By JOHN LESLIE

Philadelphia was the major city of the United States for several decades after the Revolution. Early on, the city’s Black population, both free and slave, was substantial. Escaped slaves came to Pennsylvania, seeing it as a refuge from Southern slaveholders, especially after the state enacted a gradual emancipation act in 1780. But slave catchers still roamed the streets of Philadelphia, ready to kidnap Black people and send them back into bondage.

In the 100 years spanning 1790-1890, the Black population of Philadelphia rose from 2000 to almost 40,000. A further increase in Black migration from the South was made possible by greater opportunities for work in the mines and mills of Pennsylvania. Black workers were consigned to the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs, and had to contend with growing racial segregation in public facilities such as the streetcar lines.

The demand for workers was made more acute by the First World War, when the supply of immigrant labor from Europe was cut off. About 50,000 Black workers from the South and the West Indies came to Philly during the war. Afterward, many Black workers lost their jobs to returning white veterans.

Throughout the history of Philadelphia, the competition for jobs between white and Black workers led to tensions and, at times, violence toward Black workers. In 1917 and 1918, there were race riots directed at Black workers in both Chester, Pa., and Philadelphia, which left two dead and many injured. In 1911, a Black steel worker, Zachariah Walker, was lynched in Coatesville, Pa. Black workers experienced systematic discrimination in the Philadelphia area. This discrimination was resisted by the NAACP, Black fraternal organizations and churches.

From 1913 to 1922, the Industrial Workers of the World, Local 8, organized a multiracial union of dockworkers. Local 8 had an integrated leadership and won many gains for longshoremen on Philly’s docks. The union was smashed by the employers in 1922 in the midst of the Red Scare. The bosses played on racial prejudices of the workers to divide the union and weaken it.

The 1944 racist transit strike

The Second World War brought another surge of migration to meet the needs of war production. World War II opened the door to increased activity demanding civil rights and an end to job discrimination.

For example, the Transport Workers Union fought for the hiring of Black trolley operators during the war. In 1944, the six-day Philadelphia Transportation Company strike and lock-out was a hate strike intended to stop the hiring of Black workers by the local transport company.

Art Preis wrote in the Socialist Workers Party’s newspaper, The Militant, “In a desperate move to smash the CIO Transport Workers Union, the Philadelphia Transportation Company, acting in collusion with leaders of the former company union, last week inspired a six-day municipal transportation stoppage against the training of eight Negro workers for operating jobs on street cars and buses.

“Using the time-worn device of ‘divide and rule,’ the company and its agents provoked this anti-labor race-hate action aimed at splitting the ranks of the CIO union, which a few months ago won a collective bargaining election against the company-sponsored Philadelphia Rapid Transit Employees Union. This company outfit for years had upheld the PTC’s flagrant Jim Crow policies” (“Philadelphia Walkout Aims To Smash CIO Transport Union,” The Militant, August 7, 1944).

For several days, the strike brought Philadelphia’s public transport to a standstill. Given the city’s importance to wartime production, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the Secretary of War to put an end to the walkout. General Phillip Hayes ordered strikers to return to work. Refusal would have meant termination and loss of draft deferments. The eight Black workers were allowed to assume the jobs they had been promised.

Following World War II, a Republican-controlled city council passed anti-discrimination legislation, but racism and lack of opportunity persisted in employment, education, and housing. During the 1950s, Black clergy led a series of boycotts demanding fair employment opportunities and winning some victories.

In the early 1960s, the NAACP led demonstrations against Jim Crow practices in the building trades and the exclusion of Black tradesmen from jobs in the city. This struggle reached its height in a fight to integrate the site of a new junior high school in North Philadelphia. NAACP pickets, which included many Black trades people, blocked the worksite gates, demanding the hiring of minority workers. Pickets were met with violence from white union workers and cops.

After two weeks of picketing, building trades unions and contractors met with the NAACP, led by Cecil B. Moore, and the AFL-CIO Human Rights Committee to iron out an agreement.

“By the time the meeting came to an end, Moore believed that the contractors had agreed to hire a Black plumber, a steamfitter and two electricians onto the Strawberry Mansion site. On Tuesday morning, however, Moore and NAACP pickets found not a desegregated workforce, but rather a significantly larger police presence with orders … to insure that workers were able to enter the site” (from “Up South, Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia,” by Matthew J. Countryman).

Despite promises from the unions, the overwhelmingly white composition of building site crews persists to this day.

From civil rights to Black Power

As the civil rights struggle in the South heated up and with the emergence of the Black Power movement, Black radicals in Philadelphia organized themselves.

In 1964, John Churchville, a Philly native who had worked in organizing for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Mississippi and Georgia, opened a SNCC Freedom Library in the city. A core group of activists soon gathered around SNCC’s principles of self-organization and organizing independent of white liberals.

The Freedom Library became a center for educational programs, including tutoring of students, as well as an organizing center for the Black Peoples’ Unity Movement. BPUM was a nationalist-oriented formation dedicated to community control and Black self-organization.

In August 1966, 80 Philadelphia cops, led by police captain Frank Rizzo (later the city’s mayor), raided the offices of SNCC, the Freedom Library, and apartments where activists lived. Some dynamite, which had been brought into the SNCC headquarters by one activist, Barry Dawson, was seized, and Dawson was charged with possession of an explosive. Other SNCC activists and organizers went into hiding as Rizzo claimed that he had evidence that SNCC was planning to initiate a campaign of urban guerilla warfare. Police repression effectively ended SNCC’s organizing in Philadelphia.

The emergence of the Black Power tendency was the result of frustration with the self-limiting nature of the liberal-controlled mainstream civil rights organizations—in particular with the nonviolence strategy of a civil rights leadership that condemned self-defense by the oppressed. Black Power was untainted by the anti-communist prejudices of the past and embraced internationalism and anti-imperialism. Black Power was a concrete step toward a break with the subordination of the Black community to the Democrats and towards political independence.

The founding of the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP) by young activists, including Mumia Abu-Jamal, was met with police violence under the command of the reactionary Frank Rizzo, who became chief of police in 1968. Mumia was beaten by Philly cops while protesting against a campaign appearance of the racist George Wallace the same year.

On Aug. 31, 1970, Rizzo’s cops raided the offices of the BPP in the neighborhoods of North Philadelphia and Germantown on suspicion of Panther involvement in the shootings of two police officers. No evidence linking the BPP to the shootings was found, but Black Panthers were marched through the streets naked in an attempt to humiliate them. The raid had the effect of increasing community support for the BPP. In September 1970, the BPP-initiated People’s Constitutional Convention convened on the Temple University campus with more than 6000 participants.

“Despite the ever-present repression, the police harassments, and the arrests, the city’s chapter blossomed as Black youth flocked to the offices to join the Party. We had Panther supporters in most of the city high schools, selling and sharing the newspapers. By fall 1970, we fed kids in four sites throughout the city; across from the main office in North Philadelphia on Columbia Avenue in a storefront next to a supermarket, in West Philadelphia, in a church near Party headquarters; in Germantown; and in a community center in South Philadelphia” (Mumia Abu-Jamal, “We Want Freedom”).

Unfortunately, the BPP was destroyed by police repression, COINTELPRO disruption and spying, and factionalism.

Unable to rely upon repression alone to keep the aspirations of the Black community under control, the Democratic Party—which consistently controlled the city government since 1952—assimilated a layer of Black reformists and former radicals into its ranks. The ability of the Democrats to co-opt the demands of popular movements helps the ruling class keep potentially radicalized people trapped within a set-up that’s rightly called the graveyard of social movements.

Postwar white flight to Pennsylvania and New Jersey suburbs, and the loss of many industrial jobs in the city, has meant that tens of thousands of Black workers face a choice between long-term structural unemployment or a future of low-wage, no-benefit jobs. By 1990, Blacks were about 40% of the population of the city.

According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia also has the highest “deep poverty rate—a measure of people living at 50% of the poverty line or below.” Although the rate “dipped somewhat in 2018, it came in at 11.1%, the highest among cities with a population of one million or more.” This high level of poverty disproportionately affects people of color.

The struggle for equality and justice persists today as Philadelphians face poverty and lack of jobs, attacks on public education, mass incarceration, police brutality, and gentrification of neighborhoods. Fighting back will require unity and the mass activity of the most oppressed. As we fight for the future, we should remember the past and learn its lessons.

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