Mother Bethel, Octavius Catto, Du Bois's Seventh Ward and the Sound of Philadelphia.
Mother Bethel
Richard Allen bought the land and built a church at 419 South 6th Street, and Bishop Francis Asbury dedicated it on July 29, 1794. In 1816 Allen gathered Black Methodist congregations from across the region to form a new denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and he became its bishop. Mother Bethel stands on the oldest church property in the United States continuously owned by African Americans, and it became a National Historic Landmark in 1972.
Octavius Catto
Octavius Catto was an educator and civil rights activist who taught at the Institute for Colored Youth and helped run the Philadelphia Pythians, a Black baseball team that went unbeaten in 1867. With Caroline LeCount and William Still he fought segregated streetcars, and his campaign helped bring a Pennsylvania law banning segregation on transit.
On Election Day, October 10, 1871, he was shot and killed on South Street during violence against Black voters. In 2017 a statue of him was unveiled at City Hall, the first public monument in Philadelphia to honor a specific African American.
The Philadelphia Negro
In the 1890s W. E. B. Du Bois and Isabel Eaton mapped every Black home, church and business in the city's Seventh Ward and gathered more than 5,000 interviews door to door. The Philadelphia Negro, published in 1899, was the first sociological case study of a Black community in the United States, and it placed the blame for hardship on discrimination and unequal opportunity rather than on Black people themselves.
The Sound Of Philadelphia
In the 1970s Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff built Philadelphia soul at Philadelphia International Records, with a stable of studio musicians creating a sound all its own. Their TSOP (The Sound of Philadelphia) became the theme of Soul Train.
Black Philadelphia Today
The African American Museum in Philadelphia opened in 1976, during the Bicentennial, a few blocks from the Liberty Bell, the first museum funded and built by a city to preserve African American heritage. Black-owned restaurants, salons, bookstores and brands are part of everyday Philadelphia.
Shop Black-owned businesses in Philadelphia on CashBlack.
Photo Credits
Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church at Sixth and Lombard Streets. Photo: Nick-philly, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons