Six core chapters and a concluding chapter follow this introduction. Chapter Two, “Respectability in Business and Property Ownership and the
African American Middle-Class Vanguard” establishes the premises of a freedom that was reflected through the accumulation or development of property. This chapter marks out the hopes that African Americans projected onto and out of property ownership. It establishes that the ownership or control of property by African Americans served to change not only how African Americans viewed themselves, but also how they were viewed by whites – hence, the development of the concept of “persuasive materialism.” This chapter contextualizes the
development of African American ideas about property by placing them alongside the American property ideal. As a synthesis, it brings together secondary
analyses and chronicles of African American property ownership during the 19th century. It also places emphasis on Booker T. Washington’s National Negro Business League and a rural and urban ethos of property accumulation. It portrays the dilemmas of black property, including the flourishing of a culture of accumulation, shared by individual owners in the South and beyond, as well as churches, banks and other nascent institutions. It builds the case that African American property ownership was teased out publicly in the law, but also worked out daily and deliberately. It emphasizes that with visible accumulation of
against and devaluation or outright dispossession of the very property that African Americans held dear. It examines these episodes in Indiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma and elsewhere for their lessons.
Chapter Three, “Respectability and the City: African American Material Advancement in Philadelphia 1880 to 1900,” contextualizes property ownership in Philadelphia, a city known for its culture of working class home owners. In particular it analyses the discussion of African American property ownership from the perspective of insiders and outsiders to the city from the late-19th century to the turn of the century. It takes as its subject those, including Reverend Matthew Anderson, and W.E.B. Du Bois, who participated in and helped shape not only the process of property ownership through burgeoning building and loan associations, but also discussions about African Americans’ place in Philadelphia.
Part Two of the dissertation utilizes an original data set of black mortgages to discuss the shape of the developing black community and consider how
ownership and citizenship impacted one another. Three decades of mortgages, 281 in total, are encapsulated by closely examining five- or six-year cohort groupings within each decade. Examining these mortgage borrowers helps us see who the foot soldiers of respectability were. Berean’s borrowers represented a group that W.E.B. Du Bois would call “that determined class among all people that surmount eventually nearly all obstacles.”63 These data reveal age, gender,
number of boarders or lodgers, and birthplace within the group of borrowers. Chapter Four, “‘That Determined Class: Homes on Good Streets, 1892-1897,” begins the examination of Berean’s homeowners in Philadelphia. This chapter is focused on the 1890s era in which Matthew Anderson first attested to Berean’s success. It looks at what structured those gains, who participated in them, and where in the landscape in the city. Importantly, because Anderson suggested that Berean was birthed out of a lack of housing availability and a dearth of policy remedies for housing discrimination, it considers these property moves as an expression of politics in the landscape of the city. With increased immigration into the city by African Americans, as well as by Europeans, a vibrant culture of
homeownership propagated alongside a growing culture of segregation. Via the census and other supporting materials it describes the social and economic position of African American homeowners in Philadelphia, including the central importance of caterers, waiters and porters and those who were employed in some form of domestic service. A small network of borrowers, some related to one another, were among Berean’s earliest borrowers.
Chapter Five, “That Determined Class: A Hopeful Sign of the Race’s Future, 1906 -1910,” views Berean’s borrowers against a phase of proliferating African American self-help organizations. Evidently, the success of Berean and associations like it led to the growth of similar racially-focused financial
institutions. Like never before, Berean empowered investment of African Americans across the city – in South and increasingly West Philadelphia.
Importantly, Berean’s set of borrowers were more evidently born in the South, many of them prior to Emancipation. I suggest that Berean’s mortgage locations reflect expanded opportunity for African American home owners in the city during this era of growing economic development. By focusing on occupation, we can posit how Berean’s borrowers were powering this economic advancement as entrepreneurs or being lifted by its currents. Doubtless, Berean’s borrowers between 1906 and 1910 featured more entrepreneurs than it had in the previous decade.
Chapter Six, “That Determined Class: Reckoning with Respectability and Property, 1916-1920,” contextualizes Berean Building and Loan’s survival in an era of challenge. The material advancements of the previous decade were accompanied by and empowered a set of political opportunities for African American leaders. Of necessity, black leaders were called on to support,
advance and defend respectable African American property owners in ways that Matthew Anderson believed were impossible in the 1880s and 1890s. Berean’s borrowers during this period reflect the greatest percentage of Southern-born borrowers, of the three-decade set. These borrowers reflect a narrower set of occupations – more firmly middle class than in the previous two cohorts.
In my Conclusion, the seventh and final chapter, I examine the aftermath of the property struggles of 1918 and their legacy in associational development in
the immediate years following. Additionally, I assess the study’s findings and suggests some avenues for further exploration.64
64 Sociologist Antonio McDaniel points to the deep segregation of the city’s African American
citizens and encourages researchers to examine the paradox of a population which in the 1990s had achieved clear gains in homeownership and yet also reflected persistent disadvantages. See Antonio McDaniel, "The "Philadelphia Negro" Then and Now: Implications for Empirical
Research," in W.E.B. Dubois, Race, and the City: The Philadelphia Negro and Its Legacy, ed. Michael B. Katz and Thomas J. Sugrue (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 163,78,79.