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SOCIAL STUDIES I n the great debate over nature versus nurture, there was no doubting which side had the upper hand in 1900. The men who founded and shaped anthropology, sociology and economics as academic disciplines believed in racial essentialism. The various “races” of mankind, they believed, possessed distinct, heritable characteristics and harboured differing mental capacities. In this model, white people of Anglo-Saxon stock stood at the top of the evolutionary ladder, black people at the bottom. The American statistician Walter Willcox argued that blacks were so far down the Darwinian scale that they would literally die out. Sir Francis Galton, the inventor of intelligence tests, proposed a science of “eugenics” to further improve the already superior white race. Even Franz Boas, a Columbia University anthropologist who challenged the more absurd claims of scientific racism, believed that black people had smaller skulls, placing them at a mental disadvantage. Only one social scientist, argues Aldon D. Morris in The Scholar Denied, challenged this and proclaimed what is nowadays a given: that “race” is the product of history and culture, not biology. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868–1963) is best known as the author of The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and a lifelong champion of racial equality. A brilliant polymath and crusading editor and activist, Du Bois was also a prolific sociologist. His empirical studies of black Americans were the first and best of their kind. In The Philadelphia Negro (1899), Du Bois, influenced by Charles Booth’s studies of Racing ahead In praise of the ‘master of sociological thought’ ADAM FAIRCLOUGH Aldon D. Morris THE SCHOLAR DENIED W. E. B. Du Bois and the birth of modern sociology 320pp. University of California Press. £19.95 (US $29.95). 978 0 520 27635 2 the London poor, pioneered the community survey as a research technique. Between 1897 and 1910, as a professor at Atlanta University, he organized annual conferences on black life, produced a dozen books, and nurtured young black sociologists such as Monroe Work, George E. Haynes and Richard R. Wright, Jr. Yet as sociology achieved respectability and influence in the universities, its white gatekeepers barely acknowledged their debt to Du Bois and his “Atlanta school”. Morris, an African American who grew up poor in Mississippi, was astonished that none of the white professors he encountered at university considered Du Bois worthy of attention. As Professor Lewis Coser told him, “Du Bois was not a master of sociological thought”. What he meant was that Du Bois didn’t spin grand theories in the manner of Emile Durkheim and Karl Mannheim. In the long run, however, Du Bois’s commitment to empirical research proved more valuable than did the theorizing – often half-baked and devoid of factual underpinning – of the canonical masters. Du Bois believed that sociology could refute, through the use of data, the assumption of innate black inferiority. In treating black people as fully-fledged human beings rather than biological inferiors, he was forty years ahead of the field. The study of American race relations directed by the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal and published as An American Dilemma (1944), rejected “scientific” racism and embraced Du Bois’s sociology. Morris makes a cogent case that Du Bois was, indeed, “a master of sociological thought”. Why, then, his neglect by the academic establishment? In one sense, says Morris, the explanation is simple. The movers and shakers of sociology were white professors in Ivy League universities. These institutions did not hire black professors, even one as brilliant (he was the first African American to gain a PhD at Harvard) and productive as Du Bois. Moreover, the white professors who headed sociology depart- TLS MAY 5 2017 33 ments were academic empire-builders who were prepared to undermine rival scholars, especially when it came to competing for research funds. Morris even argues that Robert E. Park, the founder of the “Chicago school” of sociology, plagiarized Du Bois. The most compelling evidence for Du Bois’s influence in the 1900s comes from that giant of sociology, Max Weber. Weber and Du Bois both studied at the University of Berlin, sharing many of the same teachers, in the 1890s. In 1904 they met at a conference in St Louis and thereafter corresponded. Impressed by The Souls of Black Folk, Weber turned to Du Bois for guidance on how to understand America’s race question. Their exchange of views had a profound impact on Weber’s thinking. At the inaugural meeting of the German Sociological Association in 1910, Weber challenged the assertion that race was a “biological constancy”. The whole notion of “race”, Weber countered, was false. “I am partly French, partly German and as French surely somehow Celticly inflected. Which of these races then . . . flowers in me?” This was pure Du Bois. Morris can sometimes be led astray by his saeva indignatio. He castigates Booker T. Washington as a kind of “Uncle Tom”, where Jeff Norell’s biography of Washington, Up From History (2009), depicts a more complex reality. In the Du Bois–Washington conflict, each man tried to undermine the other while ostensibly cooperating. Washington proved to be the better politician in the short term; Du Bois the more influential in the long term.