In our class discussion last week, I was most struck by the topic of “agency”, and the conversation we had about how much agency we can claim black Philadelphians had during some of the pivotal moments in the city’s history. Hunter emphasizes agency as the lens with which to analyze structure and power relations within the Philadelphian black community over the 20th century. His entire book, Black Citymakers, sets out to prove that black Philadelphians were not victims or passive bystanders to the changes taking place in the city over several decades, but actively involved in changing and making the city into what it is today, which we can likely generalize to other similar cities in the United States. However, as we discussed in class, it is not clear that Hunter completely proves his thesis. As I believe Quinn mentioned in class, many of the stories in the book seem to actually show a frustration of agency, rather than its success. While Hunter does show us the strategic moves black leadership was moving towards eventual goals, he also details time after time when black initiative is crushed by the overwhelming power of white supremacist leadership and policies, from the failure of the summer-long South Street businesses boycott to the drawn-out processes for housing reform leaving many still in deplorable conditions, to the lengthy Crosstown Expressway protests successfully shutting down the expressway, but hurting the affected neighborhoods regardless, to finally, the brief mention of the black flash mobs, and how these were met with a strong hand from the black mayor, reducing whatever the mobs’ purpose may have been, and limiting the issues that brought them there, to delinquency and hooliganism. I think a strong argument can be made that low-income blacks in Philadelphia have not had agency at all, shut down by white elites and black elites alike, both primary and secondarily marginalized. Limited agency may have been in the hands of black leadership, but this ultimately led to many of the low-income blacks’ needs not being met. This concept provides an interesting lens in which to discuss the work of Du Bois, who in The Philadelphia Negro, also frames blacks as agents. There is some difference in Du Bois’ reasoning for this, as in the time when he was writing, blacks were seen as a monolithic biologically inferior group. Du Bois wants to make clear that this isn’t the case. However, Du Bois also preferences black elites in much of his writing, stating that they, (the “Talented Tenth”) must lead the race forward. However, what has that attitude done for the black community today? We see in Black Citymakers the effect of secondary marginalization, and brought up countless other examples of this from the current day. What does this mean for the “linked fate” of the black community–or if we set aside that narrative, what does it mean for the fate of lower income blacks specifically?