Philadelphia is a dangerous place for Black men. Just ask Wort Whipple.

Last month, a former Daily News reporter reached out about a tragic incident on SEPTA that had made the news: A 14-year-old was killed on the subway platform at 52nd and Market Streets. His name was Wort Whipple.

Decades earlier, the reporter, Tyree Johnson, had written about a teenager with the same name who had been severely beaten by a cop. Johnson wanted to know: Could these two Wort Whipples be related?

It turns out his hunch was correct. The Wort Whipple killed last month in West Philly was the grandson of the same man Johnson had written about nearly half a century ago.

When I reached the senior Wort Whipple on the phone, hurt and pain spilled out of him. Because not only had he just lost his teenage grandson, but he told me that his oldest son — also named Wort Whipple, and the father of the young man killed on the SEPTA platform — was shot and killed about five years ago in Frankford.

For a time, there had been three different Wort Whipples living in Philly. Now there’s only one.

“It’s just me again,” said Whipple, who is now 65. “The Wort Whipples don’t do well in Philadelphia.”

As I talked to him, I thought about other families I have written about who have lost multiple relatives to gun violence. Because, of course, it’s not just people named Wort Whipple who don’t do well in Philadelphia.

Black people have always had a hard way to go in this country — consider the history of enslavement and state-sanctioned racial segregation. Although the form systemic racism takes has morphed over time, the forces that drive it, that keep most African Americans economically disadvantaged, remain. As a people, we’ve moved from being under the slaver’s whip to the police baton, from the noose in the South to the ghost gun on the streets of Philadelphia.

In 1974, Whipple was just 16 years old. He went to go get pancakes with some classmates, and when they emerged from the restaurant, an officer was outside waiting in a police cruiser. As the boys headed in the direction of their school, the officer activated his lights and began pursuit.

“We were walking across the street. I had three friends with me; they ran,” recalled Whipple, who was a sophomore at University City High School. “I was like, ‘I’m not going to run. Because why should I run? We didn’t do anything.’”

As Johnson’s story reported, one officer frisked him as he leaned over the hood of a patrol car. Then, Whipple told Johnson that another officer began hitting him repeatedly in the face — about a dozen times, according to the office workers who observed the attack. Whipple wound up handcuffed in the back of a police car. He was taken to a police station, where he was released without being charged.

Afterward, Whipple ran home as fast as he could to 32nd and Wallace, where he lived with his grandfather and uncle. He felt lucky to have survived, but he didn’t tell them what had happened because he didn’t want them to think he had provoked it. The next day at school, he got called to the principal’s office, where he learned that nearby office workers had witnessed the assault and called 911.

“I really give credit to the woman who called in, her name was Portia Perry,” Johnson recalled. “She used to be the Mary Mason of that time ... She called the Daily News, and the Daily News assigned me to talk to her. ”

An old black-and-white photo shows Whipple’s mother, the late Grace Mobley, with her hand on his face as she examines where he had been beaten.

As Whipple talked to me, it was clear that what happened all those years ago still haunts him. “I thought he was going to shoot me,” he told me, about the police officer who beat him. Thankfully, the office workers backed up Whipple’s side of the story. “They saw that I wasn’t resisting or anything. I just had my hands up.”

A police board of inquiry found Officer Joseph Stasneck guilty of beating Whipple and suspended him without pay for five days — for which he was reimbursed by the Fraternal Order of Police. Whipple’s family filed a civil suit against the city over what happened, and in 1977 received a $5,000 settlement.

But Whipple’s troubles — which started when he was stabbed during a fight at the age of 13 — were far from over. The following year, he was charged with allegedly threatening another youngster not to testify about a stolen minibike. Later, when he was arrested on charges of attempting to steal $20 from a craft shop, he reportedly told arresting officers, “You can’t arrest me. Do you know who I am? I’m Wort Whipple.” (He defended himself to me, saying the police back then were “just trying to get something on me.”)

At 17, he broke his neck while attempting to perform a backward flip. Despite a long hospital stay and rehabilitation period, Whipple had a tutor and managed to make it to his high school graduation. A few years later, he accidentally reinjured his neck and wound up hospitalized again. Whipple said he went on to spend 12 years working as a file clerk in the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania’s radiology department.

Then, when he was 35, he told me he was sitting outside on his steps at 49th and Locust Streets when he was shot twice in his leg by a drive-by shooter.

Fast forward, these days Whipple is partially paralyzed and uses an electric wheelchair to get around. His sister is his primary caregiver.

That’s just the physical toll life has taken on Whipple. The emotional toll was even bigger.

Today, he carries the heavy burden of his losses — first his oldest son, and then, most recently, his grandson. Whipple told me his son was only 29 when he was killed, just days after being released from a post-incarceration halfway house. One of his two surviving sons called him with the devastating news. He’s still grieving.

He told me that it’s sad to have outlived the two generations below him, bearing his same name. But life can be like that in a city like Philadelphia, where hundreds of people, mostly Black and brown, are killed every year. “I don’t know how I made it to 65,” Whipple said.

“It’s rough to be Black and living in Philadelphia, let me tell you. Well, it was for me.”