Book review: Black citymakers: how "The Philadelphia Negro" changed urban America

"Black Citymakers: How ‘The Philadelphia Negro’ Changed Urban America." Marcus Anthony Hunter. Oxford University Press. April 2013. --- W.E.B. DuBois immortalized Philadelphia’s Black Seventh Ward neighbourhood, one of America’s oldest urban black communities, in his 1899 sociological study The Philadelphia Negro. In the century after DuBois’s study, however, the district has been transformed into a largely white upper middle class neighbourhood. Black Citymakers revisits the Black Seventh Ward, documenting a century of tenement collapses, housing activism, black-led anti-urban renewal mobilization, and post-Civil Rights political change from the perspective of the Black Seventh Warders. Reviewed by Nathan Bullock.