The Scholar Denied: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology
The Scholar Denied: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology
by Aldon D. Morris (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 282 pages
Book review by Maynard Seider, a professor emeritus of sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts and writer/director of the documentary “Farewell to Factory Towns?”
When I, a white sociologist, left graduate school in Madison, Wisconsin in 1969, I took with me the knowledge that empirical sociology had begun at the University of Chicago in the 1920s. That same year I started teaching at Knoxville College, a black college in Tennessee. Almost fifty years later I can still remember the emotions that filled my body when an African-American colleague at that small campus told me of a book by W.E.B. Du Bois, published in 1899, that was truly America’s first volume of scientific sociology. I literally raced (o.k. trotted) to the library to find The Philadelphia Negro and as I sat for hours had to focus on what I was reading while dealing with the excitement of my discovery, along with the anger that this treasure had been kept from me.
The story that Aldon D. Morris tells in The Scholar Denied: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology explains how I and generations of (mostly white) sociology students had been kept ignorant not only of the sociological work of Du Bois but of the contributions of Du Bois’ students at Atlanta University. Morris calls that body of work, created mostly in the first decade of the 20th century, the Du Bois-Atlanta school of sociology, whose writings obviously preceded the much more well-known Chicago school. In The Scholar Denied, Morris firmly places the African-American Du Bois in the sociological founding pantheon along with the European trio, Marx, Weber and Durkheim. The author’s book is a masterful sociology of sociology, exploring the roles that racism, along with class, status and power, played in the misshapen development of the discipline. Morris, the Leon Forrest Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Northwestern University, grew up in the Jim Crow South, and made the Great Migration to Chicago along with thousands of other black families. In a community college classroom, in 1968, he learned of W. E. B. Du Bois from, not surprisingly, “an elderly black professor from the South.”
As I sat in Knoxville reading The Philadelphia Negro some 70 years after its publication, I was struck by how modern and up-to-date were the social science methods that Du Bois employed — survey research, interviews, participant observation, statistical analysis, comparative research– along with his mastery of historical analysis. And so Du Bois made the case, radical at the time, that the social and economic misfortunes that many black Philadelphians faced came from racist oppression and not from genetic inferiority. Not a conclusion that the white sociological establishment, one steeped in social Darwinism, biological racism and eugenics, wanted to hear, and Du Bois, despite a PhD from Harvard and advanced social science study at the University of Berlin, found no openings for himself at any eastern or midwestern white universities.
Instead, in 1897 Du Bois moved to Atlanta University, an historically black institution, where he spent thirteen years mentoring mostly young black sociologists, supervising some of their theses and heading the annual academic conferences that the university sponsored on critical issues relating to black Americans. Morris refers to Du Bois’s students as the “hidden generation,” because despite the quality of their research and writing, they remain largely unknown unlike a later generation of black scholars including E. Franklin Frazier, St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton. Several stars of that hidden generation include Monroe Work, a prolific writer and expert mathematician with articles in the American Journal of Sociology and Social Forces; George Edmund Haynes, a leading scholar on black migration and a co-founder of the Urban League; and Richard R. Wright Jr., sociologist, college president and outspoken bishop of the A.M.E. Zion Church.
Morris includes a remembrance of Wright’s when he took a class on the American Negro at the University of Pennsylvania from his advisor Professor Carl Kelsey:
The discussion became so embarrassing that we agreed that he would outline his day’s lecture to me before holding his class. Thus, he could eliminate what he called the “emotional areas” and what I called the “areas of ignorance and prejudice”—that was our secret agreement which I contended was not one hundred percent professional but at least it helped us “get along with the class.”
Of course, had the University of Pennsylvania hired Du Bois instead of rejecting him after he completed The Philadelphia Negro, there would have been no need for the student to have aided the professor.
Most readers will know that Du Bois and Booker T. Washington clashed on the way forward for African Americans, positions that Du Bois wrote about in his 1903 literary masterpiece, The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois argued for a liberal arts education and racial integration at all levels of society, while Washington pushed industrial education and separation “in all things purely social.” Many may not know that Robert Ezra Park, a white sociologist who would later head the department at the University of Chicago, served as Washington’s director of public relations and as ghostwriter from 1905 to 1912 at Tuskeegee Institute in Alabama. Despite his master’s degree from Harvard and PhD from the University of Heidelberg, Park felt “that I couldn’t do anything first rate on my own account” so “I decided…to attach myself to someone who was doing something first rate.”
As the leading backer of industrial education and social segregation for black Americans, Washington received the money he needed from northern philanthropists to enhance Tuskeegee Institute. He also served as the nominal gatekeeper for northern funds, a position that allowed him to steer funding away from Du Bois and his Atlanta University program. Undoubtedly the most famous and influential African-American at the time, Washington frequently visited the White House and spoke at academic conferences despite lacking advanced degrees.
In addition to his other duties for Washington, Park found time to study black southerners, and developed a theory of race relations cycles. In sync with his boss, Park argued that “given their alleged primitiveness, [blacks] had to work their way up from the bottom to prove themselves worthy to whites and to earn their respect and fair treatment.” And that may well take a long time, perhaps centuries. Park and Washington saw Du Bois, now co-founder of the NAACP and outspoken editor of its magazine The Crisis, and a leading advocate for racial equality, as a dangerous meddler in the slow, but natural cycle of change.
When an opportunity came for Park to join the Sociology Department at Chicago, he left with the blessing of Washington, who realized that Park would bring his race relations views to a powerful institution. Park would be a mainstay at Chicago until 1941, and co-authored the most important text-reader of its time, Introduction to the Science of Sociology, a 1,000 page tome that omitted any selections from Du Bois as well as any discussion of his writings and contributions. The neglect had to be deliberate because the evidence clearly shows that Park knew of Du Bois’ voluminous work in sociology.
Park also ignored the well-known writings of Max Weber, someone who admired the sociology of Du Bois. They had both studied at the University of Berlin from 1892-4 and exchanged letters after Weber’s visit to the US in 1904. In one letter, Weber hoped that Du Bois’ “splendid work…The Souls of Black Folk” would be translated into German. At Weber’s request, Du Bois wrote an article on race and class for Weber’s influential European journal of social science.
It has only been over the last few decades, well after I left the University of Wisconsin, that Du Bois’ sociological contributions have become integrated in the written history of the field. His pioneering study in Philadelphia, his careful, empirical analysis of racial and class stratification, the originality of his “double consciousness” concept and his analytic use of the social construction of race —a fundamental concept in contemporary sociology– are all now part of the discipline. Aldon Morris has not only highlighted these accomplishments, but has rearranged the dominant 20th century paradigm, giving Du Bois and the school he founded primacy in the development of American sociology. The Scholar Denied deserves a wide reading not only among sociologists, but among all those who want to delve more deeply into what W. E. B. Du Bois called “the problem of the twentieth century” — “the problem of the color-line.”