Description
Aldon Morris, who earned his PhD at Stony Brook University in 1980, credited his alma mater for providing much of his "intellectual, social and personal growth," adding, "I cherish those years as a grad student in the Sociology Department." He also thanked the man who introduced him, Sociology Professor Michael Swartz, for serving as his mentor while he was a student at Stony Brook. Then he got right down to business establishing W.E.B. Du Bois as the man who developed America's first scientific school of sociology in the United States.
"It is a well-kept secret that this school was founded by a small racially segregated college in the southern U.S.," he said. He added that the all-white male faculty in the Chicago School of Sociology at the University of Chicago is widely credited with that distinction, but that it is a highly disputed claim. It wasn't until Du Bois enrolled in political science at the University of Berlin in 1894 that he began to view himself differently "as a human being." Morris pointed out that to truly understand this statement, one had to remember what it was like to be black in American then.
"Whites continued to believe that blacks were biologically and culturally inferior, from separate toilet and drinking facilities to waiting rooms and restaurants. Dignity and self-respect were denied as blacks could not vote, were exploited economically, and were lynched and terrorized. Blacks were locked in an iron cage of racism and could not experience themselves as completely human or gain true consciousness."
Thus Du Bois was shocked to be treated as a social equal among white Europeans. Du Bois admitted that he was not always "treated as a curiosity and that people in Germany were glad to meet and talk about the part of the world I came from." That ended abruptly when he returned to the U.S. "After two years I dropped back into nigger-hating America," he said. Du Bois, in rejecting the theories in currency with sociologists of his era, urged students to look at culture, not nature, environment, not genetics, and ethical change, not moral absolutes. Germany had afforded him the opportunity to learn how a research organization was run and he applied that upon his return stateside.
According to Morris, his conducted his sociological and scientific research 20 years before the Chicago School engaged in theirs. In 1899 he published "The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study," the first case study of a black community in the U.S. This came at a time when some sociologists were predicting "blacks would become extinct due to their defects." "The Philadelphia Negro" was based on archival, census, and ethnographic data, pioneering a multi-method approach. Morris called it the "first number-crunching survey," and one that involved extensive fieldwork. DuBois spent 835 hours interviewing 2,500 households over a three-month period, collecting living histories of a living population. Morris noted that the survey involved women, which was practically unheard of at the time. Facets of the survey included questions on occupation, crime, religion, culture, migration, and other demographics and it was based on empirical evidence rather than speculation. "No other white universities were doing this then," said Morris. "Du Bois broke from the pack." And yet Du Bois had no choice but to teach at a "poor black university" because the white counterparts were not hiring black professors. He parted ways with the other prominent black activist of his day, Booker T. Washington, criticizing Washington's policy of slow civil rights changes and accommodation. That led to Du Bois's formation of the black radical organization The Niagara Movement, thought of today as the forerunner and inspiration for the NAACP. Morris said that Washington marshalled the press against his opponent. When a riot erupted in Atlanta in 1906 and a white mob killed a large number of blacks, a Washington writer claimed that Du Bois was hiding in a farmhouse in Alabama. Du Bois retaliated by saying that he rushed to Atlanta from Alabama where his wife and children were living and even bought a shotgun to use if it proved necessary. Although Du Bois was by nature a pacifist, he said that he had to make an exception in this case. One of the major schisms between the two men was that Washington argued that blacks would best benefit from concentrating their energies on industrial education and the accumulation of wealth and Du Bois promoted blacks' attaining a liberal arts education and earning their civil rights primarily through education, not economics. In closing, Morris maintained that it was politics, not geography, that kept Du Bois from achieving recognition as the founder of American sociology. He said that there are still hidden intellectual treasures hidden in his "groundbreaking" sociological findings, which scholars are revisiting. "His work contains lessons for human liberation," said Morris.
Comments, questions and answers