“The Crusade Is Now Begun in Philadelphia”: Municipal Reformers,Southern Moderates,and African American Politics

Abstract

As the twentieth century dawned, social and political reformers increasingly identified the growing black population in Philadelphia as an important underpinning of the city’s corrupt Republican political machine. This article explores the ways in which Philadelphia’s urban political corruption narrative, with its pointed attacks on black partisanship and electoral participation, developed in dialogue with white southerners’ campaigns to frame Reconstruction as a perversion of democracy. Rather than simply solidifying Jim Crow in the South, northern reformers and southern moderates borrowed from each other to shape and articulate an emerging national consensus that African Americans were unfit for full participation in the body politic.