There, he established a sociology program, now recognized as the first school of American sociology. Park and the Chicago school were conducting ethnographic field work and statistical analysis, Du Bois pioneered a new way to use sociology: to use those methodologies to contextualize the historical realities resonating among African-Americans.Īfter embarking on a sprawling sociological study of African-Americans living in Philadelphia, he was hired as a professor at the historically black Atlanta University in 1897. Sociology’s scope in history, statistics, and demographics held the potential to quantifiably reveal "life within the Veil," as Du Bois called the structural forces of oppressions that separated black and white populations, whether that came to educational attainment, voting rights or land ownership.Īnd so, almost two decades before Robert E. To accomplish this goal, Du Bois turned to the burgeoning field of sociology. ”It is not one problem,” as Du Bois wrote in 1898, “but rather a plexus of social problems, some new, some old, some simple, some complex and these problems have their one bond of unity in the act that they group themselves above those Africans whom two centuries of slave-trading brought into the land.” Du Bois, the prominent African-American intellectual, sought a way to process all this information showing why the African disapora in America was being held back in a tangible, contextualized form. in history from Harvard University, W.E.B. All the while, new generations of African-Americans found ways to uplift themselves, despite discrimination, through grassroots efforts in education, work and community building.Īfter graduating with a Ph.D. In 1897, the United States Supreme Court would rule in Plessy v. ![]() ![]() The political obstacles were voluminous, with the failure of Reconstruction still lingering, and Jim Crow institutional racism ascendant. After three decades of emancipation, the gains made by African-Americans, those that existed at all, presented a decidedly mixed picture about the state of racial progress in the country.
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