A Tale of Three Cities: Blacks and Immigrants in Philadelphia: 1850-1880, 1930 and 1970

Determining whether the black experience was unique, or similar to that of earlier white immigrant groups, is central to the debate over whether blacks should be the beneficiaries of special compensatory legislation in the present. To answer this question requires interdisciplinary research that combines a comparative ethnic, an urban, and a historical perspective. Thus we observe the experience of three waves of immigrants to Philadelphia: the Irish and Germans who settled in the "Industrializing City" of the mid-to-late nineteenth century; the Italians, Poles and Russian Jews who came to the "Industrial City" at the turn of the twentieth century; and blacks who arrived in the "Post-tndustrial City" in their greatest numbers after World War II. Analysis of the city's changing opportunity structure and ecological form, and the racial discrimination encountered shows the black experience to be unique in kind and degree. Significant changes in the structures that characterized each of the "three cities" call into question our standing notion of the assimilation process.