South Philadelphia attacks a Black woman's new house
26 - 29 July 1918South Philadelphia, around 29th and Ellsworth Streets, Philadelphia County, PA
Adella Bond, a Black probation officer, bought a house on a white block in July 1918. A crowd came for it; she fired a pistol to call police, and the police arrested her. Four days of violence followed and four people died.
Adella Bond was a probation officer of the Philadelphia Municipal Court. On 24 July 1918 she moved into 2936 Ellsworth Street, in a part of South Philadelphia that white residents considered theirs. Black families had been arriving in the city in numbers through the Great Migration, drawn by wartime work, and had been pressing against a housing line that white neighbourhoods were policing block by block.
On the evening of 26 July a crowd gathered outside her house and someone put a rock through her window. Bond fired a pistol from an upper window to bring the police, and the shot hit a man in the crowd outside. Police arrived and arrested Bond, charging her with inciting a riot.
The fighting ran for four days across roughly two square miles of South Philadelphia, between 26th and 30th Streets and the blocks around Annin, Titan and Oakford. Four people were killed: three white and one Black. Hugh Lavery, 42, was shot on 26th Street. A plainclothes police officer, Thomas McVey, 24, was shot by Henry Huff, 23, after a mob chased Huff into a house. Scores more were injured.
The arrests told the story plainly. Sixty Black residents were arrested and three white residents, in a riot that white crowds had started and that Black residents had mostly defended themselves in. Black Philadelphians who fought back faced prosecution; the men who gathered outside Adella Bond's house largely did not. The Philadelphia Tribune, the city's Black paper, drew the conclusion out loud, telling its readers that if the law would not protect them they would have to protect themselves.
Four killed, three white and one Black; sixty Black residents arrested against three white ones. The shape covers the roughly two square miles the street fighting ran across, drawn indicatively around 2936 Ellsworth Street.
Sources
- The Philadelphia Race Riot (1918)BlackPastblackpast.orgBacks Adella Bond's job and address, the 26 July crowd, her arrest, the four dead - three white and one Black - and the sixty Black against three white arrests.
- The Philadelphia Race Riot of 1918The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Historical Society of Pennsylvania (1975)Vincent P. Franklin's scholarly account of the riot, the housing pressure behind it and the prosecutions that followed.
- Centennial Chronology: The South Philadelphia Race Riots of July 1918PhillyHistory Blog, Philadelphia Department of Recordsblog.phillyhistory.orgA day-by-day chronology from the city's own photographic and records archive, naming Hugh Lavery, Thomas McVey and Henry Huff and mapping the streets involved.