Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval

Hartman begins by describing an unnamed Black girl who lives in Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward in the year 1900. She wanders around, observing her neighborhood; ethnic minorities, like Italian, Jewish, and Black people, reside there in neglected tenement buildings and in poverty. The girl wonders why reformers come and take pictures of meaningless, ordinary things. Reformers, journalists, and sociologists alike perceive the Black people and the neighborhoods they live in as immoral and destitute. But there is more to these lives, and Hartman uses the five senses to describe what goes on in the tenements and alleys, from sounds of Yiddish and English to the “odor of bacon and hoe-cake” (8).

While the girl does not face segregationist Jim Crow laws here, she is mindful of how racial discrimination limits her leisure and work prospects. She dreams of better opportunities. In her neighborhood, police and white citizens brutalize Black people. She goes to the Tenderloin area of New York City, where there is a riot, and the police are beating a woman. African American writer Paul Laurence Dunbar glimpses the girl amid the chaos. To him, their coming to the Tenderloin via the Great Migration has damaged the morality of the northern cities.