African American Sociologist Research Articles

W.E.B. Du Bois and Irene Diggs: Gender, Erasures, and Knowledge Production in the Sociology of the Global Color Line

The global sociology of W.E.B. Du Bois developed during the 1940s relies significantly on a collaborative relationship with African-American sociologist and anthropologist Irene Diggs (1906–1998). Diggs was mentored by Du Bois as a graduate student at Atlanta University and later became his research assistant, secretary, and colleague. No person worked for and with Du Bois as Diggs did, for nearly 14 years. In her own work, Diggs transcended Du Bois. Using archival documentary research, I analyze the connection between Diggs and Du Bois to show how they developed a global sociological perspective that included an analysis of the color line in Latin America. My analysis has two goals: (1) to show how the Du Bois–Diggs relationship was permeated by gender inequalities and a misrecognition of Diggs’s critical contribution and (2) to introduce Irene Diggs’s work on Latin America between 1942 and 1953 to show how it was inscribed within the project of a global sociology of the color line. I discuss how Diggs’s historical sociology expands the analysis of the Latin American color line today.

WOMAN, A UNIVERSAL CONCEPT?

This academic essay based on a literature review aims to demonstrate the correlation between the universalization of the subject “woman” and the maintenance of non-emancipatory practices. It is a critique of social immobility and the reinforcement of patriarchy from the duality maintained between mind and body in hegemonic feminism. Therefore, the perspectives of post-feminists were analyzed, in the view of the American post-structuralist philosopher Judith Butler; and black feminism, in the conception of the African-American sociologist Patricia Hill Collins.

Labor Organizer Nannie Helen Burroughs and Her National Training School for Women and Girls

Labor Organizer Nannie Helen Burroughs and Her National Training School for Women and Girls

„Entlang der Farbenlinie“ W. E. B. Du Bois in Nazi-Deutschland

Abstract The African-American sociologist and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) travels to Germany in 1936 for a five-month research stay. In his weekly column in the “Pittsburgh Courier,” he reports on the Olympic Games in Berlin, the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, and vocational training at Siemens. In the last articles, which appeared after he had left the country, he presents his analysis of National Socialist society. He observes life in the totalitarian dictatorship “along the color line,” from a postcolonial perspective. To his own surprise, he finds that he himself experienced no discrimination, while the persecution of the Jews, which cannot be grasped with the category of “skin color,” surpasses in popular cruelty and government policy the racism he himself experienced and criticized in the United States. The essay discusses Du Bois's reports from the German dictatorship on the basis of their first German-language edition and in the context of the debate about anti-Semitism versus colonial racism and “multidirectional memory.”

Claiming Freedom: Race, Kinship, and Land in Nineteenth-Century Georgia by Karen Cook Bell

Reviewed by: Claiming Freedom: Race, Kinship, and Land in Nineteenth-Century Georgia by Karen Cook Bell John David Smith Claiming Freedom: Race, Kinship, and Land in Nineteenth-Century Georgia. By Karen Cook Bell. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2018. xii, 161 pp. $39.99. ISBN 978-1-6111-7830-2. In 1903 the great African American historian and sociologist W.E. Burghardt Du Bois took stock of the conditions of life for the rural South's black proletariat. Writing "Of the Dawn of Freedom," Du Bois considered the failure of the U.S. government to confiscate land belonging to the defeated Confederates in 1865 both a broken promise and a missed opportunity. "It had long been the more or less definitely expressed theory of the North that all the chief problems of Emancipation might be settled by establishing the slaves on the forfeited lands of their masters,—a sort of poetic justice, said some." But no, Du Bois complained bitterly, "the vision of 'forty acres and a mule'—the righteous and reasonable ambition to become a landholder," became little more than a pipe dream (The Souls of Black Folk; Essays and Sketches [New York, 1903, reprint 2018], 22, 27). Economists, historians, and sociologists have long agreed with Du Bois, keenly aware of the deleterious long-term legacy of the failure of Reconstruction-era governments to compensate the South's freed-people both with land and the means to transform it into productive property. Denied land, most of the freedmen and women ultimately became farm tenants or worked on shares for white landholders. Frequently, black persons became mired in the web of neoslavery—fastened securely to the white man's land by debt, sparse capital, and illiteracy. Without land, the freedpeople lacked opportunities to build communities, to invest capital, and to leave property to their heirs. Over a century and a half African Americans have suffered markedly from generational poverty, leaving black persons at a distinct disadvantage when competing with white persons for education, housing, and jobs. Although "Forty Acres and a Mule" continues as a rallying cry for reparationists and polemicists, numerous scholars, including Edward Magdol and Claude F. Oubre, have made clear that General William [End Page 152] T. Sherman's famous January 1865 Special Field Order 15 never was intended to award land fee simple to the freedpeople. At best it was the general's short-term strategy to alleviate what he considered the military problem of dealing with the burden of thousands of freedpeople in his army's midst. Despite the assertion in Sherman's Special Field Order that freedpeople in what became known as the "Sherman Reserve" would be granted homesteads, the land provision in the March 1865 Freedmen's Bureau Act made clear that the freedpeople could occupy and rent—but not receive as reparation—up to forty acres of abandoned and occupied land for three years. The refugees could purchase the land based on whatever fee simple titles could be secured. Historian Karen Cook Bell's most welcome Claiming Freedom focuses on slavery, emancipation, the government's failed land policy, and the broad meaning of gender, kinship networks, and land ownership in the rice-producing portion of the Sherman Reserve—five counties in the Georgia lowcountry, extending from Savannah to St. Mary's. Drawing on varied sources, including the Southern Claims Commission papers, as well as local deeds and probate records, she examines how black persons in these counties shaped "oppositional communities" and established "complex networks of relations and tensions that were the products of contradictory and competing visions of freedom" (2). The Civil War and its accompanying uncompensated emancipation initiated in Georgia and the other Confederate states "a social, political, and economic revolution," Bell writes, eroding "the tension between slavery, free labor, and modernity" (52). Bell first assesses slavery in the Georgia lowcountry, largely confirming extant interpretations of the institution's complexities, contradictions, and diversity. She credits the task system with offering the lowcountry bondspeople degrees of freedom and an early grasp of the meaning of private property and land-based communities. That said, Bell revises previous scholarship by arguing that slaves who labored at tasks neither were "privileged" bondspeople nor were...

La caída del cielo o el derrumbe de las dualidades: un análisis del testimonio de Davi Kopenawa

This article is an ethical, academic and theoretical proposal that aims to denaturalize the classic differentiations between the “ones” and the “others” based on a reflection that integrates concepts such as the veil, the second look and the double conscience described by the African-American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois, together with the concept of the unthinkable by Michel Rolph Trouillot and the reality as a construction by Michael Taussig, in the testimony of Yanomami leader Davi Kopenawa compiled in The Falling Sky (2013) and in the article by anthropologist Jadran Mimica written about the aforementioned testimony. My interest is to demonstrate how Kopenawa’s testimony overturns the classic/traditional model in which indigenous people and whites find themselves trapped in fixed categories, and how critics themselves reject the possibility of reading them in another way.

The trauma consensus: history method in the age of trauma

Trauma has the potential to change the way we understand, research, and write the histories of settler colonial societies. Indigenous and African-American psychologists and sociologists have used trauma to develop the diagnoses of American Indian Historical Trauma (AI HT) and Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome (PTSS). A growing awareness of trauma with the increased prevalence of trauma-related disorders (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD) offers historians and other social scientists an opportunity to establish a new consensus based on the shared historical trauma of the descendants of colonization and empire-building. This essay argues for the necessity of such a new consensus, and then, drawing on psychology, anthropology, literary studies, and historical theory, posits a new ‘trauma methodology’ for the creation of the histories of settler colonial societies, which includes the assessment of subject matter, research methods, timeline, and writing.

Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy by Daniel Geary

Reviewed by: Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy by Daniel Geary Brian S. Mueller BEYOND CIVIL RIGHTS: The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy. By Daniel Geary. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2015. Daniel Geary has written an important history on both the inception of the Moynihan Report and its reception by academics and pundits. Rarely, if at all, does a government study receive much attention from individuals outside of the federal bureaucracy. Yet the Moynihan Report—even decades after Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant secretary of labor, wrote the report in March 1965 as an internal document—engaged the [End Page 155] public in a way government studies rarely do. While the use of phrases such as “tangle of pathology” no doubt partially explains the public interest in the Moynihan Report, Geary also points to the elasticity of the document’s argument itself. The underlying meaning of the Moynihan Report differed depending on the reader, with liberals seeing the study as a call for jobs programs as a means to strengthen the black family, conservatives construing the report as a plea for African Americans to put their own houses in order, both literally and figuratively, rather than depend on government assistance, and African Americans looking at the report as an appeal to their people to make family a priority. Geary blames these “disparate reactions” on the report’s “internal contradictions that reflected those of 1960s liberalism and because of its contentious assumptions about race, family, poverty, and government” (3). In fact, Geary shows that the same “internal contradictions” that troubled liberalism in the 1960s existed within Moynihan. Coming of age during the New Deal, Moynihan felt it was the duty of the federal government to provide its citizens with a job, an idea that became less popular by the early 1960s. Employment mattered to Moynihan, moreover, because it would allow males to provide for their families, which conformed to the liberal defense of the “family wage” whereby a male breadwinner earned enough so that his wife could stay at home and raise the children. However, a “subtle but significant shift” in Moynihan’s thinking about the black family and unemployment occurred (70). Whereas Moynihan had originally pointed to the latter as the reason for the unusual makeup of the former, by the time he published The Negro Family Moynihan reversed his argument so that the female-led African American family became the reason for black poverty and unemployment. Geary suggests that by emphasizing “racially different family structures” Moynihan ignored other explanations for the economic plight of African Americans (71). As a result of Moynihan’s new perspective on the black family, readers, too, took from the report differing understandings of the problems of black economic inequality. Thus, Geary contends, it is not surprising that the Moynihan Report received both acclaim and derision from within liberal and conservative camps. What makes Geary’s work truly enjoyable is how, by tracing Moynihan’s own intellectual transformation, he shows the similarly changing responses to the Moynihan Report. Yet, whether criticism or support for the study’s findings came from feminists, conservatives, or African American sociologists, the family became the main topic of debate. Ironically, to give just one example, black sociologists, Geary argues, “fought on the terrain defined by the Moynihan Report” by keeping alive the focus on the family, and thus, unintentionally, the arguments over pathology and the black family (138). In the process, discussion of socioeconomic factors fell to the wayside. Thus, Geary’s history of the Moynihan Report serves as a guide to the changing rhetoric of American politics that accompanied the conservative turn away from big government. Brian S. Mueller Independent Scholar Copyright © 2016 Mid-America American Studies Association

Imaginary intersection: Thomas Mofolo, Gertrude Stein and W. E. B. Du Bois

This brief exploration of the potential connections and interconnections between Thomas Mofolo, Gertrude Stein and W. E. B. Du Bois began as a result of happen- stance but quickly transformed into an investigation fuelled by a sense of wonder and mystery. The wonder was due to an evocative literary echo. The mystery came through the discovery of a few overlapping facts that may or may not add up to an argument, but certainly add up to a compelling story that might as well be true. In a larger frame, this essay attempts to look at the way works of literature in the early 20th century could have played a role of aesthetic influence on each other despite being separated (via their locus of creation) by geographic distance, cultural milieu and potential access. It also hopes to undermine the assumption in the Global North/ Western mind-set that the currents of aesthetic influence flow only in one direction. The specific goal is to imagine Thomas Mofolo’s first experiment, his allegorical nar- rative T ra veller to the East , rippling out from the small mountain nation of Basutoland (now Lesotho) in Southern Africa, up the continent and either across the Mediter- ranean Sea to Paris—the home of expatriate Jewish American experimental writer Gertrude Stein—or across the Atlantic to New York and into the hands of African American sociologist, intellectual and Pan-Africanist W. E. B. Du Bois.

A sociological dilemma: Race, segregation and US sociology.

US sociology has been historically segregated in that, at least until the 1960s, there were two distinct institutionally organized traditions of sociological thought – one black and one white. For the most part, however, dominant historiographies have been silent on that segregation and, at best, reproduce it when addressing the US sociological tradition. This is evident in the rarity with which scholars such as WEB Du Bois, E Franklin Frazier, Oliver Cromwell Cox, or other ‘African American Pioneers of Sociology’, as Saint-Arnaud calls them, are presented as core sociological voices within histories of the discipline. This article addresses the absence of African American sociologists from the US sociological canon and, further, discusses the implications of this absence for our understanding of core sociological concepts. With regard to the latter, the article focuses in particular on the debates around equality and emancipation and discusses the ways in which our understanding of these concepts could be extended by taking into account the work of African American sociologists and their different interpretations of core themes.

W.E.B. Du Bois in Turn-of-the-Century Atlanta, 1897–1910

In the decade and a half between the completion of his Harvard Ph.D. (1895) and his founding of The Crisis for the NAACP (1910), African American historian and sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois laid the empirical foundations for modern sociology and the revisionist interpretation of history. Despite his prodigious academic efforts, he eventually lost faith in the ability of scholarship to help African Americans and he left academe for the NAACP and the world of advocacy.

Frederick Douglass and the early social psychology of racial oppression

Frederick Douglass brought an extraordinarily logical mind, breadth of historical and social science knowledge, commitment to discovery and expression of truth, and keen observation to analysis of race and gender relations and scientific racism in the United States. Douglass's social psychology of racism and liberation is more insightful and modern than that of his American contemporaries, and not equaled until the middle of the 20th century. Similarities between the major turn-of-the-century African American sociologists and “students of sociology,” Anna Julia Cooper, W.E.B. DuBois, Kelly Miller, Mary Church Terrell, and Ida B. Wells and other evidence strongly suggests that Frederick Douglass had a strong influence upon certain aspects of their thought, that Douglass may be considered to be the anchor of the White racism emphasis in Afro-American sociological thought. Based upon this analysis it is recommended that Afro-Americanists take several steps to appropriately review and evaluate Douglass's thought in planning research and teaching.

The Anthropology of Afro-Latin America and the Caribbean: Diasporic Dimensions

▪ Abstract The contributions of a number of First and Third World scholars to the development of the anthropology of the African diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean have been elided from the core of the discipline as practiced in North America and Europe. As such, the anthropology of the African diaspora in the Americas can be traced to the paradigmatic debate on the origins of New World black cultures between Euro-American anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits and African American sociologist E. Franklin Frazier. The former argued for the existence of African cultural continuities, the latter for New World culture creations in the context of discrimination and deprivation characteristic of the experiences of peoples of African descent, in light of slavery, colonialism, and postcolonial contexts. As a result, subsequent positions have been defined by oppositions in every subdisciplinary specialization and area of interest. Creolization models try to obviate this bifurcation, and newer dialogical theoretical perspectives build upon such models by attempting to combine revisionist historiography with social/cultural constructionist approaches to identity, especially around the concept of blackness understood in the context of cultural identity politics.

Early Traditions of African-American Sociological Thought

This article documents the empirical, methodological, and theoretical contributions of African-American sociologists from the late 1800s until 1945, an era that constitutes the early tradition of African-American sociological thought. African-American sociologists came to the discipline with the desire to assess the stake of African Americans in modernity, which centered on their transition to the urban sphere and the industrial socio-economic order in American society. Despite the connections between the sociological project writ-large and the quest of African-American sociologists in particular, the latter remained little regarded in the profession for years to come. While providing an overview of the contributions of African-American sociologists and the assessments made by other scholars about those contributions, this essay focuses upon the ways by which African-American sociologists have depicted the social character of black Americans. This essay also accounts for the ways that such scholars have introduced or enriched the standard paradigms and methodologies employed in American sociology, and documents the legacy that these efforts had on later sociological depictions of African Americans.

Making History: A Personal Narrative of My Presidential Year

In her informative essay titled, “My Four Revolutions,” Jessie Bernard (1973) referred to the roots of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. She labeled its development following the unfolding of the post-World War II era as the “third revolution”—one to which she was enthusiastically committed (Wilkinson 1998). Her focus centered not only on the national political culture with its multiple social and political problems, but the leading and oldest professional association for sociologists at the time—the American Sociological Association. Along with Alfred McClung, Betty Lee, and many other colleagues, Jessie felt that an elitist group attracted to abstracted empiricism and research that lacked relevance to the real world dominated the ASA. In the view of this modern assemblage of dissidents, the association had a minimal stake in actual problems, but instead, had become an instrument of business. This standpoint resonated in the 1970s when women and African American sociologists rightfully began to claim the ASA as their organization as well (Blackwell 1974, 1992). In her social history critique and personal odyssey, Jessie articulated the mission and goals of the Society. These centered on the promotion of the study of social problems and applying social science research to devise policy. She also felt that the organization should be engaged in initiating new opportunities as well as in improving working conditions for the members of the profession. Along with others, she envisioned its role as encompassing both the protection of basic academic freedoms pertaining to teaching and research and the enhancement of interdisciplinary cooperation. Such beliefs and values embraced my perspective long before becoming President of the SSSP.

Mother-only versus father-only households: Educational outcomes for African American males

Writing about the African American family in the 1930s, noted African American sociologist, E. Franklin Frazier (1939) claimed that the majority of African American households were female-centered, that out-of-wedlock births represented family disorganization, and that such patterns were transmitted normatively from one generation of African Americans to the next. For obvious reasons, this image of African American families as female-headed and dysfunctional gained widespread acceptance and, in 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan reinforced this viewpoint with his linking of pathology with African American female-headed families. Moynihan's major thesis was that African American families were matriarchal in structure and that boys in these families were dominated by women and subsequently grew up without adequate role models for healthy adult masculinity. Summarizing the kind of cultural arguments put forth in the works of Frazier and Moynihan, 1 Eitzen (1974, p. 270) presented the following characterization of the Black family literature:

African Americans and Post-Industrial Labor Markets.

This collective portrait documents the disproportionate vulnerability of African Americans to the ongoing transformations of the U.S. economy from industrial to service areas as the twenty-first century approaches. chapters have been previously published in Review of Political Economy between 1991 and 1996. This volume represents one of the best sources of up-to-date perspectives on the circumstances facing African Americans in post-industrial labor markets. African Americans and Post-Industrial Labor Markets is divided into seven sections: The Intersection of Race, Power, Culture, and Economic Discrimination, Black-White Wage Differentials, Occupational Crowding, Black Women in the Labor Market, Structural Unemployment and Job Displacement, Sectoral Analyses, and Strategies to Increase Employment. authors discuss such topics as: the impact of the general status of race relations on labor markets; increasing access to higher-paying occupations; the relationship between occupational segregation and local labor market dynamics; and the earnings of black women compared to white women and black and white men. chapters are connected by a common theme: black employment is highly sensitive to changes in both aggregate and local economic conditions. As a result, policy changes designed to promote macro-level economic stabilization could well have the unintended effect of further increasing job instability among blacks. African Americans and Post-Industrial Labor Markets is a momentous compendium and should be read by economists, African American studies scholars, sociologists, and professionals in the business world.

Introduction: Challenges to the homogenization of “African American”

African American sociologists are beginning to confront the use of “African American/Black” as a homogeneous sociological category. In doing so they are laying the ground for improvements in social scientific research in general. One aspect of that improvement involves the use of people of African descent as subjects for theoretical statements about humanity at large rather than merely about other African descendent populations. Another aspect involves confronting the extensive segregation within the discipline around the research done by African American scholars. This introduction discusses the implications of these issues for African American scholars and for the discipline as a whole.