The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology

by Aldon D. Morris

In this groundbreaking book, Aldon D. Morris’s ambition is truly monumental: to help rewrite the history of sociology and to acknowledge the primacy of W. E. B. Du Bois’s work in the founding of the discipline. Calling into question the prevailing narrative of how sociology developed, Morris, a major scholar of social movements, probes the way in which the history of the discipline has traditionally given credit to Robert E. Park at the University of Chicago, who worked with the conservative black leader Booker T. Washington to render Du Bois invisible. Morris uncovers the seminal theoretical work of Du Bois in developing a “scientific” sociology through a variety of methodologies and examines how the leading scholars of the day disparaged and ignored Du Bois’s work.

The Scholar Denied is based on extensive, rigorous primary source research; the book is the result of a decade of research, writing, and revision. In exposing the economic and political factors that marginalized the contributions of Du Bois and enabled Park and his colleagues to be recognized as the “fathers” of the discipline, Morris delivers a wholly new narrative of American intellectual and social history that places one of America’s key intellectuals, W. E. B. Du Bois, at its center.

The Scholar Denied is a must-read for anyone interested in American history, racial inequality, and the academy. In challenging our understanding of the past, the book promises to engender debate and discussion.

 

Genres: Sociology, History, Race, Nonfiction, Biography, Education, Academic

320 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 2015

About the author

Aldon Morris is the Leon Forrest Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Northwestern University. He has published widely on social movements, race, religion, social inequality, and the sociology of W. E. B. Du Bois. He is the author of The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement (Free Press, 1984), which won the 1986 Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award from the American Sociological Association, and co-editor of the volumes Frontiers in Social Movement Theory (Yale, 1992) and Opposition Consciousness: The Subjective Roots of Social Protest (University of Chicago, 2001). Most recently he authored the award-winning book The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology (University of California, 2015). In 2009 Morris won the Cox-Johnson-Frazier Award from the American Sociological Association for a lifetime of research, scholarship, and teaching.

Reviews

[Donna Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Morris considers DuBois the father of American sociology, and Morris is right. This is, of course, not the first time a Black man was robbed of credit for an accomplishment that was instead credited to a Caucasian American. It happens all the time. But until I ran across this scholarly study, I hadn’t thought about DuBois and sociology because I had never studied the latter. As an admirer of DuBois’ historical and political role, I was drawn to this book when I found it on Net Galley. Thank you to that excellent site as well as University of California Press for the DRC, which I was given in exchange for an honest review. It is available for purchase now.

DuBois was a venerable intellectual, an academic light years ahead of most Americans of any racial or ethnic background. He was the first Black man to graduate from Harvard University, and in addition to his graduate work there, he also studied in Berlin under such luminaries as Max Weber and others. In Europe, he was treated as an equal by those he studied with, and I found myself wondering a trifle sadly—for him, not for us in the USA—why he chose to return here. And the answer is so poignant, so sweetly naïve, that I wanted to sit down and cry when I found it. Because once he had the empirical facts with which to debunk the whole US-Negro-inferiority mis-school of mis-thought, he genuinely believed he would be able to elevate African-Americans to a state of equality in the USA by laying out the facts. The racists that created Jim Crow laws in the south and an unofficial state of cold racism that let Black folk in the Northern states know where they were welcome and where they were not, would surely roll away, he thought, if he could reasonably haul out his charts, his graphs, his statistics, and demonstrate flawlessly, once and for all, that discrimination against Black people was based on incorrect information.

See what I mean? I could just cry for him.

So although DuBois was the first American to go to Europe, study sociology, and return with more and better credentials than any American academic, he could not persuade anyone with authority to bring about change, was not even allowed to present his findings to anybody except Black people in traditional Black colleges, because another school of sociologists, the Chicago school, were busy promoting armchair theories based on little data, or bogus data, all showing that Black people simply were not smart enough to become professionals or take on anything above and beyond manual labor, and of course, he was Black, so he must not be that smart, right?

Pause to allow your primal scream. It’s galling stuff.

Caucasian professors in Chicago had done a bit of reading, and with regard to Black people, decided that their craniums were too small to hold enough brain-iums. And just as there is one reactionary in every crowd that the newspapers will flock to in order to show that there is across-the-board agreement, so did Booker T Washington stand before any crowd that would listen to him (and the white academics just loved him), in order to say that it was the truth, that it was going to be a long time before the Negro was “ready” to do the difficult tasks involving critical thinking that had been so long denied him. Tiny steps; patience; tiny steps. Meanwhile, he extolled his fellow Black Americans to enroll their sons and daughters in programs teaching “industrial education”, so that they would be ready to do manual labor and put food on their families’ tables.

All of the studies that backed this line of thinking were deductive, starting with the answer (inferior beings, manual labor) and then finding the questions to fit that answer. DuBois had done inductive research because he was searching for information rather than looking for a rational-sounding way to keep a group of people entrenched in an economic underclass.

DuBois made the connection between the socialist theory he had studied and the material evidence before him: there were people getting rich off the backs of dark-skinned people, and they had a vested interest in maintaining Black folk as an underclass. Ultimately, he turned to political struggle, and that is how I knew about him, not as a sociologist, but as a Marxist. He also became the father of the interdisciplinary field of African-American studies. He helped found the NAACP.

This scholarly work, like just about anything produced by a university press, is not light reading. Rather, the author presents his thesis and synopsis, and then carefully, brick by brick, starts back at the beginning to build his case. His documentation is flawless, and his sources are diverse and strong. There is some repetition in the text, but that is appropriate in this type of writing. He is not there to entertain the reader, but to provide an authentic piece of research that will stand the test of time, so there is a little bit of a house-that-jack-built quality to the prose.

For serious admirers of DuBois’s work, this will be an excellent addition to your library. For those interested in sociology as a field, this is for you, too. And to those with a literacy level that permits you to access college-level material and who have a strong interest in African-American history and/or civil rights, this is a must-read.

For these readers, I recommend, in addition, The Souls of Black Folk, which I had not regarded as sociology-based material until now, though I have read it twice; and a collection of speeches by DuBois, which I have been intending to review for some time, and which will soon grace this page of my blog.

Morris has done outstanding work, and I like to think that if DuBois were here, he would be proud to see it.

[Nils · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am deeply ambivalent about this book. On the one hand, I think he's basically right that Du Bois prefigured many of our current sociological theories and (to a somewhat lesser extent) methods; that Du Bois should be credited with creating a "school"; that mainstream American sociology in its postwar heyday read Du Bois out of the canon; and that racism played its part in this exclusion. The chapter on Du Bois and Weber, while somewhat derivative of Zimmerman 2006 on "Decolonizing Weber," adds important information about the bilateral exchange between the two titans. At the same time, however, there are a number of methodological and theoretical problems with this text. To begin with, I find it difficult to square Morris's dual claims that Du Bois was at once a hugely influential founding father of American sociology and a suppressed figure. It seems that the only way both those things could be true is if Du Bois was plagiarized by the Chicago School, but even Morris doesn't go quite that far.

More troubling is Morris's claim that Gunnar Myrdal regarded blacks as "racial inferiors" (p214) is not only politically spiteful but also just factually wrong. While Morris is clearly correct that the $2m in Carnegie Endowment money that funded the work that led to Myrdal's epochal An American Dilemma was intentionally steered away from Du Bois, at least in part because of Park's admonition that Du Bois was an "unreliable" and "non-objective" scholar on racial matters, this in no way implicates Myrdal as complicit in that effort to sideline Du Bois. Indeed, even Morris acknowledges how fulsomely Myrdal praised and cited Du Bois in An American Dilemma. The real cause of this calumny against Myrdal, it seems, is Morris's a beef with white racial liberals for denying the "agency" of blacks - though a more reasonable reading of Myrdal is not that he denies the agency of African Americans in challenging racial exclusion and subjugation, but rather that he puts the onus for change on white people, and (yes) was excessively optimistic about whites' willingness to abandon their racial privilege. (This point dovetails with Ta-nehisi Coates's post-Obaman critique of U.S. race relations - that Obama was the apotheosis of the Myrdalian vision of white liberal racial redemption, and Obama's failure, as well as Trump's triumph, reveals the hollowness of that vision. On this last point, see https://nplusonemag.com/issue-27/poli....) Even though Myrdal received the funding that Du Bois wished to receive and that Morris represents as by-rights belong to Du Bois, this does not mean that Myrdal's own intellectual work was necessarily tainted by the biases of his funders. But acknowledging this would complicate Morris's simplistic account of racial suppression in the academy and the country.

Morris's tendentious calumny against Myrdal is in fact symptomatic of a bigger problem, namely that Morris's reading of Du Bois seems, at best, partial and inconsistent, above all in Morris's willful refusal to so much as acknowledge Du Bois's increasing embrace of (an initially heterodox and eventually card-carrying CPUSA form of) Marxism over the course of his career. Du Boisian heritors like Eric Williams, C.L.R. James, Cedric Robinson, or Paul Gilroy don't warrant so much as a passing mention for Morris. (Howard Winant is so far the only reviewer I've seen who has the temerity to point out just how partial and red-blind Morris's reading of Du Bois is: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/1....) Some of this presumably has to do with the fact that Morris's hero worship of Du Bois might be slightly complicated were he to acknowledge that Du Bois joined the CPUSA in 1961 -- in other words, five years after Hungary 1956. Without addressing Du Bois's Marxism, however, Morris fails to consider the possibility that Du Bois's Marxism might have something to do with his canonical exclusion from postwar (i.e. Cold War) social science. In other words, it seems that McCarthyism might have as much to do with Du Bois's exclusion as a racism -- but you'd never have any clue of this from reading Morris, who doesn't want to cloud his polemical narrative about racists in the academy. Du Bois may be the godfather of intersectionalism, but for Morris, it's racism and racism only, all the way down.

All of this is, it seems profoundly connected to the particular hermeneutic of racial suspicion that underpins this work, one that is framed in such a way that I fear is expressly designed to provoke a certain kind of guilty racialized fear that will prevent people from critically assessing the book. Morris's book is, quite explicitly, a kind of "J'accuse!" against the structural racism of the US academy; this is not inherently problematic, and indeed is a good thing, but the particular way in which he does this is by suggesting that anyone who might wish to nuance or challenge his reading of the matter is essentially complicit in the problem of structural racism. Morris directly threatens to make this charge, when he says that white scholars can't handle the truth about what he's saying about Du Bois because doing so would disrupt their own privilege. In other words: if you don't acknowledge his argument as uncriticizable truth, then you're down with white supremacy. Needless to say, this is not a perspective rooted in the idea of open inquiry.

The irony is that this is a deeply anti-DuBoisian move, one that (again) refuses to acknowledge the real radicalism of Du Bois. Du Bois always insisted that scholars could transcend their subject positions, whereas it was the white scholars Morris (on this score, rightly) criticizes who claimed that blacks couldn't be "objective" on racial matters. Thus Morris ends up embracing the anti-DuBoisian methodological position, just with inverted racial inflection, namely that any whites who disagree with his political positions must be racially biased.

[David Leonard · Rating 4 out of 5]

"To what extent do progressive white scholars of today unwittingly interject racist biases in their science even while believing they stand above the prescientific racial assumptions?... Contemporary white scholars should engage their highest levels of reflexivity to expunge deep-seated racial biases from their work that are embedded in the American culture and social institutions" Morris, The Scholar Denied.

In reading this quote and Morris's history of sociology and the rightful place of W.E.B. DuBois at the center of the history, I am struck by the continuity in history. Whereas DuBois voraciously published,with some of the work forever altering the intellectual landscape, Robert Park and countless other white scholars delivered little work; yet, it was Park and others who ascended up the academic ladder. Whereas DuBois had a scholarly resume unmatched, it was Park and countless other white scholars without similar academic credentials who received both praise and material support then (and now). This is of no surprise given the "wages of whiteness," given that it was Park who aided and abetted white supremacy whereas DuBois challenged inside and outside of the academy. The fact that Robert Park remains a lauded scholar within some segments of sociology is telling. it speaks to not only the erasure of this history, and the rendering of DuBois as invisible but the refusal to confront the privileges and exclusions that define white supremacy and the academy. It reveals the continued privileging of white scholars, those who claim objectivity while dismissing black scholars as biased, all while promulgated theories of black inferiority and white superiority

The persistence of color line in academia becomes clear in this book. The persistent of individual racism shaping "scholarly" discourse in the name of white supremacy becomes clear through this book. The continued erasure of Dubois becomes clear and the consequences and roots remain a defining element of today's academia.

[Daniel Kleven · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I've read in the past year. This is a book about W. E. B. Du Bois, but it is about so much more than Du Bois, about how systems work, getting down to the bottom of the "how and why?" a the brilliant work of a Black sociologist was marginalized, yet how Du Bois's work was "non potest sepeliri" ("not possible to be buried"). So it's a book about Du Bois, but in many ways Du Bois stands in for the Black experience in America, and from that angle, it offers a critical analysis of white institutions, white academia, white philanthropy, white publishing, and tells this story in great detail.

I'm fascinated with historical "how and why?" questions, the questions that get at "why is my world the way it is?" or "how did we get here?" This is one of those books.

I've read a fair amount on the "Booker T. vs. W. E. B." debate, and this book added quite a bit of helpful context. That debate debate was never merely ideological and theoretical -- it was about power, money, and control, and the book documents how "The Tuskegee Machine" effectively blocked funding and support from Du Bois's sociological enterprise at Atlanta University.

Morris's explanation of "liberation capital" was enlightening: "Liberation capital is a form of capital used by oppressed and resource-starved scholars to initiate and sustain the research program of a nonhegemonic scientific school..." I think this applies to HBCUs, the Black church/church planting, missions, charter schools, and so many collective enterprises.

I'm pretty sure methodology of this book could be repeated in any number of disciplines, a "CSI" of the systematic attempted burial of Black figures in history, philosophy, theology, politics, and the sciences.

I loved this book. There's a reason it won multiple awards when it came out (R.R. Hawkins Award (2016), Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award (2016)), and it probably should have been considered for more.

If you are interested in Du Bois, sociology, Black history, or the structures of academia, I highly recommend this book.

[Havana · Rating 3 out of 5]

In my neverending saga of adding my course books to this app, I present: a cunty scholar and his enemies (who shared a bed and were most definitely boinking it).

Slow start, but it was a rather interesting read and did a great job of covering the influence of Du Bois and white supremacist sociology.

[Jay Gabler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pretty humbling to think that I defended my dissertation in front of a picture of Du Bois, but had so little appreciation for his foundational importance in American sociology.

[Justin · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I think the book makes many important points about Du Bois and think it's a must read for anyone who is serious about understanding the history of race as a concept, the author's unwillingness to acknowledge Du Bois as a complicated figure weakens the book at moments. Early on, the author insists that Du Bois in no way believed in race science and calls out several scholars who are critical of Du Bois's conception of race, Kwame Anthony Appiah perhaps being the most well-known example. While certainly Du Bois was not a race scientist or a scientific racist, the author refuses to acknowledge that Du Bois's explicit belief in Black blood does in fact count as a form of race science, and that Appiah's point is not to say that that makes Du Bois racist, but rather simply to point out how race science creeps in to even contemporary understandings of race.

Stepping outside of who has the better reading of Du Bois though, my real gripe is just with the author's unwillingness to interrogate terms such as race and race science and disentangle them: for Morris, if one is racist they believe in race science and if one is anti-racist, they are a social constructivist and there is nothing in between. The actual history of race belies such an easy distinction.

But all this could almost be waved away as just the inherent complexity of race. What cannot be dismissed so easily is the complete erasure of Anna Julia Cooper that Morris inexplicably sneaks in at the end, as he claims that Du Bois laid the foundational work of intersectionality in the 1920s. All one needs to do to actually find intersectionality's roots is read Kimberlé Crenshaw and see for yourself that she cites Cooper writing in the 1890s, not Du Bois writing in the 1920s. The Scholar Denied engages in some scholarly denial of its own by portraying Du Bois as a singular male genius who was not part of any broader intellectual movement of African American writers and thinkers.


In the end, there is a lot of good information in this book, but it would be even stronger if it treated Du Bois as more human and less saint.

[DM · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mixed feelings on this. On one hand, clearly required reading to understand how racism shaped what is considered "classic" in sociology. On the other, I wish he had interrogated more of Du Bois's ideas. By the end it felt repetitive and I didn't have much new insight into who Du Bois was or the importance of his work. He kept mentioning how "pioneering"he was but wished he had instead shown this through Du Bois's work. Also did not mention communism/Marxism at all...

[Larry Lamar Yates · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very important book, and very much a worthy heir to Morris' The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change. Both books identify the Black skill and competence that is given short shrift so often. In one book, he shows us that hose who developed the grassroots "movement centers" that were the core of the Freedom Movement were profouindly intelligent actors, as well as the heroes we all know they were. In this book, DuBois is given his due as a distinctive genius, but also shown as operating with the "liberation capital" in the Black community that made his array of research possible.

Morris, in both books, goes deep into the period, and brings us vivid and concrete characterizations of key players. But he also gives us hope, and some sense of proportion about the obstacles we face today. He closes the book with these words:

"...if an innovative scientific school could take root in the worst of times, amid the terrorism of lynch mobs, attacks from elites within the community it sought to liberate, and discrmination from a racist society that withheld critical resources, then maybe there is hope for all who work to produce knowledge for the purpose of understanding and transforming society."

Dr. Morris, currently serving as President of the American Sociological Association, is certainly included in that number of "all who work to produce knowledge for the purpose of understanding and transforming society." In that spirit, both of these essential books, without taking away any scholarly accuracy, are very personal books, in the best sense.

[Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this novel. Despite not engaging previously in any texts directly about sociology I was able to learn a lot and have grown an interest to learn more on the subject.

I was wholly unaware that such high level sociological work was being developed in america so long ago, especially surrounding Black Americans preceding the civil rights movement by so many decades. It is fascinating reading about Du Bois and I now look forward to reading some of his works directly.

It is shocking (but unfortunately not surprising) that so many sociologists were devoting their lives to examining black culture, while actively engaging in racist practices and doing everything within their power to silence and erase Du Bois and his contemporaries. Despite not being given a seat at the table, and offered substantially less opportunities and funding than his white counterparts, Du Bois has left a lasting legacy in his field and I am glad that he is now being recognized for his contributions, even if he wasn’t at the time.

My only gripe (if I can even call it that) with this book is that it has a somewhat inconsistent narrative thread. A lot of the biographical elements are repeated between sections, and if the sections are meant to be accessible independently of each other that is fine, I am just not a huge fan of rereading information.

[Evan Suttell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent overview of Du Bois work both as a scholar and as an educator in Atlanta. Demonstrates exactly how crucial he is to American sociology + his connections with other key sociologists such as Weber and Jane Addams + his general erasure from early histories of sociology. My biggest complaints are that the argument, while well-evidenced and strong, gets pretty repetitive by the end and the fact that Morris omits Du Bois' Marxism while still explicitly praising the "bottom up" approach taken by Black Reconstruction. thought Robert Vitalis did a better job writing about Du Bois' communist leanings in White World Order, Black Power Politics.

[Quintin Myers · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a phenomenal analysis of how the Du Boisian school in Atlanta was the original school of sociology which is not what many textbooks will say, nor many introduction to sociology professors. I used to teach the importance of Du Bois to my students but had significantly less information than Morris whose research was meticulous and very similar to Du Bois’s research itself. I also appreciate the reflexive questions he poses in his conclusions for current sociologists, both White and Black.

[alicia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a super interesting read and really informative but quite dense and really academic. I mean, I knew all this going into it but it still made it a bit hard to keep up in parts for someone looking for a general overview. I learned a lot but would probably now like to follow up with something a bit more digestible and easy to read to understand to cover my bases and get a deeper understanding.

[Jewel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a fascinating look into the experiences that W.E.B. Du Bois not only lived but documented. It describes the trials that he had to endure throughout his life and career. This book explains a lot about why sociology is the way it continues to be today. More people should read this work and take head of not only what it presents but also what we lost by continually denying a great scholar.

[Amy]

my eyes have been crossing at the volume of mentions of Burgess & Park in my studying for my urban planning licensing exam (urban planning, after all, draws from many different fields but especially from sociology). my gf (a sociologist) mentioned this book to me and it makes me especially furious when I think about my syllabus’ very heavy emphasis exclusively on white men in the field.

[Rob Pruden · Rating 3 out of 5]

Way to repetitive, but it did make me think in ways untapped by other authors so I am glad I read this book.. I had also very little direct knowledge of DuBois and he certainly is an historical figure worth getting to know. A man way ahead of his times.

[apollo · Rating 5 out of 5]

not much to say or argue with here. this is an extremely dense book with an overwhelming amount of direct evidence that du bois was purposefully locked out of sociology by the chicago school because it was racist. a really masterful and eye opening work.

[Sebastian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Important topic and convincing thesis: DuBois did not make it into the sociology canon due to the engrained racism of the discipline. The writing is not so great, however, and after a while, there is a feeling of deja-vu.

[Kiara · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't believe I've ever wanted to give a book 6 stars before, until now.

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great exploration of W.E.B. Du Bois' life and scholarship, and his long-overlooked contribution to sociology, particularly the conflict with the men of the Chicago School.

[iougz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a must read for anyone interested in sociology and its history as an academic discipline. Du Bois truly was one of the GOATs!

[jarvisvalley · Rating 4 out of 5]

you can do social science, but du bois do it different

[Yaaser · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author fails to place Du Bois’ struggles in the wider context of the United States. The book is in general too narrowly focused on the sociology of knowledge, providing little insight on the broader history, social dynamics, and political implications of racism. In addition, a reader of The Scholar Denied comes out with very limited idea about other weighty elements of the story of Du Bois, such as the South and the North, the structures of racism, the past of slavery, and the opposing “white” sociology in which much of American politics operated. A new “veil” of sorts seems to have fallen upon these dynamics.

On the other hand, Morris’ attempt to unearth non-racial factors contributing to the sidelining of Du Bois in the intellectual arena sheds only passing light on the insurgent cultural and political role he played in a conflict-stricken, highly racialized American era. Du Bois’ extreme views and positions in his last days were so unrelenting that even his “talented tenth” companions and comrades had to distance themselves from his actions. In truth, Du Bois was not a politician willing to compromise and bargain, but a true liberator fully aware of the workings of history and the tremendous responsibility the latter had laid upon his shoulders.

This is a man who had every opportunity at every juncture to be the typical laureate and celebrated leader of the black community, yet he chose the lonely vigil of reproach and imprecation and exhortation, dying more radical than he had ever been, having gone as far as joining the Communist Party, expatriating himself to Ghana and reportedly renouncing his American passport. Even his death, according to his biographer David L. Lewis, was timed with cinematic poignancy, passing away only one night before the 1963 March on Washington.

As Martin Luther King Jr. was about to deliver his earth-shattering speech “I have a dream” in front of the Lincoln Memorial, activist Roy Wilkins stepped up to the microphone to declared that Du Bois had died.

A moment of silence in his honor then ensued.

[Frederic · Rating 4 out of 5]

Building on the works of scholars such as Lee Baker (From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954) and Manning Marable (W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat), Morris here builds a cohesive argument for the importance of Du Bois as a social theorist and for his marginalization by white scholars of his time. The writing is clear and authoritative, but may be a bit heavy for the average undergraduate. The argument is a good one, but in its service Morris sometimes seems to skip over points that might complicate (not derail) the message. For example, the discussion of Boas, while fairly noting that he was a product of his time and culture, focuses on his earlier work and does not mention some of his later contributions -- which were likely shaped by interaction with Du Bois and his scholarship. But the argument here is an important one, and a good contribution to the ongoing effort to recognize Du Bois as a peer and major figure along with the more widely studied white male social scientists of the 20th century. In that, it belongs in teaching disciplinary histories alongside one of my favorites, The Women Founders: Sociology and Social Theory, 1830-1930, A Text with Readings.

[Kåre · Rating 3 out of 5]

Historien er fantastisk. I USA omkring 1900 var der en dygtig sort sociolog, hvis arbejde var på højde med de bedste, på trods af racismen i USA. Men han blev tilsidesat og underkendt af hvide USA-sociologer og skoler af sociologer.

Du Bois var således en af en håndfuld, som i USA i 1900 kunne udføre statistiske undersøgelser.

Forfatteren viser denne pointe tydeligt og troværdigt. Det er interessant at høre om mødet mellem Du Bois og Weber, Boas og chicago-skolen for sociologi.

Men så er det heller ikke mere interessant. Der er mange gentagelser og for meget, som er irrelevant for mig.

[Meghan Fidler · Rating 4 out of 5]

I never knew W.E.B. DuBois was so active in the academy, he even met with one of my Anthropology heroes, Boas! On the flip side, the more I learn about Mr. Booker T Washington the more dubiously I examine his work. I've long been a fan of DuBois's writing, and I deeply enjoyed the extensive primary document research that Aldon Morris has conducted.
Given the political climate of today Morris has made a timely contribution to intellectual history.

[Roger Green · Rating 5 out of 5]

Aldon Morris vindicates W.E.B. Du Bois's academic legacy as a founding figure for the discipline of American sociology through thorough research that tracks the development of an academic feud that sought to minimize and limit credit to Du Bois's superior research strategies. Along the way he shows how "scientific" racism persisted in institutionalized form in the mid twentieth-century and the amnesia that exists around these early debates.

[Ivana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Who is the missing person on the wall of fame of sociology? W. E. B. du Bois.
A very detailed inquiry of early 20th century academia and race relations mingled with well everything.
I can imagine a better written, more engaging - less repetitive - book.