SCRAP BOOKS OF A BLACK HERITAGE
WILLIAM DORSEY'S PHILADELPHIA AND OURS On the Past and Future of the Black City in America. By Roger Lane. Illustrated. 483 pp. New York: Oxford University Press.
For some, history is not a silent chronicle of past events but an active conversation between the past and the present. So it was for William Henry Dorsey, the scion of one of 19th-century Philadelphia's most prominent African-American families, and so it is for Roger Lane, a professor of social science at Haverford College and the author of "William Dorsey's Philadelphia and Ours," a long look at the evolution of African-American life in that city after emancipation.
The nature of black life in 19th-century Philadelphia fostered such conversations. The presence in their city of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (the nation's first independent black denomination), the Institute for Colored Youth (the most prestigious black secondary school, founded just before the Civil War), the American Moral Reform Society (a pioneering black civil rights organization) and the Grand and United Order of Odd Fellows (the largest black fraternal association) sharpened the historical consciousness of black Philadelphians. Some kept journals and diaries or wrote histories of their own. Others formed historical associations and organized exhibitions of their personal memorabilia. Still others systematically preserved the evidence of their own time for posterity.
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