Mapping Courage: Honoring W.E.B. Du Bois and Engine #11

Description of Project

The scene is painted on the wall of Engine #11, a historical African-American firehouse. W.E.B. Du Bois is depicted observing a city scene with a census in his hand. Dr. Du Bois, the first African-American to earn a doctorate from Harvard and a founder of the NAACP, was invited by the University of Pennsylvania department of sociology in 1896 to conduct a survey of blacks living in Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward. The study, which was the first scientific study of race, served as the basis for his classic 1899 paper, The Philadelphia Negro.