APLICACIÓN DE LA METODOLOGÍA EN EL PROYECTO

Becoming Owners decodes the rituals of property ownership as a window

into understanding the race’s engagement with the materialist method. In part because of Booker T. Washington’s endorsement of this pathway and because of the national organization that he established to pursue economic success, it is apt to look closely at the records and proceedings of the National Negro

Business League. The League’s local members as well as participants at its annual conferences took every opportunity to promote themselves and ways of leveraging what they had acquired for the race’s benefit. Presenters regaled the audience with tales of advancement, talked of how much property they held, and discussed the strategies and pitfalls of business. Whether the NNBL met in the North, South or Midwest, real estate or property-related themes appeared on most, if not all, of the annual programs with proponents from various cities, including Philadelphia. Up to Washington’s death in 1915, persuasive

materialism was at the forefront of the group’s ideology. Examining materialism’s currents through the efforts of the League provides an opening into its relevance in Philadelphia. 38

38 _{The seminal study of the National Negro Business League remains John Howard Burrows, The}

Necessity of Myth: A History of the National Negro Business League, 1900-1945 (Auburn, Ala.: Hickory Hill Press, 1988). While Burrows acknowledges the premises of materialism, he sustains his focus and critique on what I believe is a “straw man,” whether capitalism could succeed along strictly black racial lines.

Secondary sources and accounts from black property and landholders during the 19th _{century help to establish the premises of the League’s origins, as} well as the pre-conditions for “persuasive materialism” in Philadelphia. Because I contend that property ownership was largely a pursuit of the middle class or a pathway to the same middle class, I read a variety of these sources as windows into the “middle-class” mind. These include the biographies of prominent,

Philadelphia-based clergy such as Matthew Anderson and Richard R. Wright Jr., as well as the collections of notable observers of black Philadelphia, like William Henry Dorsey. These observers weave an image of Philadelphia’s black middle class as deeply concerned with their respectability and its reflection on their status.

The Philadelphia Tribune, black Philadelphia’s leading newspaper,

founded in 1884, presents a notably conservative outlook on black community and life.39 _{Whether in its editorial content or in its advertising, readers could find a} reliable reflection of the thoughts and plans of the city’s black leaders. Moreover, the city’s black building and loans, whose numbers peaked in the 1920s, were often discussed or had aspects of their financials presented or advertised in the

Tribune. On a regular basis, the newspaper’s church news columns summarized

the sermons of the city’s ministers, reported their property decisions, and

39 _{Kim Gallon’s comparative study of black newspapers and their presentations of black sexuality}

during the early 20th _{century found that among a group including Baltimore Afro-American,}

Chicago Defender, Philadelphia Tribune, and Pittsburgh Courier, the Tribune offered the most “respectable” representations of black life and culture. See Kim T. Gallon, "Between

Respectability and Modernity: Black Newspapers and Sexuality, 1925-1940" (University of Pennsylvania, 2009), Chapter 2.

covered major pulpit news. Although they are widely considered a central location of the production of black respectability, black churches have managed to go largely unremarked upon as spaces where the landholding practices of blacks were worked out. Because of the centrality of the black church to my discussion, I utilize the Tribune as a primary source to help determine the meanings of those black church property decisions. The Tribune’s archives,

available digitally from 1912, are invaluable in this regard. The respectability so valued by its editors makes the paper a trustworthy and reliable sounding board and reporting space where the various editors observed the types of property decisions and outcomes they believed would benefit the race.

For the purpose of tracking black property-holding, I have created a database from the Mortgagee Corporation (or Mortgagee Corp) records kept by the Philadelphia City Archives. (See Appendix, “Note on Sources.”) The

Mortgagee Corp records detail companies that issued mortgages to individuals in the city. At least from the 1890s, after Matthew Anderson and William Still

established Berean Building and Loan and it had started to loan, the city’s Recorder of Deeds tracked mortgages offered through mortgagees operating in the city. Because black property holders were unlikely to be able to afford their properties outright and were also unlikely to obtain loans from other lenders, these black building and loans well represented the property decisions of the race in Philadelphia. The Recorder of Deed’s ledgers provide us with a view of how much black people paid and, of course, where they could purchase. The

listings include first and second mortgages, taken out by individuals and organizations. The ledgers also reflect how active these building and loan associations were, and, by extension, how successful they were in finding an audience for their vision for black property holders.

Berean’s Matthew Anderson promoted that vision from the 1890s into the 1920s, envisioning black residents, living in new homes, “all inviting, on good streets, in different parts of the city.”40 _{Indeed these records are reflective of} neighborhood succession in the city’s various wards and neighborhoods that would become dominated by African Americans. In a city where residential clustering became more evident during the migrations of the 20th _{century, these} property moves give us a map of those developments. Read in conjunction with

the Tribune, these property decisions help explain what was happening to

persuasive materialism.