In Black America; The Scholar Denied, with Dr. Aldon D. Morris

From the University of Texas at Austin, KUT Radio, this is In Black America. He was first of all a superb scholar, he's the first African American to get a PhD at Harvard, he got a PhD at Harvard in history, and then he also studied at the University of Berlin in Germany, and those were the leading social scientists of the day, and so Du Bois was a very highly trained social scientist, and he was also just a gifted intellectual in that scholar, and so that was part of it was his business, his training and his intellect, but another part of it was that Du Bois saw it, that the world was thinking wrong about race, that the white community and white leaders believed that black people were inferior, that they were genetically inferior, they were cultural inferior, they were in fact subhuman, not poor members of the human family, and this is what was believed throughout the 19th century, and the 20th century, and this was the belief, that the university, this is what professors taught.

Dr. Aldrin D. Morris, the Leon Force Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Northwestern University, an author of the scholar denied W.E.B. Du Bois, and the birth of modern sociology, published by University of California for us. In his book, Morris looked at the birth of modern sociology and argues W.E.B. Du Bois' work is to founding of the discipline. Based on extensive and rigorous primary source research, the book is the result of a decade of research, writing, and revision. In exploring the economic and political factors that marginalized the contributions of Du Bois, and enabled Robert E. Park and his colleagues to be recognized as the quote, father in the quote of the discipline, Morris delivered a wholly new narrative of American intellectual and social history that placed one of America's key intellectuals, W.E.B. Du Bois, at its center. In 1895 Du Bois became the first African American to earn a PhD from Harvard University. He wrote extensively and was best known spokesman for African American rights during the first half of the 20th century. In 1909, he co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Color People. I'm John L. Henson, Jr. and welcome to another edition of In Black America.

On this week's program, the scholar denied W.E.B. Du Bois and the birth of modern sociology with author Dr. Alden D. Morris in Black America. Du Bois, from the age of 18 to 95, he published something on average of every 12-day of his life from 18 to 95. This kind of prolific scholarship and classic work, even despite that, he was ignored, not thought important, thought to be inferior, incapable of being a great scientist and so on and so forth. So that was one reason that he was a Negro and did not command any attention from any white person, so that was one part of it. But the other part was because his thought was so radical, challenging Jim Crow, challenging racial inequality, challenging racism. But he didn't only challenge racism, he challenged Jim to inequality, he challenged class inequality, and so he did not fit with the status quo. His ideas were very much in disharmony with the status quo, calling for change, calling for social transformation, and so there was no place in the academy for him.

W.E.B. Du Bois was a civil rights activist, leader, pan-Africanist, sociologist, educator, historian, writer, editor, poet, and scholar. In this groundbreaking book, the scholar denied Dr. Alden D. Morris helped rewrite the history of sociology into a non-extra permanency of Dr. Du Bois' work in the founding of the principle, calling the question of availing narrative of our sociology developed. W.E.B. Du Bois, a major scholar of social movement, proven a way in which history of the discipline has traditionally given credit to Robert E. Park at the University of Chicago, who worked with conservative African-American leader, Booker T. Washington, to render Du Bois' invisible. W.E.B. Du Bois uncovered a similar theoretical work of Du Bois in developing a scientific sociology through a variety of practice and examples, how the leading scholars of the day dispairs to ignore Du Bois' work. Recently, in Black America, spoke with author Dr. Alden D. Morris.

I was born in a little rural town called Tuwala, Mississippi, and I stayed there until I was like 12, 13, and then moved to Chicago, and it lived in Chicago every sense except that when I was in graduate school, and when my first professorship was at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and then I came back to Chicago almost 30 years ago, and I've been teaching at Northwestern University every sense. I think that the great leader of the Civil Rights Movement, Ms. Ella Baker, when I interviewed her, and she asked me the same question you asked me, and I told her, and she said, all I get is you've had a double dose of racism, the Southern and the Northern variety, and I think she hit it on the head, and so that's who I am. When you moved to Chicago, I think back in 1957, what similarities did you notice coming from Mississippi and then going north?

I noticed that there was still a great degree of racial segregation, and Chicago was one of the most segregated, I think it is the most segregated, big city in America. And so, you know, there were the black side of town and the white side of town. We lived on the west side and the south side, and we still do for the most part, although there are pockets now of integration, but for the most part, all of the public schools remain very segregated with schools being overwhelmingly black and brown in terms of the public schools, but that there was still very serious racism in the north. The neighborhood that I live in now, we didn't live in when I was growing up, I lived adjacent to it, and when black people started to move in to the neighborhood, they had bricks and stuff thrown through the windows and so on, and I had my encounters like all young black people with the police being profiled and so on and so forth. And so, I think that the thing that happened was that I had been told that the little kid in Mississippi that the north was the Promised Land, and I literally believed it.

And when we drove up here from, well, I thought I was stepping out on the streets of the Promised Land, but I was suffered a rude awakening, and we are still trying to address the endemic racism that is both apparent in both the north and the south. And I'm not contemporary as having grown up during the same period. Speaking of the civil rights movement, how did that help shape the man that you are today? Oh, I think that the civil rights movement shaped me in very, very fundamental, foundational ways. You know, when I moved to Chicago, this was prior to the confrontation in Birmingham in 1963, right before the March on Washington, in Washington, and I mean, my greatest hero in life was definitely Dr. Martin Luther King. I listened to all of the speeches. I can pretty much recite them now. But also, I saw all of those young people, students, both at even elementary school and high school and college who took to the streets for change.

And I knew that, you know, having known about and heard about the lynching, having been exploited in the cotton fields of Mississippi and so on, having been called niggas and have my grandparents being called niggas and boy. And having written on the segregated Greyhound bus when we would come north and all of that and having experienced the fear that existed if you were black during the Jim Crow days of the south. You know, I knew about all of that. And so anything, any force that came about to tackle that problem in a confrontational, dramatic way, called my attention when I was very young. And so my first book is called The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement. It's considered to be a classic book on the Civil Rights Movement.

But I wrote that book out of those kinds of experiences. And so I certainly would not be the person I am today if there had been no Civil Rights Movement. And one of the reasons that I wrote the scholarly night, W.B. Du Bois in the birth of modern sociology, is because I learned that W.B. Du Bois was actually one of the major architects of the Civil Rights Movement. He was doing this in the early 1900s. And he organized the Niagara Movement in 1905. And then that became the forerunner that gave rise to the NAACP. And he led many movements while being a prolific and profound scholar. And so then this new book follows up on the earlier book, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement. Because I'm dealing with one of the grand architects of the Civil Rights Movement. That is the modern Civil Rights Movement. Before you became a man of letters, you attended South Eastern Community College. What led you to that particular community college, considering the Vietnam War was going on?

Well, yes. The thing is, is that I come from a very working class family. I didn't know anyone who had gone to college. And the education was always valued in my home, my mother, my grandparents, and so on. They told us that there's one thing the white man cannot take from you in this education. So you need to get some. And so I took that to heart. But I didn't know anything about colleges and universities. In fact, I thought that I probably would be a failure in college because obviously to me, as a young age, I thought that only really smart people went to colleges and universities because none of my people went. And so then when I looked around for the possibility of going to a college, the first thing we had, a number of junior colleges, they were called in Chicago. And some of my friends started going to those and I went and filled out an application and got a call and said I was admitted I was rather nervous. I didn't do too well on the entry exams.

And so they put me in what they call basic courses where you didn't even get credit form and all. But I only stayed there for one semester because I failed really quickly. But I was always very serious about education. And so I'm a champion of junior colleges and community colleges to this day because they often serve as the ground floor for those of us who did not grow up with resources and who did not grow up with people who had experiences at colleges and universities and could naturally direct us there. And I actually ran into some very gifted professors at the junior college level who took interest in me and encouraged me to go to the next level. And so I have a very fun place in my heart for community colleges. If you're just joining us, I'm Johnny O'Hanston, Jr. and you're listening to In Black America from KUT Radio and we're speaking with Dr. Alden Morris, the Leon Force Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Northwestern University and author of W.E.B. Du Bois and the birth of modern sociology. Dr. Morris, how did Professor Richard Maxwell set you on this path to rediscover W.E.B. Du Bois?

Okay, let me just say that the title of the book is the scholar, the NAD, W.E.B. Du Bois and the birth of modern sociology. And I chose that title because even though Du Bois did all of this groundbreaking scholarship on inequality in America and on racism and so forth, the mainstream, the white mainstream marginalized his work and would not even recognize North Quote or cite his work. And so that's how I came up with the title, the scholar, the NAD. And when I was in community college, as I said earlier, there were some very gifted instructors and professors there.

And one in particular was an elderly guy from the South and I took his class. I never forget the title. It was a black man in the United States. And I took that course and I was just shocked by the knowledge that he had of the black community both historically and contemporaneously. And I read everything he told us to read and on Saturdays, me and some other classmates would go over to his house and he would conduct almost seminars just hanging out with us at his house. And he liked to drink and so we would drink with him and talk and argue about the black experiences and so on. And then he told me when I was getting ready to finish up with an associate suffrage degree, he said you should go on and get a bachelor's degree. And I was like a bachelor. He was like, yes, you can do it. And so I took his advice and went on to Bradley University here in Peoria, Illinois. And then I ran into some other professors there who took interest in me and said you should go on and get a PhD in sociology. And I was like, I PhD, you know, no, I think I have enough now.

But they persisted and I went on and did that. But yes, it was in those classrooms at the community college. It wasn't the only professor at the University Maxwell, but there were others. And I can remember several black women professors who took interest in me and who profoundly shaped my thinking and so forth. And of course, that was the first time I was introduced to reading W. B. Du Bois and the Souls of Black folk and learn about the tremendous struggle that he had with Booker T. Washington over the direction that black people should take to get free. And so that's that's kind of like my background. Now, when you write in the book that W. E. B. Du Bois was somewhat ignored from his contemporary white sociologist, but also African-Americans who were some of your instructors knew who he was. Why do you think that was so prevalent back then?

Well, the thing is is that you know, like people given our history, you know, being born in the South, my middle name is Douglas and my brother's first name is Frederick. And so of course, my grandparents was thinking about Frederick Douglass. And of course, we all knew about who Booker T. Washington was and we all knew about the importance of came to know about the importance of W. B. Du Bois. And so it's just a very central part of our existence that we have to learn about. I mean, even you learn about it through word of mouth, even if you didn't have classes and so forth. You learn how to get up and sing, you know, the national anthem, lift every voice and sing by James Wilson, Johnson, and so on and so forth. And so then these African-American professors and instructors, they knew about this history and they introduced us to this history. And then of course, after I started reading Du Bois, I thought that, you know, when I went away to my last two years of undergrad and then when I went to graduate school, that I would really read Du Bois and become very knowledgeable about his work and his scholarship and so on. But that did not happen and that was because he had been ignored, his work had been marginalized and most of the professors that I had in grad school, they were even ignorant of Du Bois. I knew more about Du Bois than they did, not a fact they usually didn't know anything.

And so then I, after not having to study Du Bois at all in my educational background, especially as a graduate student and as an assistant professor, you know, I said, you know, it is important for me and African-American scholar who is a sociologist and Du Bois was a sociologist. It is important that I study his work and study it in detail and to be able to conquer his thought and that I made a promise when I was young coming out of grad school that one day I was going to set the record straight about Du Bois and who he was and what kind of sociologist he was. So that was the original thing that got me going and culminated in the scholarly night, WB Du Bois and the birth of modern sociology. Why was it so important for WB Du Bois to basically use data over substantive innuendos or class?

It's because Du Bois was, first of all, he was a superb scholar. He's the first African-American to get a PhD at Harvard. He got a PhD at Harvard in history. And then he also studied at the University of Berlin in Germany and those were the leading social scientists of the day. And so Du Bois was a very highly trained social scientist and he was also just a gifted intellectual and scholar. So that was part of his training and his intellect. But another part of it was that Du Bois thought that the world was thinking wrong about race. That the white community and white leaders believed that black people were inferior, that they were genetically inferior, they were culturally inferior. They were in fact subhuman, not bull members of the human family. And this is what was believed throughout the 19th century and the 20th century. And this was the belief in the university. This is what professors taught. This is what they wrote. This is what their research said to them.

And so Du Bois knew that this was wrong and he also noticed that they really just more or less speculated about these things. And they just did what he called armchair theorizing or what he called car witness sociology. And so he thought that if he would go out along with other scholars that he attracted and they go out and they do all of the empirical work. They collected the data that they did to interviews. They did the ethnography. They did the participant observing the use of stats and so on. That he could prove that black people or nor any race was inferior. And that would do it. That would do the trick is that then whites would say, okay, we have no excuse for oppressing black people and keeping them at the bottom and they indeed are just like us and not inferior. And so that's what motivated Du Bois. And then of course, about 1910, he recognized after witnessing a lynching and really learning about this lynching and he went by a store and he saw the lynched victims knuckles in the window of a grocery store.

And that's what he realized. My God, this thing is not just about ignorance. This is about power and economics and so forth. And that's when he started to say, I've got to do a lot more than just do scholarship and study this thing. We're going to have to organize and we're going to have to fight politically. Now has his efforts towards the study of sociology affecting the field as far. It's beginning to affect a lot. You see, most dollars of color did not arrive in the academy until the late 1960s, following protests, cities, taking over buildings and so forth. That's how we got there. And once we got there, of course, we had a different set of interests. And so we started to research and write old people like Du Bois and many others like Cardigy Woodson and Ida B. Wells and so on. So part of it is that we brought a new way of thinking to the academy and we said in many ways, no, we're going to look at this and we're going to deal with this.

What is happening with my book and all is that there is some recognition now that the curriculum in high school and in colleges and universities and graduate schools and so forth must change to take into account the role of scholars like Cardigy Woodson and W. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells and many others. And so we're calling for a new interrogation of the thought of these people because what we realize when you read it and you think about it, it has a lot to say to us today about what is going on and we need to address the problems that we have. Obviously, Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois had two different trains of thought as it relates to the upper mobility of African Americans. What is important to know is that Du Bois never disagreed with Booker T. Washington that industrial education was not important and that black people needed to learn how to do trades and so forth. He was not against that and he wrote the Booker T. Washington and said, yes, we do need industrial education and learn how to work with our hands.

But way different with Booker T. Washington was that he says, but that is not the only way to out liberation. We must have educated people in the liberal arts, in economics, in political science, in philosophy, in history, in the humanities who can think broadly and creatively and that we also need the boat. We need to be politically enfranchised and we need to do away with racial segregation. We need to be the social equal of anybody on the planet and so he would not acquiesce to segregation the way that Booker T. Washington did. Or would he make the argument that we simply needed to learn how to be a book of brick masons and cooks and construction workers and so on, but that we need to be involved at every level of the society from the highest intellectual endeavor all the way to working with our hands. So Booker T. Washington said, we must learn to plow field is just as important as writing a poem. And of course Du Bois was a poet too.

And so Du Bois pushed a whole idea that no, we had to learn everything that existed that we could learn and we needed to. And so they differed erratically. The bottom line is that Booker T. Washington was a conservative like leader, whereas Du Bois was a radical black leader and scholar who advocated full equality, full citizenship rights and so forth. And he was unwavering and also Du Bois believed very deeply in the need to protest unequal conditions and so on. And so they were different in those regards. And as Robert Ezra Park received most of the credit for producing the first generation of black sociologists at the Chicago School. Well, because black scholars doing this period, we talk about the early 20th century, black scholars just like black people in Jones, they were not thought to be important. And I thought it means somebody who was as prolific as Du Bois, Du Bois outproduced intellectually. He outproduced almost all white scholars. Let me tell you something. Du Bois from the age of 18 to 95, he published something on average of every 12 days of his life from 18 to 95.

Just this kind of prolific scholarship and classic work, even despite that, he was ignored, not thought of important, thought to be inferior, incapable of being a great scientist and so on and so forth. It was one reason that he was a Negro and did not command any attention from any white person, so that was one part of it. But the other part was because his thought was so radical, challenging Jim Crow, challenging racial inequality, challenging racism. But he didn't only challenge racism, he challenged Jim to inequality, he challenged class inequality, and so he did not fit with the status quo. His ideas were very much in disharmony with the status quo, calling for change, calling for social transformation, and so there was no place in the academy for him. While studying at the University of Berlin, what type of methodology did Du Bois get from that experience?

Well, he clearly learned how to be an MP, what we call an empirical social scientist. That is that you don't just theorize about what's going on. You got to get out and study what is going on. Du Bois's motto was that we study what others discuss, and so that he learned, as I said before, all these empirical methodologies, including going out into communities, doing interviews with people about their lives and their conditions, living among them and observing them and writing down what you see and what you hear. And then doing quantitative work, using census data and all of that, he put all of those different empirical methods together to inform his work. And so his bottom line was that like what I'm saying is backed up by data. This is not something of hearsay. This is not my opinion. But if the white scholars want to be real scientists, they got to get out here and do research like I'm doing, and otherwise I have scientific work in theirs is conjecture.

Tell us about the school in Atlanta. Well, the thing here is that Du Bois as a black scholar could not get a job at any white university. He couldn't get one at his alma mater Harvard. He couldn't get one at the University of Pennsylvania. He couldn't get one at the University of Chicago, Yale, or Columbia anywhere. And so his only choice was to get a job at a historically black college or university. And Atlanta University, there was some very forward-looking people who recruited him to come there. And he came there in about 1897. He stayed in 1910 and he produced all of his classic work, including the Phosa Black Folk in 1903. Dr. Alden D. Morris, the Leon Forrest Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Northwestern University, an author of the Scholar denied W.E.B. Du Bois in the Birth of Modern Sociology. If you have questions or comments or suggestions ask your future in black America programs, email us at jhanssonatkut.org.

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