Ethnic and Racial Studies

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A singular scholar and writer in a profoundly racist

world

Martin Bulmer

To cite this article: Martin Bulmer (2016) A singular scholar and writer in a profoundly racist world,
Ethnic and Racial Studies, 39:8, 1385-1390, DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2016.1153694

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ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES, 2016
VOL. 39, NO. 8, 1385–1390
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2016.1153694

A singular scholar and writer in a profoundly racist

world
Martin Bulmer
Department of Sociology, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK

ABSTRACT
W.E.B. Du Bois was a remarkable pioneer, and Aldon Morris does justice to his
career and significance. The nature of the racist world which he inhabited is
convincingly evoked, and his claim to be a founding father of American
sociology is well argued. Yet in 1910 Du Bois abandoned academia to become
the founding editor of the NAACP magazine THE CRISIS, and towards the end
of his life four decades later abandoned the USA to live in Ghana. Was Du
Bois at heart the sociologist trained as a graduate student in Berlin, or did he
become something different, an advocate, investigator and prophet who from
a lofty and austere pinnacle addressed his compatriots about what it meant
to be black in America?

ARTICLE HISTORY Received 17 December 2015; Accepted 9 February 2016

KEYWORDS W.E.B. Du Bois; The Crisis; NAACP; social survey; Atlanta School

Recalling the impact of the announcement of the death of W.E.B. Du Bois at

the March on Washington in August 1963, David Levering Lewis observed that
Legendary Du Bois [for few had ever dared a more familiar direct address]
appeared to have timed his exit for maximum symbolic effect. [He died in
Accra, Ghana, where he had moved late in life at the invitation of Kwame
Nkrumah] … … In a real sense, Du Bois was seen by hundreds of thousands of
Americans, black and white, as the paramount custodian of the intellect that
so many impoverished, deprived, intimidated and desperately striving African-
Americans had either never developed or found it imperative to conceal. His
chosen weapons were grand ideas propelled by uncompromising language.
Lesser mortals of the race – heads of civil rights organisations, presidents of col-
leges, noted ministers of the Gospel – conciliated, tergiversated, and brought
back from white bargaining tables half loaves for their people. Never Du Bois.
Not for him the tea and sympathy of interracial conferences or backdoor suppli-
cations, hat in hand and smile fixed, in patient anticipation of understanding or
guilt-ridden, one-time-only concessions. From an Olympus of scholarship and

CONTACT Martin Bulmer m.bulmer@surrey.ac.uk

© 2016 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDer-
ivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distri-
bution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered,
transformed, or built upon in any way.
1386 M. BULMER

opinion, he waved his pen and, as he wrote later, attempted ‘to explain,
expound and exhort; to see, foresee and prophesy, to the few who could or
would listen.’ (Lewis 1993, 3)
Twenty-two and fifteen years ago, Lewis’s magisterial and definitive two-
volume biography, subtitled respectively Biography of a Race and The Fight
for Equality and the American Century 1919–1963 (Lewis 1993, 2000) painted
a picture of the committed activist who for 25 years at the helm of the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, edited The
Crisis and kept the issue of racial equality on the public agenda. The work
paid due attention to Du Bois’s earlier career as the first black American to
gain a PhD from Harvard, and his subsequent academic career at Wilberforce,
University of Pennsylvania and Atlanta University, but its predominant
emphasis was upon the public scholar and activist.
Now Aldon Morris has focused specifically upon Du Bois’s career as a soci-
ologist, and asks us to consider his place in the sociological Pantheon. This fine
study argues that Du Bois has been unjustly neglected by historians of the dis-
cipline, and in a moving autobiographical account at the start of the book,
Morris cites his own teacher as a graduate student, Lewis Coser, emphatically
declaring that Du Bois was not a master of sociological thought when Morris
ventured to suggest that he was. The main focus is upon the first twenty years
of Du Bois career, as sociological researcher and scourge of Booker T Washing-
ton, before he left academia in disillusion and moved to New York to edit The
Crisis for the NAACP.
The outlines of Du Bois’s career are well known. Morris highlights not only
his distinctiveness as being the first black student to gain a PhD from Harvard,
but the subsequent two years which he spent in Berlin at the feet of some of
the great German social scientists of the day, Gustav Schmoller and Adolph
Wagner. Du Bois had a two-year award in Germany from an American foun-
dation which was not renewable and his failure of get it extended, which pre-
vented him being awarded a PhD from the University of Berlin, was an
example of the kinds of reverses which he repeatedly encountered as a
black scholar. Morris devotes a whole chapter to Du Bois contacts with Max
Weber, who did not teach him in Berlin, but with whom Du Bois established
contact in 1904 when Weber visited the St Louis Exposition. They corre-
sponded and met and Du Bois introduced Weber to black America. Du Bois
published an article in Max Weber’s German academic journal, the Verein
für Socialpolitik, [preceded by one by Simmel and followed by another by
Michels], and as Lawrence Scaff has shown (2011), the two men were
engaged in the kind of dialogue which masters of sociological thought did
engage in, for example on the relationship between class and race.
The academic openings for a black social scientist at the end of the nine-
teenth century were limited exclusively to black colleges, so Du Bois began
his teaching career at Wilberforce. Morris demonstrates, however, the
 ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 1387

singularity of the step which Du Bois took in leaving the college environment
to do research at the University of Pennsylvania. Having clashed with the
authorities at Wilberforce about various matters, and finished his Harvard
PhD on black reconstruction, Du Bois accepted with alacrity an invitation
from the Provost at Penn to undertake a study of the condition of coloured
people in the seventh ward of that city suggested by Susan Wharton, a
local notable and Quaker. This study Du Bois carried out in 1896–97 over 15
months while living in the city, entirely on the periphery of the University
of Pennsylvania, and published as The Philadelphia Negro in 1899. It was a
learning experience too for this dapper member of the ‘talented tenth’ (For
more details, see Bulmer 1991).
The colour bar precluded any possibility of an academic appointment for
Du Bois at the time at an Ivy League university like Penn, so Du Bois sought
and obtained an appointment at Atlanta University, a black institution
located in the heart of black Atlanta, where he developed a sociology depart-
ment, taught sociology and developed a laboratory for social investigation.
‘Du Bois remained at Atlanta for thirteen years, making a name in social
science, letters, literature and activism while pioneering the first scientific
school of American sociology’ (Morris 2015, 57).
A substantial portion of Morris’s book documents what he calls the ‘Atlanta
School of Sociology’, itemizing the studies carried out by and the achieve-
ments of the black scholars who constituted that school apart from Du Bois
himself such as John Hope, Monroe Work, Lucy Craft Laney and George
Edmund Haynes. Morris’s claim that this is an unjustly neglected aspect of
American sociology is well taken. He is kind enough to draw on an article
of my own on the characteristics of ‘schools’ of sociology (Bulmer 1985),
and there is no doubt that Du Bois was a dominating figure at Atlanta at
this period, who bears comparison with the Chicago sociologist Robert Park
or the Columbia anthropologist Franz Boas, both of whose relationships
with Du Bois are discussed in the book and both of whom established
schools. The complicating factor in the case of Du Bois, however, is the
factor of race, and the way in which this impinged upon his Atlanta activities.
Morris establishes that Du Bois had a well worked out research programme,
but he could not secure adequate funding to undertake all the work which
he aimed to carry out, and this hindered his effectiveness. Morris documents
what he was able to achieve, but points to the disadvantageous conditions he
was under in seeking funding, hinted at in Davis’s opening quotation. Du Bois
intellectual incisiveness and refusal to conform to white expectations reduced
the likelihood of his securing support, and he was therefore thwarted to some
extent in what he set out to do.
The Atlanta of the day was not, moreover, a very restful place in which to
live. A scene of race riots and occasional lynchings, it was a stressful environ-
ment. Du Bois activist tendencies led him to develop some of his ideas about a
1388 M. BULMER

public sociology, with his critique of Booker T Washington and Washington’s

Tuskegee machine developed while he was in Atlanta. Du Bois core ideas,
expressed in brilliant essays such as The Souls of Black Folk, were a product
of the Atlanta years, but projected Du Bois onto a national, activist, stage
which took him away from purely academic pursuits. Ultimately it led him
into the establishment of the NAACP, in which he played such a signal part,
and in the end to his decision to abandon an academic career in order to
devote himself to full-time activism as editor of the NAACP magazine, The
Crisis.
The pivotal feature of early twentieth-century American society was its
deeply embedded racism. Some features were characteristic particularly of
the South, but nowhere in the USA could a brilliant black scholar like Du
Bois be appointed to a white university and hold a faculty position. And
this exclusion was but one manifestation of the fundamental inequality
which propelled Du Bois into his disagreements with Washington, and his
resort to activism as a way of challenging such fundamental social inequal-
ities. Morris does discuss Du Bois as a public sociologist, but in my view
does not accord sufficient weight to the second half of Du Bois career in
New York after 1910 when he created The Crisis, built it on a secure foun-
dation, and used it as a probing tool of inquiry to expose the dark under-
belly of American society. Whether it was sending investigators to report on
urban race riots, going himself to France to report on the poor conditions
of black American troops in France in 1918, or reporting year by year on
the slow pace of black advancement at leading white universities, The Crisis
became an instrument of public enlightenment and challenge to the status
quo. W E B Du Bois bears comparison to other notable figures of what may
be called public sociology such as Gunnar Myrdal and DP Moynihan [both inci-
dentally as well active politicians], but arguably he pushed his intellectual
differences further, and was less likely to temper his language in order to
achieve a political effect. This increased his impact, but perhaps further mar-
ginalized him, also in relation to the academic community of which we was
such a distinguished part for the part of his career which Morris is discussing.
Reading Lewis’s biography alongside Morris, going into the history of The
Crisis, the brilliance of its conception and the verve of its reporting, and the
international stage on which Du Bois moved, one is struck how different his
life became in New York to faculty life in Atlanta. He brushed shoulders
there with participants in the Harlem renaissance, and became in a sense a
prototypical transnational cosmopolitan. He sent his daughter Yolande to
attend an English public school, Bedales, backed up with a recommendation
from Ramsay Macdonald, Britain’s first Labour prime minister, whom Du Bois
had come across at one of the congresses on colonial freedom which he had
organized in London. The placement did not work out in the end, but it is
instructive that such an initiative was attempted.
 ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 1389

Who belongs in the Pantheon of sociology? Du Bois was undoubtedly a sig-

nificant pioneer of black empirical sociology in the USA who has been unjustly
neglected. Morris does much to right that neglect. Du Bois engaged in dis-
course with Max Weber and Franz Boas, he attempted to promote the Ency-
clopaedia of the Negro, the promise of funding for which ultimately
attracted him to move to Ghana and renounce his American citizenship in
his early nineties, and to die there in exile. Morris chronicles the obstacles
this project faced in the USA, which to a considerable extent bear out his
animadversions about racism. Yet is it right to say that Karl Marx or Max
Weber were just sociologists? Was W E B Du Bois just a sociologist? Morris
argues that he has been unjustly neglected, with strong justification, but
what the book plays down, I think, is the extent to which Du Bois himself
turned away from academic sociology after 1910, spurred by the rebuffs
which he had received and his urgent activist agenda. And in doing so, he
became something else, a major American public figure.
Consider Jane Adams. She has been hailed as a prototype feminist sociol-
ogist (cf. Deegan 1990). Is she part of the sociological Pantheon? Undoubtedly
she was a most important and influential public figure, who spoke about sig-
nificant public issues. Was there not a party convention to nominate Theodore
Roosevelt as presidential candidate, where Jane Addams opened the pro-
ceedings and received a considerably larger public acclamation than the can-
didate himself? But does this make Jane Addams a sociologist, particularly
when it is also debatable in her case whether she regarded herself as a soci-
ologist? So in the case of Du Bois. Morris’s attempt to reclaim him for sociology
is a persuasive one, if ultimately an unsuccessful one. For W E B DuBois was
much more than a sociologist, a larger than life figure who tackled race as
an issue in America on a public stage, yet experienced so many frustrations
in so doing.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

References
Bulmer, M. 1985. “The Chicago School of Sociology: What Made it a ‘School’?.” The
History of Sociology: An International Review 5 (2): 61–77.
Bulmer, M. 1991. “W E B Du Bois as a Social Investigator.” In The Social Survey in
Historical Perspective 1880–1940, edited by M. Bulmer, K. Bales, and K. K. Sklar,
170–188. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Deegan, M. J. 1990. Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School. 1892–1918. New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books.
Lewis, D. L. 1993. W E B DuBois: Biography of a Race. New York: Henry Holt.
1390 M. BULMER

Lewis, D. L. 2000. W E B DuBois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–
1963. New York: Henry Holt.
Morris, A. D. 2015. The Scholar Denied: W E B Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology.
Oakland: University of California Press.
Scaff, L. 2011. Max Weber in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.