Census included social, health, and economic indicators for the first generation of emancipated African Americans in the South, as well as indicators of the status of African Americans living in the North. Anti-black race-writers interpreted these indicators as evidence that African Americans were a “diseased and dying” population group. High incidences of contagious diseases, particularly tuberculosis, and high rates of criminal incarceration among African Americans were casually and falsely assumed to be indicators of biological inferiority. The anti-Black race-writers gave no consideration to the alternative explanation, today accepted as fact by leading historians and sociologists, namely that discriminatory housing, health, employment, and policing policies and practices were the source of the negative trends recorded in the census.

Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, a Harvard University paleontologist and thought-leader/purveyor of social myths in the late nineteenth century, was associated with “scientific racism. Shaler subscribed to the theory of black regression, which the historian Ibram X. Kendi unsparingly describes as follows: Freed from the condition of slavery, blacks were regressing to the “‘African type,’ leading to ‘bold and forward’ Black women advancing on White men, Black male criminals raping White women (compelling White men to lynch them), and Black parents producing children who were ‘less inclined to work.’” In other words, Shaler promoted a view of chattel slavery as a civilizing influence. His ideas belonged to a climate of opinion in the North that regarded African Americans as a declining race unworthy of social, health, and education services.

Discriminatory housing policies segregated African Americans in densely populated urban ghettos of the North. This photograph shows an African American family in a kitchenette apartment on Chicago’s South Side.

This image looking west shows Franklin Field in 1903, eight years after its opening. The stadium was built on land transferred from Blockley Almshouse to the University of Pennsylvania in 1889.

The University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology was built on former almshouse property across Vintage Avenue from HUP and several blocks west of the almshouse and its hospital buildings. The Museum opened in its first phase in 1899; the rotunda was completed in 1915.