Bibliographical Essay

A variety of primary sources are useful for scholars interested in the topic of Black urbanites in San Francisco and on the Pacific slope. The United States Bureau of the Census collected demographic information which can be culled from the Manuscript Census; the federal census documents of 1860, 1870, 1880, and 1900, in addition to a state enumeration for 1852, are available. Scholars can compile this data and perform the complicated analyses used by cliometricians for other topics. Some simpler tabulations of the kind I made have also been undertaken by: James A. Fisher, "The California Negro—1860—An Analysis of State Census Returns," in San Francisco African-American Historical and Cultural Society, Inc., Blacks in the West, No. 1 Manuscript Series, 1976; Ernest V. Siracusa, Jr., "Black 49'ers: The Negro in the California Gold Rush, 1848-1861" (typed essay on microfilm, June 1969, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley); and Philip M. Montesano, "The San Francisco Black Community, 1849-1890: The Quest for 'Equality Before the Law'" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 1974). California's state censues have little value except for comparisons at the state level.

Some few documents and petitions of Black San Franciscans are preserved in the offices of the Governor and the Secretary of the State of California. These include articles of incorporation of Black enterprises and race organizations and letters concerning appointments of notaries public. If researchers do not have a specific name or organization and year, however, their task is formidable, depending on whether the records have been indexed by race.

Government reports rarely mention Afro-Americans and thus shed little light on their condition. Annual reports of the San Francisco school board provide information on Black schools during the mid-nineteenth century. The San Francisco Directory lists names, occupations, and addresses of some heads of households; the designation "colored" disappears after 1876, limiting the Directory's utility. It does include brief histories of and data on Black churches and Masonic lodges, as well as the names of the officers of each.

Librarians have only begun to process the material on Afro-Americans in the letters and manuscripts of famous and well-to-do whites. Afro-Americans were not on the minds of the Sharons, the Crockers, and the Huntingtons, so we should not be surprised if the most careful gleaning of their records turns up very little for those interested in Afro-American history.

But Afro-Americans themselves left a number of unpublished and published

records. There are very few letters, with the exception of those among the Charlotte Brown Papers in the California Historical Society Library and the Jeremiah B. Sanderson Papers in the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Also useful are The Proceedings of the State Conventions of the Colored Citizens of the State of California and the Proceedings or Official Minutes of the California Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church . The former, which has been recently republished, is useful for understanding politics and civil rights in the mid-nineteenth century. It also contains valuable statistics, as well as records of debates. The Official Minutes contains statistical data on the size and wealth of the churches, particularly at the turn of the century. Annual Records of the Booker T. Washington Community Service Center, 1926-1931 are the most detailed of all records of Black institutions. As Afro-American history gets the attention it deserves, more valuable materials will undoubtedly be made available to libraries, but at present only a few documents, constitutions, by-laws, and programs of Afro-American societies are accessible.

A number of dissertations and theses afford an understanding of the scene in San Francisco and the far west. The growth of the physical setting, and the politics affecting the city's expansion, are discussed in Martyn J. Bowden, "Dynamics of City Growth: An Historical Geography of the San Francisco Central District, 1850-1931" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1967) and Margaret G. King, "The Growth of San Francisco Illustrated by Shifts in the Density of Population" (M.A. thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1928). Judd Lewis Kahn, "Imperial San Francisco: History of a Vision" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1971) focuses on the rebuilding of the city after 1906.

Several theses and dissertations analyze labor relations, prohibition, and other topics. Edward Paul Eaves, "A History of the Cooks' and Waiters' Union of San Francisco" (M.A. thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1930) provides the background for understanding the Palace Hotel change-over, but does not discuss the Afro-Americans who were replaced. Robert Coleman Francis, "A History of Labor on the San Francisco Waterfront" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1934) treats an area of San Francisco's economic life from which Negroes were excluded, except as strikebreakers, until 1934. Neil Larry Shumsky, "Tar Flat and Nob Hill: A Social History of Industrial San Francisco During the 1870s" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1972) permits an understanding of the city's economic development and its effects on various classes in the nineteenth century.

Vice and ethnic districts are treated in Elizabeth Anne Brown, "The Enforcement of Prohibition in San Francisco, California" (M.A. thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1948); Liston F. Sabran, "Mayor James Rolph, Jr. and the End of the Barbary Coast" (M.A. thesis, San Francisco State University, 1961); and Helen Virginia Cather, "The History of San Francisco's Chinatown" (M.A. thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1932).

Several theses and a few dissertations analyze Afro-American topics. The oldest are Berlinda Davison, "Educational Status of the Negro in the San Francisco Bay Region" (M.A. thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1921), and Robert Coleman Francis, "A Survey of Negro Business in the San Francisco Bay Region"

(M.A. thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1928). Another early study is A. Odell Thurman, "The Negro in California Before 1890" (M.A. thesis, College of the Pacific, Stockton, 1945). Several dissertations and theses focus on migration and social history. Edward Everett France, "Some Aspects of the Migration of the Negro to the San Francisco Bay Area Since 1940" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1962), and Lawrence Brooks de Graaf, "Negro Migration to Los Angeles, 1930 to 1950" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1962) enable the reader to compare the Blacks of the two cities. Unfortunately, the University of California at Los Angeles does not have the copy of de Graaf's dissertation. James A. Fisher, "A Social History of the Negro in California, 1860-1890" (M.A. thesis, Sacramento State University, 1966) foreshadows the interest in civil rights that produced a number of graduate studies in the 1960s.

Sheila M. Skjeie, "California and the Fifteenth Amendment: A Study of Racism" (Ph.D. diss., Sacramento State University, Sacramento, 1973) analyzes California's belated adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment. A seminar paper by Sally Garey, "Some Aspects of Mid-Nineteenth Century Black Uplift: Philip A. Bell and the San Francisco Elevator " (University of California, Berkeley, 1967) informed me of one of the first major champions of civil rights in San Francisco. Various aspects of the struggle for equality in nineteenth-century cities are treated in Francis N. Lortie, Jr., "San Francisco's Black Community, 1870-1890: Dilemmas in the Struggle for Equality" (M.A. thesis, San Francisco State University, 1970); and Larry George Murphy, "Equality Before the Law: The Struggle of Nineteenth-Century Black Californians for Social and Political Justice" (Ph.D. diss., Graduate Theological Union, 1973); Philip M. Montesano's dissertation has been noted. Civil rights issues affected the exodus from California to Canada; this is analyzed in James William Pilton, "Negro Settlement in British Columbia, 1858-1871" (M.A. thesis, University of British Columbia, 1951). A Black San Francisco community of the 1960s is studied in Neil Arthur Eddington, "The Urban Plantation: the Ethnography of an Oral Tradition in a Negro Community" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1967).

Among published materials, the federal census has much statistical material and innumerable comparisons, but sometimes lacks the information sought by the scholar interested in a particular Afro-American community. Because the procedure is subject to change every ten years, censuses cannot always easily be compared. As noted, San Francisco's civic officials were not likely to gather material on Negroes—they were far more interested in and fearful of the Chinese. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors Municipal Reports , however, include a breakdown on diseases and causes of death by race. Although the number reported may be too small to be statistically significant for the Afro-San Franciscans, scholars may find this useful for assessing the health of the city's Black population.

Henry G. Langley, comp., San Francisco Directory, 1860-1879 (compiled by others in subsequent years) offers much information. Also, see Charles F. Tilghman, comp., Colored Directory of the Leading Cities of Northern California, 1916-1917 (Oakland, 1917). In addition to listing names, addresses, and occupations of heads of households, it includes advertisements, photographs of homes and of officers of social clubs, and some statistical information. One of the

few remaining copies is at the East Bay Negro Historical Society in Oakland. A generation later, Workers of the Writers' Program of the Works Project Administration in Northern California compiled San Francisco: The Bay and Its Cities (New York, 1947); they noted the growing Black population, its geographical origins, and the nature of its social life.

Because much of San Francisco's manuscript and published history was destroyed by the fires of the 1850s and the earthquake and fire of 1906, the material that survived is precious and needs to be carefully mined to recreate an accurate multi-ethnic history of one of the nation's most fascinating cities. Histories, reminiscences, and published collections of letters shed some light on the Afro-American population of the Bay Area. Frank Soulé, John H. Gihon, and James Nisbet, The Annals of San Francisco (New York, 1855) provides a colorful portrait of the pioneer period, including a number of references to Negroes. Hinton Rowan Helper, The Land of Gold: Reality Versus Fiction (Baltimore, 1855) gives the new state a critical examination and notes the poverty of the Black folk. More typically, John S. Hittell, A History of the City of San Francisco and Incidentally of the State of California (San Francisco, 1878), and John P. Young, San Francisco: A History of the Pacific Coast Metropolis , 2 vols. (San Francisco, 1912) rarely mention Blacks, except when discussing slavery.

Benjamin E. Lloyd, Lights and Shades of San Francisco (San Francisco, 1876), and Anthony Trollope, A Letter From Anthony Trollope Describing A Visit to California in 1875 (San Francisco, 1876) illuminate several aspects of the city's social life. Other late nineteenth-century visitors left their thoughts. See Rudyard Kipling, Letters From San Francisco (San Francisco, 1949); George R. Stewart and Edwin S. Fussell, eds., San Francisco in 1866 , by Bret Harte (San Francisco, 1951); and Edwin S. Morby, trans. and ed., San Francisco in the Seventies: The City As Viewed by A Mexican Political Exile , by Guillermo Prieto (San Francisco, 1938).

Other reminiscences occasionally mention Afro-Americans. Turn-of-the century San Francisco is portrayed in Evelyn Wells, Champagne Days of San Francisco (New York, 1947); Charles Keeler, San Francisco and Thereabout (San Francisco, 1902); and Amelia Neville, The Fantastic City: Memoirs of the Social and Romantic Life of Old San Francisco (Boston, 1932). More recently, the University of California's place in the East Bay's history has been presented from the perspective of alumni, including well-known Afro-Americans, in Irving Stone, ed., And Then There Was Light: An Autobiography of a University, Berkeley, 1868-1968 (Garden City, N. Y., 1973).

A few memoirs shed light on the entertainment milieu and vice districts of old San Francisco. There is Clifton Rather, Here's How: An Autobiography (Oakland, 1968-1970); Sally Stanford, The Lady of the House: The Autobiography of Sally Stanford (New York, 1962); and Ruben V. Vaughan, The Print of My Reminiscence (Hollywood, 1955).

The autobiographies and reminiscences of Afro-Americans and articles by Samuel L. Clemens offer insights into Black San Francisco life. An early pioneer, Mifflin W. Gibbs, related the San Francisco civil rights struggles of the 1850s in Shadow and Light: An Autobiography (New York, 1968 ed.). Bishop Alexander

Walters, My Life and Work (New York, 1917) devotes a chapter to Walters's San Francisco residency.

Another visitor to San Francisco was James Weldon Johnson; see Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson (New York, 1933). While he gives only scant mention to San Francisco, Horace Cayton, in his autobiography, Long Old Road (Seattle, 1963), describes a family, its success, and its decline as a result of militant politics, an influx of Black migrants, and the resulting intensification of race hatred. This account sheds some light on what may have been a typical experience for nineteenth-century far western urbanites.

The successes of a Negro playwright, Garland Anderson, a San Franciscan, are recounted in a singular reminiscence, From Newsboy and Bellhop to Playwright (San Francisco, 1927). Anderson's play, Appearances , brought him fame in New York City. Another remarkable account of Black San Francisco life is included in the journalistic efforts of the young Samuel L. Clemens, in Edgar M. Branch, ed., Clemens of the Call: Mark Twain in San Francisco (Berkeley, 1969).

Unfortunately, only one Black resident's account of modern San Francisco and the changes of the 1940s has been published. Maya Angelou, who migrated from Arkansas as a teenager during World War II, gives a vivid description of the booming city in her autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (New York, 1970).

Black newspapers constitute a rich source of information, if only because the residents took them so seriously. Only one copy of the first Black newspaper on the Pacific slope, the Mirror of the Times (Dec. 12, 1857) was available to the author, though at least one other is known to exist. The San Francisco Pacific Appeal (1862-1879) and the Elevator (1865-1898) are excellent for the 1860s but vary in number and quality in the 1870s; a few copies of the Elevator exist for the next two decades. A handful of issues of the San Francisco Vindicator and the San Francisco Sentinel illuminate some areas of Black urban life in the 1880s and early 1890s.

Twentieth-century newspapers improve in number and quality through the first three decades. The San Francisco Pacific Coast Appeal (1898-1925), which combined with the Elevator , is excellent for the first few years of the century. Like many other Negro newspapers, approximately half of each issue consisted of non-racial material from other journals. This highlights the duality of Black life. While I focused on the ethnic dimension, it might be worthwhile to compare this material with that in white newspapers.

Like the Pacific Coast Appeal , copies of the Oakland Western Outlook (1894-1924) are not as numerous as the dates suggest. As Oakland emerged as a city in its own right, its enterprising Black population published the Sunshine (1900-1923), the California Voice (1919-), the Times (1923-1930), the Western American (1926-1929), and the Independent (1929-1931). At the same time Black San Franciscans launched the Western Appeal (1918?-1927) and the Spokesman (1931-1935).

The other daily and weekly newspapers were not reviewed unless I was interested in a specific event I knew had occurred at a particular time. Using the especially useful newspaper index of the California State Library and the microfilm

index of the San Francisco Call (1894-1904), I found several informative articles. These aids helped fill in the years during which Black newspapers were rare. They were also valuable for notes on such well-known personalities as Peter Jackson and Mary Ellen "Mammy" Pleasant, and some less famous citizens.

These articles were among the most useful: "Thrifty Colored Folk" (Examiner , June 16, 1889, p. 10) on successful individuals; "San Francisco Has No Regular Negro Quarter, But She Has A Peculiar Negro Colony" (Chronicle , Feb. 7, 1904, p. 7), which may have been written by J. S. Francis, a Black newspaperman; and Oscar Hudson, a lawyer and consul for Liberia, "Negro Citizens of State Show Enviable Race Record" (Chronicle , Jan. 18, 1922, p. 14); the historian-journalist Delilah L. Beasley wrote some articles for the Oakland Tribune during the Panama Pacific Exposition (1915), but I was unable to locate them.

For labor problems in the Palace Hotel, discrimination in hotels at the turn of the century, Black businesses, and passing as white, I relied upon "A Palace Lock-Out" (Chronicle , Nov. 9, 1889, p. 6); "Famous Colored Servants to Go" (Call , Nov. 3, 1896, p. 14); "Jackson Feels the Color Line" (Call , Sept. 28, 1897, p. 1); "Hotel Men and the Color Line" (Call , Sept. 29, 1897, p. 4); "Oakland Business Men" (The Colored American Magazine [New York] IX [Nov. 1905], 648-50); and in the same periodical, "A Successful Business Venture" (XIII [Dec. 1907], 269-72); and Fannie Barrier Williams, "Perils of the White Negro" (XIII [Dec. 1907], 21-23).

Oral histories were consulted when they were available. Interviews with several well-known Black Bay Area residents are part of the Earl Warren Oral History Project of the University of California, Berkeley, and they have been transcribed. The Oakland Museum also interviewed several prominent Black residents; Mary Perry Smith permitted me access to nearly two dozen taped interviews. They substantiated some of the ideas I formulated after reviewing the written documents and interviewing a number of residents on my own. Eighteen urbanites allowed me to interview them for several hours in their homes and to revisit them on subsequent occasions.

The informants also led me to their photograph collections. While some nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photos of Black pioneers are available in the California Historical Society Library, the Bancroft Library (University of California, Berkeley), and the East Bay Negro Historical Society, the discovery of the family albums, studio portraits, and snapshots in respondents' homes was much more meaningful to me. They were then part of the context in which the residents used them, and the informants identified individuals when they could and depended on these documents to sharpen their recollections. Walter L. Gibson, Freddie McWilliams, Royal E. Towns, and Eleanor Carroll Watkins have preserved a number of photographs of varying age and in good condition, and other citizens also possessed some of these precious images.

The secondary literature is not particularly rich for the urban scene in the far west or for Blacks in the region. A few biographies of well-known San Franciscans occasionally mention Negro employees. C. B. Glasscock, Lucky Baldwin: The Story of An Unconventional Success (Indianapolis, 1933); and Marion M. Marberry, The Golden Voice: A Biography of Isaac Kalloch (New York, 1947) give brief but well-drawn portraits of two Afro-American employees.

Aside from Helen Holdredge's controversial Mammy Pleasant (New York, 1953), no Black San Franciscan has been treated in a biography. Ann Charters, Nobody: The Story of "Bert" Williams (New York, 1970) gives a sketch of Williams and George Walker's lean years on the west coast. Alan Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and "Inventor of Jazz" (New York, 1950) includes a glimpse of Morton's San Francisco sojourn and his travels on the west coast.

Some nineteenth-century Black histories, efforts of Black men of letters, contain brief descriptions of San Franciscans. Examples are: Martin Robison Delany, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (New York, 1968 ed.); William J. Simmons, Men of Mark (Chicago, 1970 ed.); and William Wells Brown, The Black Man, His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements (New York, 1863). Also I. Garland Penn, The Afro-American Press and Its Editors (Springfield, Mass., 1891); and Bishop Richard R. Wright, Jr., The Bishops of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (Nashville, Tenn., 1956 and 1957) sketch out the careers and achievements of some San Francisco Negroes, often before migration.

Various chronicles of San Francisco life illuminate this specific urban scene and the Black presence in it. Herbert Asbury, in The Barbary Coast: An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld (New York, 1933), has exlored this side of the city much as he treated New Orleans, Chicago, and New York. Oscar Lewis covered the city's rich in: The Big Four (New York, 1938); Silver Kings: The Lives and Times of Mackay, Fair, Floor, and O'Brien, Lords of the Nevada Comstock Lode (New York, 1947); and, with Carroll D. Hall, Bonanza Inn: America's First Luxury Hotel (New York, 1937); the last is the history of the Palace Hotel. Other aspects of the city's history are treated in William Martin Camp, San Francisco, Port of Gold (Garden City, N.Y., 1947); Samuel Dickson, San Francisco Kaleidoscope (Stanford, Calif., 1949); and Joseph A. Baird, Time's Wondrous Changes: San Francisco's Architecture, 1776-1915 (San Francisco, 1962).

Two published works focus on the Black San Franciscans. Elizabeth L. Parker and James Abajian, A Walking Tour of the Black Presence in San Francisco During the Nineteenth Century (San Francisco, 1974) reviews the locations of homes and businesses. Charles S. Johnson, The Negro War Worker in San Francisco, A Local Self-Survey (San Francisco, 1944) analyzes the changes in the Black population during World War II; it was supervised by a leading Afro-American sociologist.

Several articles deal with Blacks in San Francisco specifically, or on the Pacific slope generally. E. Berkeley Tompkins, "Black Ahab: William T. Shorey, Whaling Master," California Historical Quarterly LI (Spring 1972), 75-84 is based in part on interviews with Tompkins's daughter, Victoria. Rudolph M. Lapp, "Jeremiah B. Sanderson, Early California Negro Leader," The Journal of Negro History LIII (Oct. 1968), 321-33 tells the experiences of an early pioneer and school teacher who was also a minister. Philip M. Montesano, "The Amazing Dr. Ezra Johnson," Urban West I (Jan.-Feb. 1968), 21-26 examines a Black doctor's role at midcentury; "San Francisco in the Early 1860s: Social and Cultural Life of the Negro Community," Urban West I (Nov.-Dec. 1967), 15-16, and "San Francisco Black

Churches in the early 1860s: Political Pressure Group," California Historical Quarterly LII (Summer 1973), 145-52 review social and cultural life during the Civil War era.

Slavery in California and Blacks in the Gold Rush and pioneer period are treated in: Delilah L. Beasley, "California Freedom Papers," The Journal of Negro History III (Jan. 1918), 33-44; Clyde Duniway, "Slavery in California After 1848," American Historical Association Annual Reports for the Year 1905 I (1906), 243-48; Howard Holman Bell, "Negroes in California, 1849-1859," Phylon X (Summer 1967), 151-60; Rudolph M. Lapp, "The Negro in Gold Rush California," The Journal of Negro History XLIV (April 1964), 81-98; James Fisher, "The Struggle for Negro Testimony in California, 1851-1863," Southern California Quarterly LI (Dec. 1969), 313-24; and Malcolm Edwards, "'The War of Complexional Distinction': Blacks in Gold Rush California and British Columbia," California Historical Quarterly LVI (Spring 1977), 34-45. F. W. Howay, "The Negro Immigration into Vancouver Island in 1858," British Columbia Historical Quarterly II (April 1939), 101-13 discusses the reasons behind the California exodus.

Davis McEntire and Julia R. Tarnpol, "Postwar Status of Negro Workers in San Francisco," Monthly Labor Review LXX (June 1950), 612-17 probe changes in the Black population after World War II. Margaret Johnson, "The Negroes in West Berkeley," Immigration and Race Problems, 1949-1953 (1953), 865-89 examines this East Bay city at about the same time.

Monographs on Pacific slope topics provide a much-needed historical dimension. Among them are: Earl Pomeroy, The Pacific Slope: A History of California, Washington, Idaho, Utah, and Nevada (New York, 1965), which alerted me to the significance of cities in western settlement; and Pomeroy, In Search of the Golden West: The Tourist in Western America (New York, 1957), which did the same for tourism. Gunther Barth, Bitter Strength: A History of the Chinese in the United States, 1850-1870 (Cambridge, Mass., 1964) chronicles the experiences of the largest non-white foreign-born contingent on the west coast; Barth's Instant Cities: Urbanization and the Rise of San Francisco and Denver (New York, 1975) highlights the unusual histories and roles of these two western cities.

Labor legislation and relations are the topic of Lucille Eaves, History of California Labor Legislation (Berkeley, 1910) and Ira B. Cross, A History of the Labor Movement in California (Berkeley, 1935). Like many older histories, they offer little information on Negroes, but are valuable for their examination of the context in which white laborers and the few Black slaves worked.

The histories of Black California were written by newcomers. Delilah L. Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles, 1919), was the first state history of a racial group. This work, along with Sue Bailey Thurman, Pioneers of Negro Origin in California (San Francisco, 1949), lacks the sophistication and accuracy of some university-sponsored histories, but contains information that contemporary academics considered unimportant and that otherwise would be lost.

Rudolph M. Lapp, Blacks in Gold Rush California (New Haven, Conn., 1977) analyzes the Afro-American presence, political and civil rights struggles, and social

life during the early years. Charles Wollenburg, All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Race Exclusion in California Schools (Berkeley, 1976) is excellent. It chronicles the history of race discrimination in a state which has quickly forgotten this aspect of its heritage. Elmer R. Rusco, "Good Time Coming?": Black Nevadans in the Nineteenth Century (Westport, Conn., 1975), and Eugene Berwanger, The Frontier Against Slavery: Western Anti-Negro Prejudice and the Slavery Extension Controversy (Urbana, Ill., 1967) represent the trend toward state studies and analysis of race relations, respectively.

James de T. Abajian, comp., Blacks and Their Contributions to the American West: A Bibliography and Union List of Library Holdings Through 1970 (Boston, 1974) contains a wealth of valuable information.

Urban Afro-America has not received as much scholarly attention as slavery, possibly because the latter institution lasted so long. Also, slavery's very remoteness makes it possible for scholars to consider it more readily than a subject which impinges so closely on their basic assumptions. The first study to focus on the condition of Blacks in an American city is W. E. B. Du Bois's classic in sociology and history, The Philadelphia Negro (1899). (Before this scholarly work there were reports on the conditions of Negroes in certain cities compiled by antislavery and religious societies.)

Early in this century, the growth of cities and of their Black populations resulted in several sociological studies, as well as works by settlement house and social workers. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Black North in 1901: A Social Study (New York, 1969 ed.) reviewed Black life in several northeastern cities. Mary White Ovington, who worked with Du Bois in the NAACP, wrote one of the first studies of Negroes in the major eastern city: Half A Man: The Status of the Negro in New York (New York, 1911). George Edmund Haynes, The Negro at Work in New York City, A Study in Economic Progress (New York, 1912) probes the economic life of the city's citizens. Black Boston is surveyed in John Daniels, In Freedom's Birthplace: A Study of the Boston Negroes (Boston, 1914); Daniels focused on the antislavery heritage and social institutions. Thomas J. Woofter, Negro Problems in Cities (New York, 1928) examines the mass migration and its impact upon the cities. A group of New England Negroes were the topic of Robert Warner's New Haven Negroes: A Social History (New Haven, Conn., 1940).

More recently, St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York, 1945) set new standards in the use of history, sociology, and anthropology to study modern Black city dwellers. Few scholars have matched Drake and Cayton in depth, breadth, and clarity, or in their sympathy with their subjects, which added an impressive humanistic dimension to their scholarship.

Most monographs focus on twentieth-century Black residents of northeastern cities. Aside from the early efforts of Du Bois, Ovington, and Daniels, James Weldon Johnson's Black Manhattan (New York, 1930) treats social and cultural life in Negro New York from the late eighteenth century. This cosmopolitan scholar brought an interest in the sporting world to his study of Black urban life, and he refrained from the pious moralizing that mars other studies. Claude McKay, Harlem: Negro Metropolis (New York, 1940) treats such topics as the numbers

racket, cultists and occultists, and Father Divine, while Richard Wright and Edwin Rosskam, Twelve Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States (New York, 1941) depicts the modern ghetto. Constance M. Green, Washington: Capital City (Princeton, N.J., 1963) and Letitia Woods Brown, Free Negroes in the District of Columbia, 1790-1846 (New York, 1972) are concerned with race relations and civil rights.

Richard Wade, Slavery in the Cities: The South, 1820-1860 (New York, 1964) lays bare the close connections between slavery and southern cities. John Blassingame, Black New Orleans, 1860-1880 (Chicago, 1973) is among the first monographs on Afro-Americans in a specific southern city; it is primarily concerned with traditional topics such as the end of slavery, the freedmen, and Reconstruction.

A number of works on the ghetto accompanied the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. Black New York is examined in Seth M. Scheiner, Negro Mecca: A History of the Negro in New York City, 1865-1920 (New York, 1965), and Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of A Ghetto, Negro New York, 1890-1930 (New York, 1965). Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of A Negro Ghetto (Chicago, 1967) is one of the better accounts of the development of the modern ghetto. David M. Katzman, Before the Ghetto: Black Detroit in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana, Ill., 1973), and Kenneth Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870-1930 (Urbana, Ill., 1976) examine civil rights, race relations, and class-related issues in two midwestern cities. Ethnic neighborhoods, housing, racism, and reform are analyzed in Thomas Lee Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto: Neighborhood Deterioration and Middle-Class Reform, Chicago, 1880-1930 (New York, 1978). Scholarly study of the quality of life in nineteenth- and twentieth-century cities in the upper south, the deep south, the Great Plains, and the far west still awaits the attention of younger generations.