The Sociology of W.E.B. Du Bois as a Weapon of Racial Equality: Pioneering Scientific Social Research at Historically Black Colleges and Universities

Abstract

W.E.B. Du Bois was a pivotal scholar of the 20th century who had a sustained global impact on sociological, literary, and political knowledge. Although he produced groundbreaking sociological scholarship in a historically black school – Atlanta University, his work was marginalized and erased due to racism and the radicalness of his scholarship. This article demonstrates that Du Bois was a founder of scientific sociology in the United States who developed a pioneering and distinct Atlanta School of sociology. This article advances two theses: Du Bois developed an emancipatory school of sociology that theorized and empirically documented the causes of racial and social inequality and that the Atlanta School gave rise to pioneering scientific social research at historically Black colleges and universities that served as intellectual weapons in the struggle for racial equality.