Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 1860–1900

by Roger Lane

In the late nineteenth century, life became more stable and orderly for most American city dwellers, but not for blacks. Roger Lane offers a historical explanation for the rising levels of black urban crime and family instability during this paradoxical era. Philadelphia serves as test case because of the richness of the data: Du Bois's classic study, The Philadelphia Negro, newspapers, records of the criminal justice system and other local agencies, and the federal census. The author presents numerical details, along with many examples of the human stories--social and political--behind the statistics.

Lane reveals how social and economic discrimination created a black criminal subculture. This subculture, overlooked by those histories depending on often inaccurate census materials, eroded family patterns, encouraged violence, discouraged efforts at middle-class respectability, and intensified employment problems by adding white fear to the white prejudice that had helped to create it.

Modern crime rates and patterns are shown to be products of a historical culture that can be traced from its formative years to the 1980s. Lane not only charts Philadelphia's story but also makes suggestions regarding national and international patterns.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

206 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

Reviews

[Frank Stein · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lot of the book rambles, or deals with issues only tangentially related to its supposed subject, but it is still a great work of history that thoroughly deserves its Bancroft Prize for one simple reason: its intriguing and convincingly-stated thesis. Basically, Lane argues that blacks that moved to Northern cities in the post-Civil War era became more alienated, socially-disorganized, and criminally-inclined than their Southern brethren and forebears.

While today the realm of debate is still framed between those who argue that black crime is caused solely by racism and poverty (ie Jesse Jackson), and those who believe that it is rooted in black social-disorganization tracing its roots back to slavery (basically the 1965 Moynihan report position), Lane shows that both these explanations have little value in the post-war era. He also shows that the Moynihan-type argument, generally regarded as being the less "sympathetic" of the two, was originally broached by black intellectuals, people like WEB Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and E. Franklin Frasier, as an explanation for how the black race was coming "up from slavery" and improving in civilization and morals. They thought that black social problems (which they were genuinely concerned about) were rooted in the past, and were therefore gradually ameliorating as blacks moved, both physically and metaphorically, further away from slavery. But Lane shows that crime and disorganization in the black community were getting worse as the 19th century wore on, and as more blacks moved to Northern cities like Philadelphia.

First, Lane deals with the police statistics. They show that the white murder rate in Philly dropped in this period from 3.1 to 2.1 per 100,000 people, coincident with a long-term trend that had been going on at least since the Middle Ages (as people moved to the city and grew wealthier they also grew more "civilized" and peaceful). Yet, paradoxically, the black rate jumped from 6.4 to 11.4 per 100,000 in the same period, about the same percentage change as whites but in the exact opposite direction (it was also about 5x the white rate, compared to about 8x today). Lane also shows this was not just systematic police bias. Numbers show that over 40% of all arrests in this period were not made by the police at all (aggrieved citizens often frog-marched the accused to the judges), and when the police did make arrests they were treated with much less deference than today, with many getting charged with assault when they dared to exert force. One supporter of a Philly mayor even admitted that "courts are loath to admit, [and:] juries to believe, the testimony of policemen." Therefore those tried for murder in the 19th century were tried mainly because the victims' kith and kin prosecuted, which meant, of course, blacks were mainly prosecuting other blacks. Lane even shows that conviction rates were about equal after arrest, and that punishments for white and black defendants were fairly comparable (not a single black was hanged in Philly between 1860 and 1892, despite numerous black-white murders and despite many white executions).

Lane traces the roots of this criminality to the almost complete exclusion of blacks from the new industrial labor force, with its regular disciplines and regimentation, as well as its good wages (the labor unions were key in this exclusion of course). Also, self-employed blacks were only about 1% of the black labor-force, as were white-collar workers, and therefore the vast, vast majority were confined to being domestic help or unskilled laborer. Their irregular wages were often supplemented by theft and prostitution. The fundamental problem, then, was a movement into the illicit economic sector, which meant, in this era, mainly pimping and prostitution. Although they were only about 5% of the population, blacks constituted over half of all those jailed for keeping "bawdy houses" in the 1890s. In the early 20th century too, about 1/4 of all those charged with prostitution were black. It was the drug trade of the 19th century. Furthermore those born in the North were more likely to commit crimes like prostitution than blacks coming from the rural South, and they were also more likely to be part of single-parent households. Things were getting worse, not better.

So what Moynihan called the "tangle of pathology" is both more recent and yet more intractable than we once thought. This is one of the few history books that actually lives up to its billing of explaining contemporary political problems through a historical lens. The only question is why it isn't better known.

[May]

Whereas the nearly universal U-curve of criminality saw a decrease in urban crime in the late 19th century, for urban black Americans, crime actually increased. To explain this diverging pattern, Roger Lane's Bancroft Prize-winning Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 1860-1900 succinctly ties poverty and discrimination and culture together. Using Philadelphia as his model, but stating that patterns found there can be applied to other urban centers, Lane argues that exclusion from the urban-industrial revolution led black Philadelphians to resort to crime and vice, eventually producing attitudes and behaviors that affected all urban blacks and creating a black criminal subculture that reinforced their exclusion and discrimination.

White exclusion of black Philadelphians from the urban-industrial revolution prevented them from enjoying the same prosperity, political power, safety, and stable social psychology that white Philadelphians enjoyed. As poverty and discrimination blunted their opportunities, they turned to crime and vice, which led to violence and homicide. Eventually, this criminal behavior "worked deep into the culture of black Philadelphia" and affected black Philadelphians of all classes and backgrounds. As a result, this pattern of criminality, which reemerged after the 1960s, has erased white memory of 19th-century discrimination of blacks that created this behavior and has been used to justify further racism.

This book meanders through chapters and brings in a lot of research that could be condensed. Representativeness of this pattern and conclusions are less convincing and Lane's work would benefit from a longer discussion of its cultural explanation. However, its thesis is well-stated, well-argued, and well-supported.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Roots of Violence..." by Roger Lane gives you a lot to think about. In the book, Lane describes the overarching trends in the black community of Philadelphia from the Civil War, forward. Although Lane writes specifically about Philadelphia, many of the collective behaviors and socioeconomic factors affecting the black community, are repeated throughout many northern cities. The book is well researched, and it is fascinating to see how the obvious historical oppression of the black community, has found expression in its cultural folklore, such as the legend of Stagger Lee, and Bad, Bad Leroy Brown. This book is extremely helpful in understanding the macro historical trends that have occurred over the last 150 years in race relations, and I can see why it won a Bancroft Prize in American History. A very thought-provoking book.