Infrastructure

Blighted

How The Inquirer covered the clearing of West Philadelphia’s Black Bottom

Jake Blumgart

December 8, 2022

Walter Palmer remembers the neighborhood where he grew up, then known as Black Bottom, as a lively community on the easternmost edge of West Philadelphia.

Today, memories are largely what is left of the predominantly Black neighborhood on the border of the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University, then initiating a vast, federally funded urban renewal project that would within decades transform the neighborhood he knew into University City.

In the 1960s, as the demolition crews moved in, Palmer was part of a coalition of neighborhood, civil rights, and student groups who attempted to resist the plan. They lay down in front of bulldozers and rolled barbed wire across key streets to block builders in efforts to sway public opinion against the university, which had won the support of City Hall and the three largest newspapers in town.

Palmer says only one paper covered Black Bottom – a name The Inquirer never used in its 1950s and 1960s coverage – and the neighborhood’s defenders with any sympathy.

“The only salvation we got, the only support we got, came from the Philadelphia Tribune, which is the oldest Black newspaper in America,” said Palmer.

Founded in 1884, the Tribune gained a reputation as one of the most influential Black newspapers in America during the Great Migration, as the city’s African American population grew rapidly.

“The Tribune was always good because it sided with the Black community,” said Palmer. “The Daily News, The Inquirer, and the Bulletin were largely white corporate entities, which sided with white corporate interests and white institutional interests.”

An independent analysis of The Inquirer archives by Temple University’s Abby Whitaker found that the paper mainly focused on urban renewal projects as a benefit for the city that would help stem the postwar challenges that faced urban America.

When the opposition did get coverage, in articles like 1957′s “Property Owners Hit Penn Expansion Plan” or 1965′s “Housing Bullying Charged,” the coverage rarely delved deeply into the allegations made by opponents, and when critics were quoted, they were most often white professionals rather than Black residents or business owners.

Much attention was lavished on the jobs that would be created – 10,000 from the University City Science Center alone, one 1964 Inquirer article noted – or the Penn and Drexel faculty and staff attracted back to city living.

Urban renewal was seen as a way to fight back against white flight and help city residents resist the lure of the suburbs.

“Luckily for Philadelphia … Penn decided not to run this time, but to stand firm and fight the blight of its surroundings,” a 1962 Inquirer article reads. The reporter, who goes on to note that the city’s larger urban renewal efforts had displaced 5,000 families and 2,500 “other individuals,” does not quote any opponents of the project or any of the people displaced. By 1970, Black Bottom, which stretched from 32d Street west to 40th and from Lancaster and Powelton Avenues south to Sansom Street, had been all but erased by a series of condemnations and buyouts.

The university cleared Palmer’s neighborhood using a law passed in 1959 that allowed for the clearance of blighted land in order to expand campuses. Penn itself had been a key player in drafting the law and utilized these urban renewal tools more aggressively than any other university, according to historians John L. Puckett and Mark Frazier Lloyd.

Whitaker’s analysis found the term blight was often uncritically adopted by reporters. Within stories, the term was usually employed to describe buildings being cleared for new projects, but it was often also used to describe predominantly Black neighborhoods. “Each year larger proportions of the black population are crowded into the ghettos, and the ghettos spill their blight over continually larger proportions of the cities,” wrote the author of one 1967 Inquirer Magazine story.

Only a single Inquirer article complicated the description of blight in West Philadelphia, noting that a Penn professor named Paul Davidoff argued that the Redevelopment Authority was simply using the term as an excuse to clear the area and secure federal funds.

Press coverage ramped up to an extent in the later 1960s, as student activists became more aggressive and occupied an administration building in protest. A February 1969 sit-in by 250 Penn students secured a $10 million commitment from the university for low-income housing.

But still the coverage tended to argue that the elimination of communities like Black Bottom was necessary for the greater good.

“There was a lot of media coverage and all in favor of the University of Pennsylvania,” remembers Palmer. “We tried to use the media, but never was able to get our side of the story communicated adequately. We were constantly fighting an uphill battle.”