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The Contribution of Blacks to Sociological Knowledge: A Problem of Theory and Role to 1950Author(s): Benjamin P. BowserSource: Phylon (1960-), Vol. 42, No. 2 (2nd Qtr., 1981), pp. 180-193Published by: Clark Atlanta University

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By BENJAMIN P. BOWSER

The Contributionof Blacks to Sociological

Knowledge:A Problem of Theory

and Role to 1950INTRODUCTION

N THE LATE 1960s sociology was a popular major for black under-

1raduates. There was interest among sociologists in what a generationof black scholars might offer the field since it was clear and of greatconcern that the social sciences were not bias-free. Methods and inter-

pretations of research were conditionedby

the scientist'sbackground,experience, and opinions. If blacks and persons from other diverse back-

grounds could enter the field, then all would ideally benefit and sociolo-

gical research, bias withstanding, would reflect and be able to draw on

a greater range of talent and experience than it had in the past.After a decade there is now a question of whether this accommodation

and addition of backgrounds and experiences into sociological research

has occurred or was ever desired. Indications are that there has been

some reaction against integration. If there had been interest in havingmore black researchers, there might now be more than the few who have

completed doctorates in the 1970s, given the large number of majors inthe late 1960s and early 1970s. As interested blacks got beyond the intro-

ductory and intermediate courses, many found the methods and theories

they were expected to adopt inadequate and alienating. They also mayhave been given few opportunities to do something constructively and

creatively with these ideas and procedures in graduate classrooms and

committees. Many left the field bitter. The same experience has reduced

the ranks of new black sociologists on their first and second appoint-ments. They are finding little support or interest for their work, and

tenure is the final judgment.The present situation leads one to ask another question. Is there a

relation between the social uses or the role sociology plays in society

and the presence of blacks within the field? We can look at the role of

sociology in society by examining its theories and then the contribution

or reactions of the past two generations of black sociologists to these

theories. I hope to do four things: 1) show the circumstances under which

the social sciences emerged, 2) show that the resulting role the social

sciences movement took on in England and later in the United States

was anti-black, 3) examine the contribution and potential contribution

that the first two generations of black sociologists might have made, and4) provide a historic context for the embattlement of the present and

third generation of black sociologists.

180








CONTRIBUTION TO SOCIOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE 181

THE SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES':THE COLONIAL FACTOR

African slavery made European economic expansion possible in the

eighteenth century.1 Initially royal families profited from colonial ven-tures but soon the merchant (middle) class began to benefit and growin size and organization. Stock exchanges started in London and Amster-

dam reflected a scale of wealth known only to ancient Venice.2 It was the

accumulation of colonial wealth by this long suppressed merchant class

that gave birth to the industrial revolution as an :attempt to further

expand trade and to improve communications and manufacturing.3

The cultural learnings of these commercial-minded urbanites were in

the intellectual systems of men who represented these historic develop-

ments. Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was the model of an urban com-

mercial-minded secularist who developed a philosophical expression ofthe new sciences. He set the stage for a social science movement with

his The Advancement of Learning, in which he advocated not more pietybut rather experimentation, induction, and more scientific knowledge

as a way of improving life.

Free from Church dominance (advocated by Thomas Hobbes'

Leviathan in 1651), sovereigns struggled against each other for colonial

control (case in point the Thirty Years War, 1616-1648); but, as one could

expect, they soon found themselves in conflict with their influential

urban merchants. The transitions in this conflictare

exemplified byJohn Locke's Of Civil Government and by Montesquieu's The Spirit ofthe Law. For Locke, one of the major ways that a ruler could practice

tyranny was by interfering with commerce, while Montesquieu held

that a popular legislature was partly necessary for fair trade regulation.

The commercial motive behind this movement toward popular govern-

ment was more forcefully expressed by David Hume in Essays: Moral,

Political and Literary, in which he singled out specfically foreign trade

and taxes as an area which government should not regulate. But he only

set the stage for the more sophisticated laissez-faire argument of Adam

Smith in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.Ironically, the Industrial Revolution and the growth of commercial

merchant classes would not have been possible if it were not for the

labor of Africans. Blacks were capital-generating property.4 What made

foreign commerce profitable for both England and France was slave

labor; without it there possibly never would have been an Adam Smith,

a David Hume, a Louis XIV, or a Francis Bacon. But this is not simply

a point of history. The slave-based wealth of England and France also

affected intellectual life. Montesquieu's comments on Brazilian cannibals

Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (New York, 1966).2Carlton J. Hayes, et al., History of Western Civilization Since 1500 (New York, 1962), p. 121;

A. Usher, The Early History of Deposit Banking in Mediteranean Europe (Cambridge, 1943),p. 210.

s werner Sombart, The Quintessence of Capitalism (New York, 1967), p. 139 and Chap. 25.4 Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, pp. 5, 35-7.








PHYLON

as the lowest form of human existence and David Hume's explanation ofan African mathematician as a monkey with a gift for repetition werenot uncommon. This was not the doings of brilliant thinkers who were

simply prejudiced, but rather that Montesquieu's and Hume's philoso-phies were racially motivated. To advocate laissez-faire government and

unrestricted commerce as the common good and as the basis of national

wealth was also to justify continued slavery. Racial inferiority and there-fore continued slavery were prime motivations for the growth of thenotion of natural law which not only justified slavery scientificallybut also suggested that it was good for Africans since it brought to them

the gift of civilization and order.

By the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, secular

thinkers in England and France began to diverge. St. Simon and AugustComte called for a social physics - a science, like Newton's physics,which could develop a social technology which could transform human

society in the same way that physics and other sciences were affectinghuman material life. A social science was the way to an undreamed-of

social utopia as illustrated by their thesis, Plan of the Scientific Opera-tions Necessary for the Reorganization of Society. On the other hand,

Herbert Spencer in First Principles assumed that social laws must be

characterized by the persistence and passing of forces as in Physics.5Central to Spencer's thesis was the law of evolution. Societies evolve

at different rates from very simple organizations to highly complexdivisions of function and labor as in England. These social phenomenawere natural laws of society and, because they were natural and in

evolution, they were not to be interfered with. An unchanging law was

just the opposite of the reform spirit of St. Simon and August Comte.

How is it that the English and French Founding Fathers differed on this

critical point?There was no coincidence or differing expressions of culture. The

French and English variations were rather the outcome of colonial

experiencesfrom 1806 which differently affected industrialization in

England and France. While England was continuing to expand its empire

(after the loss of the thirteen colonies) and to bring in wealth after the

pragmatic abolition of slavery in the Empire, the French colonial empirefell apart shortly after that country's revolution. St. Simon and Comte

had accurately observed that it was necessary to have a reorganizationof metropolitan French society (after almost one hundred years of slave

generated colonialism). France's demise was largely due to the successful

Haitian revolution (1806) which took away France's most profitable

colony.6 Unlike the English, the French could no longer export their

discontented to colonies such as South Africa, Australia, Canada, or

5Herbert Spencer, First Principles (New York, 1864), p. 407.6David Nicholas, Economic Dependence and Political Autonomy: The Haitian Experience

(Montreal, 1974), p. 3.

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CONTRIBUTION TO SOCIOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE

Louisiana, nor could they stabilize their dislocated rural population by

rapid industrialization with cheap foreign resources. On the other hand,

the English needed a rationalization for increasing their colonial hold-

ings in order to provide jobs, continue industrial growth at home, andpacify worker discontent. Colonial wealth was vital to England's social

stability.7 Thus in France the more attractive social philosophy would

have to be concerned with the social reorganization of a France with

considerably fewer colonies. In fact, August Comte was critical of the

capitalist influences which were having disastrous social impacts in

France,8 while in England (Spencer's) more popular social philosophy

provided justification for the existing colonial based society. Both de-

velopments reflected the impact of blacks (in Haiti, and by 1840 in

Jamaica as well as in South and WestAfrica)

onEnglish

and French

society and their social thought.

THE EMERGENCE OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

By the 1850s, social philosphers were the only ones who could provide

believable interpretations and explanations for the effects of the Indus-

trial Revolution. The factory system became the most efficient means

of manufacturing and was involving higher proportions of the English

and French populations. Though the population was rapidly increasing,

the agricultural system was not technically advanced enough to provide

a surplus for the rapidly increasing urban labor force. Despite vastwealth in industrial Europe, the poor seemed everywhere and were

rapidly increasing, and everyone (even the wealthy) experienced

considerable hardship after a crop failure. There were ample defenders

of the existing order such as Hume, Smith, Spencer, and Benthan;

economic liberalism held that continued capitalism was part of the

natural order and was therefore good. One of the most significant of

liberals was the Reverend Thomas Chalmers, who opposed government

taxation and aid to the poor. Chalmers suggested in his Christian and

Civic Economy of Large Towns (1820-26) that to view the poor uni-

formly was incorrect and wasteful; each case of poverty should betaken singularly and handled according to its circumstance. This was

the only way of distinguishing the honest from the dishonest poor.

The social sciences in England and the United States were developed

out of the defense of the newly evolving industrial society by Locke,

Montesquieu, Hume, Smith and Spencer. By 1850, neither Sociology nor

other contemporary social sciences had clearly emerged from the con-

gery of ideals which consisted of utopian socialism, Spencerian evolu-

tionism, economic liberalism, the case work ideal of Chalmers, the

politicalscience of Hume,

Montesquieu,and Locke, as well as the

XE. Varga and L. Mendelson, New Data for V.I. Lenin's Imperialism (New York, 1940).8Howard Becker and Harris Barnes, Social Thought from Lore to Science, 3 vols. (New York,

1961), 2:585.

183








PHYLON

economics of Adam Smith.9 It seemed as if a distinct sociology at this

point could have been any of these expressions. But by the second half

of the nineteenth century, the more conservative tradition of Spencer

and the social Darwinists dominated in England, while the economicliberalism of Chalmers' case study approach survived in social work.

It was these two lines of thinking which were exported to the industrial

United States and within which the first generation of blacks in Ameri-

can 'sociology' had to work.

THE FIRST GENERATION:DU BOIS, HAYNE,AND DANIEL

Contrary to popular belief, the first expressions of sociology in theUnited States did not start with W. G. Summer and Lester F. Ward in

the early 1900s.They began with Henry Hughes' Treatise on Sociology

(1854) and George Fitzhugh's Sociology of the South: or The Failure ofFree Society (1854). Both defended slavery as economic necessities and

as part of the natural order.10Hughes' and Fitzhugh's arguments were

precisely those of the English evolutionist (Spencerian) defense of the

colonies. One could gather from Hughes and Fitzhugh the growing sense

of conflict between the American North's agenda for wealth by indus-

trialization and the Southern view that the nation should continue its

basis of wealth through the plantation economy. By 1865 there was no

longer an issue; the Southern economic system lay in ruin from the Civil

War. The economics of slavery which Hughes and Fitzhugh had soughtto defend was no more, and the evolutionist idea of a natural order of

superior to inferior man was at the core of sociological thinking and

now knew no distinction between North and South. Men quite literallyinherited through selected evolution differential mental capacities,

civilization, morals, and, of course, physicial characteristics.1' More

importantly, this differential inheritance followed racial ancestry and

explained the favorable status of some and the misery of most others,

especially blacks.12

The first sociologists of the new Northern economic order were advo-

cates of this Social Darwinism and were direct intellectual descendantsof Herbert Spencer. William G. Sumner, Lester F. Ward, and Franklin

Giddings had all read Spencer and acknowledged his influence on

them. At core there was little difference between their fundamental

assumptions of human society - there were simply differential develop-

ments which produced superior and inferior beings. What distinguished

one from the other was how much flexibility they saw in this differential

development. Sumner saw none. There were fundamental mores which

do not change despite human efforts.'3 These mores regulate social re-

9

RaymondAron claims

Montesquieuto be the first sociologist in Main Currents in Sociologi-

cat Thought (New York, 1968), Vol. 1, p. 13.10E. Franklin Frazier, Sociological Theory and Race Relations, American Sociological Review

12 (June 1947): 265-71.11Helen Curtis, The Growth of American Thought (New York, 1943).2 Becker and Harris, Social Thought, 3:972-73; Fay Karpf, American Social Psychology (New

York, 1932), pp. 211-16.William G. Sumner, Folkways (London, 1906), pp. 53-55; Becker, 3:961.

184








CONTRIBUTION TO SOCIOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE

lations, including the (inferior) place of blacks in American civilization.

Evolution was fixed and was not to be tampered with; if so, the con-

sequences would be far worse.14 Ward, on the other hand, was influenced

by not only Spencer but also by Grimplowicz (Race and State, 1875).

This combination of philosophies made an interesting sociology. Differ-

ences in evolution define social place (Spencer), yet social organization

is the product of racial and group conflict (Grimplowicz). Spencer's

evolutionary differences were to Grimplowicz the products of struggle

between groups rather than genetic inheritance. The success of one

group over the other points only to more favorable circumstances. In

Grimplowicz's notion, it was not only possible but also favorable that

one tried to change evolution. Ward had a flexible evolutionist thesis;

what differentially evolved was not necessarily genesbut rather the

circumstance or life conditions of a race.'5 Finally, Franklin Giddings

held that differential evolution was not genetic or the circumstances of

group (race) conflict. It was rather a psychic evolution. Consciousness

of kind or alikeness constituted an attraction and sympathy of minds;

the results were manifested physically in forms such as states, empires,

cultures, and group solidarity.16 Such an evolution occurs in stages and

is indicated by the apparent inability of blacks and other races to

develop complex civilizations, in contrast to the races of Western Europe.

Obviously, no blacks could be contributors to this intellectual tradition

even if there were some who wished to be. There were blacks befor andduring W. E. B. Du Bois' early years who challenged the Social evolution-

ists. Among these were Alexander Crummel (The Future of Africa, 1862),

William W. Brown (The Rising Son, 1876), George W. Williams (History

of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880, 1882), and William H.

Ferris (The African Abroad: His Evolution in Western Civilization,

1913).17 What is remarkable about all these writers was that they

held the same notion about human society and behavior. Life and

custom were not directly inherited (Spencer and Sumner); they were

notproducts

of evolutionary racial struggle (Gomplowicz), nor were

they due to psychically evolved common sentiment (Gidding). They

were a response to physical and socially perceived circumstances which

were products of other men's purposeful behavior. The accuracy and

longevity of this notion over the evolutionists' ideas of the Founding

Fathers of American sociology would suggest that men named Crummell,

Brown, Williams, and Ferris may have been not only the first American

black sociologists but their ideas preceded similar ones of Cooley, Mead,

Thomas, Boas, and Du Bois by several decades.

While Sumner was writing his first essay, entitled The Absurd Effort

to Make the World Over (1894), there were serious social problems14 Sumner, idem; Nicholas S. Timasheff, Sociological Theory (New York, 1967), p. 69.'5 Lester F. Ward, Dynamic Sociology (New York, 1883), pp. 82-83.16Franklin H. Giddings, The Principles of Sociology (London, 1896), p. 328; James Hayes, So-

ciology and Racism, Phylon 34 (December 1973) :330-41.17See George Shepperson's introduction to W.E.B. Du Bois, The Negro (London, 1915), p. xxi.

185








PHYLON

which needed examination, explanation, and solutions. American citiesstarted to grow rapidly in size and influence over small towns. Largenumbers of European immigrants brought to the American mind a con-sciousness of cultural difference, their own nativism, and the question ofwhether or not assimilation was desirable, or even possible. The closingof the frontier forced Americans to look at themselves more closely thanever before. Urban life literally redefined and intensified the individual's

sense of self, and blacks were moving out of the South.These rapidly developing conditions were not discussed by the existing

academic disciplines. Nor did the imported social philosophy of Herbert

Spencer show promise in addressing these issues. In fact, there was no

better conservative defense of the new industrialists and their abuses

than Spencerian sociology (William Sumner). It was no wonder thatsociology was totally inadequate in explaining the developing social

conditions or in suggesting ways to improve social problems. Sumner's,

Ward's, and Giddings' sociology had the same role as Spencer's in

England, and in the slave South Hughes and Fitzhugh were laissez-

faire defenders of the existing order. But to do nothing and to call it the

natural order, mores of society, or the product of racial struggle was

intolerable and not in keeping with the activist American character.

Just as the potential contribution of early black historians (Crummel,

Brown, and Williams) to sociology was ignored, so also was that of

W. E. B. Du Bois. It is ironic that the first empirical study of anAmerican community was done by a black man.18 The Philadelphia

Negro (1898) was produced in the very spirit of induction and observa-

tion advocated by Francis Bacon more than two centuries before the

emancipation of blacks from slavery; it could have served well as a

model of community study and as a way of going about finding out

precisely the sort of information which was then needed about America's

troubled urban communities. But since both Du Bois and his study were

dismissed as being of no particular importance to the field, his potential

for academic leadership was never actualized.'9 He was the product ofthree interrelated intellectual traditions which were ignored by the

sociology of Sumner, Ward, and Gidding. First, freed black communities

had a long tradition of activism which served a vigorous campaign

against slavery and the ideas which defended it.20 Second, the social

work movement which was inherited from England was developing its

own theoretical expressions and was in fact closer to actual human

problems and life than the academic sociologists were. Ironically, it was

the social workers who were at the earliest time receptive to the idea of

Is ee E. Digby Baltzell's introduction to W.E.B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro (New York,1899), pp. Ix, xxv-xxvii.

19Elliott Rudwick, W.E.B. Du Bois as Sociologist.20 New Orleans served as a center of thought of free blacks from before 1820. See Charles B.

Rousseve, The Negro in Louisiana (New Orleans, 1937).

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CONTRIBUTIONTO SOCIOLOGICALKNOWLEDGE

empirical community studies.21 And finally, the white abolitionist tradi-tion continued to serve as a basis for financial and intellectual supportagainst the racism of the Social Darwinists. In the case of Du Bois, the

Quaker influenced University of Pennsylvania rather than the Univer-

sity of Chicago under Abion Small, or Columbia (Gidding), or Wisconsin

(Ross) supported his social work related study of Philadelphia's SeventhWard.

To do a community study or to protest slavery never meant that one

was devoid of theory. The anti-slavery struggle and the historic researchinto its origins produced one of the first American conceptions thathuman achievement or degredation are the results of social and economic

behaviors rather than genes, evolution, or the curse of God. Of course,

abolitionists, social workers and free black intellectuals were not theonly ones to perceive society in this fashion. There were Europeanscholars who objected to the Spencerian evolutionary determinism andwho also suggested the independent role of social causes. They weretheoretists such as Emile Durkheim (Suicide), Max Weber (The Metho-

dology of the Social Sciences), George Simmel (The Conflict in Modern

Culture), and Gabriel Tarde (The Laws of Imitation). Supposedly, thesewriters were read by the first generation of American sociologists andwere reputed to have been influenced by them.22If so, their impact wasminimal.

One can only imagine what the early sociology would have been andwhat impact it might have had on the nation had it taken the social

work movement seriously, had it been genuinely influenced by its

European counterparts, and had it given DuBois' The Philadelphia

Negro the place it deserved. In the more contemporary reviews of the

early sociological Fathers, the racism and theoretical closure on race and

society (their ideas about the first were not separated from the second)were conveniently forgotten and their alleged appreciation of social and

economic causes reassured.23Du Bois was not the first nor the last

scholar to produce a work of potential but unwanted merit to sociology.The Philadelphia Negro was quickly followed by George Haynes' The

Negro at Work in New York City, Edward Daniel's In Freedom's Birth-

place, and Mary W. Ovington's Half a Man. All of these studies, like

Du Bois' work, were empirical observational studies of black com-

munities, social welfare sponsored,and produced before the Robert Parks

Chicago research tradition.

By the 1920s,the evolutionism of the Founding Fathers began to give

way to a variety of intellectual influences from other fields. Franz Boas'

rejection of cultural laws and particularistic field research method

21 Charles Booth, Hull House Papers and Maps, Labour and the Life of the People, 1889-1891

(London, 1902); Baltzell, op.cit., p. xvii.22Robin M. Williams Jr., Sociology in America, Social Science Quarterly 51 (June 1976): 81.2aCompare treatments of American fathers of sociology in Timasheff and Williams as opposed

to Frazier, Hayes, and Karpf.

187








PHYLON

pointed out all of the contradictions of the evolutionist reductionism.24The biologists, Francis Galton and Karl Pearson, demonstrated the dis-

tinction between genetic and racial populations. The former populationis highly flexible and internally diverse, while the latter is only a socialconception of little biological significance. But the sociologists whoworked after Sumner, Gidding, and Ward did not abandon completelythe early evolutionist intent. Their thoughts were either modified to

incorporatesocial causality or their social causality notion advocated that

causality was of fixed influences and conditions.25A good example of a fixed conditionality thesis was that of Howard

Odum, a student of the racist Edward Ross. Odum held that although

Negroes had the potential to achieve and to be culturally indistinguish-

able from whites, their moral character was defective and would there-fore not provide the motivation to take advantage of their potential for

achievement.26 A more interesting rationale was that of James Mark

Baldwin's recapitulation thesis. As a child develops into an adult, the

youngster's mental development passes through all stages of evolution.27

Of course, some groups develop mentally, if not physically, to higher

stages. Charles Ellwood, Sociology and Modern Social Problems (1910)

and, surprisingly, Charles Cooley held the same position.In Cooley's case, we see a tragic reflection of- social influence on a

major theorist. Despite his identifying with the Evolutionists, he uni-

quely defined the individual self as social rather than instinctual(William McDougal) or phenomenological (Rene Descartes). The self is

an expression of our perception of our appearance to others, perceptionof their judgment of us and of self-perception (a looking-glass self).28

Cooley's notion is of timeless analytic merit. One would think that it

would have been deduced easily that the alleged moral, instinctual, or

broadly evolutionary defects of Negroes were actually the historic and

continued impact of their being negatively perceived by whites and bythemselves because of their impotency to make changes in the largersocial environment. Instead, Cooley had to twist his own theory and

assert that the races have distinct temperaments and capacities and

regardless of circumstance would break into caste. In time, mental as

well as biological differences had to occur.29 t was obviously a difficult

task for some sociologists to accept a social theory which accounted for

dynamic group differences and at the same time accept the prevailingconventional wisdom of inferiority of Negroes . The same ambivalence

can be found in W. I. Thomas before his Polish research experience.0

2' Marvin Harris. The Rise of Anthropological Theory (New York, 1968), p. 254.5sThomas Gossett, Race (New York, 1965); George Frederickson, The Black Image in the White

Mind (New York, 1971); Hayes, op. cit., pp. 332-41.26Howard Odum, Social and Moral Traits of the Negro (New York, 1910).27James M. Baldwin, Mental Development in the Child and in the Race (New York, 1895).28 Charles H. Cooley, Human Nature and the Social Order (New York, 1922); Timasheff, op. cit.,

p. 147.29Hayes, op. cit., pp. 337-38; Frazier, op. cit, p. 266.30Note the influence of Zuanieck on Becker and Barnes, 3:1076.

188








CONTRIBUTION TO SOCIOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE 189

He was impressed early in his career with the centrality of instincts

disposing differential capacities to manipulate environment.

The result of this seemingly slow acceptance of conditionality (social

causation) in social theory was that after Odum, Baldwin, Ellwood, and

Cooley social theory no longer directly reflected racial opinion, as it

did with Sumner, Ward and Gidding. From this point on, social theory

appeared neutral and one could not know an author's opinion or

theoretical application to race unless the writer addressed the topic.

Secondly, while evolutionists held racial categories to be virtually

absolute, the new theoretic developments were parallel to evolutionist

thought in their acceptance of the idea of there being few worthy excep-

tions to an otherwise defected race. And finally, since Negroes theore-

tically could be changed, given the right environment, it was the missionof fair-minded whites to advocate racial reform or accommodation.31 It

was obvious that blacks had no place in formal sociology and that Du-

Bois, Haynes, and Daniels were outsiders.

THE SECOND GENERATION:

JOHNSON, FRAZIER, DOYLE, DRAKE, AND REID

The social and professional context as outsiders changed for the

second generation of blacks, Johnson, Frazier, Doyle, Drake, and Reid,

asthey

enteredsociology through

theUniversity

of Chicago. While the

first generation, DuBois, Haynes and Daniels, were ignored and of

necessity independent of the early university centers, Chicago, Wiscon-

sin, and Columbia, the second generation was sponsored as graduate

students and in research, remarkably enough by W. I. Thomas (after

Polish Peasant), Albion Small and Robert Park.32 I should point out

that this emerging interest in patronizing blacks was not limited to the

University of Chicago. It was paralled by the support whites gave to

the Harlem Renaissance of Negro arts, letters, and popular entertain-

ment. This was also the period when the Negro theatre came upon in-

creasing economic pressure to be managed and sponsored by white busi-ness interests for white audiences.33

There was a great deal of concern for the race problems resulting from

increasing numbers of blacks migrating to American cities. Undoubtedly,

Robert Park was one of the concerned. Since Park was most directly

responsible for the Chicago School of Sociology and for bringing blacks

into it, he should be the key to the role blacks (Johnson, Frazier, Doyle,

Drake, Cayton) were expected to play. There were two important points:

first, Park was closer in thought to Booker T. Washington than to

W. E. B. DuBois; and second, Park's ecological thesis was far more

1 W. I. Thomas, The Scope and Method of Folk Psychology, American Journal of Sociology 1

(January 1896) :445.32 See essays by Rudwick, Robbins, and Edwards in Blackwell and Janowitz.88Loften Mitchell, Black Drama (New York, 1967), p. 53.








PHYLON

revealing of his idea of society than his race relations theory. The

ecological thesis was like that of Odum, Ellwood, Baldwin, and the early

Thomas; it was a transitional notion bridging social conditionality with

Social Darwinism. There was a natural ecological law by whichcertain urban conditions emerged.34

In reading Park and the Park inspired Chicago studies one is givensocial organizational variations in gangs (L. Thrasher, The Gang, 1936),

delinquency (McKay and Cottrell, Delinquency Areas, 1929), dereliction

(N. Anderson, The Hobo, 1923), suicide (R. Cavan, Suicide, 1928), mental

illness (Fairs and Drunham, Mental Disorders in Urban Areas, 1939),drug addiction (B. Dai, Opium Addiction in Chicago, 1937) and family

instability (E. Mowrer, Family Disorganization, 1927). But the explana-

tion for these variations was an overriding ecological order that one caneasily take as a natural law or first principle. Park apparently did not

see variations in social organization and the resulting distribution of

social problems as a direct outgrowth of other social facts, in particular,

interest-group related behaviors. An objection to an interest-groupnotion might certainly be one reason why Park had a close relation with

Booker T. Washington, who reaffirmed a segregated natural order,

rather than to W. E. B. Du Bois, who by this time was doing his best to

change the existing social ecology.When Charles Johnson entered the University of Chicago he must

have had a definite place and role. His role was to be a race scholar andhis place was to do research where Park and other whites could not,

among blacks. An unintended consequence of the urbanization of blacks

was increased race consciousness and the social isolation of blacks

from whites. The result was that whites could not observe blacks nor get

their cooperation to comment on the race situation. Probably on the

agenda for Johnson was the production of some ecological studies of a

social problem in the Chicago black community. Apparently he was

willing in both role (race scholar) and place (The Negro in Chicago,

1919),but did not produce any ecological studies. One reviewer suggests

that Johnson may not have finished his degree under Park; instead, he

went to New York and became editor of Opportunity magazine35 and

then went South, where he produced work within the Du Bois-Haynes-

Ovington-Daniels social work tradition. Charles Johnson's works are to

this day classic expressions of social conditionality: Shadow of the

Plantation, Patterns of Negro Segregation, and Growing Up in the Black

Belt.

E. Franklin Frazier had a different experience from that of Charles

Johnson. His thesis and early post-graduate work used the ecological

thesis to discuss variations in black family organization, The Negro

See Robert Park in Milton Gordon, Social Class in American Society, p. 24.85Richard Robbins, Charles Johnson in Blackwell and Janowitz, op. cit., p. 60.

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Family in Chicago, and of social class, Negro Harlem: An Ecological

Study. His later work utilized W. I. Thomas' theory of social organiza-tion and disorganization.36Intellectually, Frazier in comparison with

Johnson remained close to Park and Thomas. Ironically, it is Park-Thomas influence which has come under fire in contemporary reviews

of Frazier's work on the black family. It was also not insignificant thatFrazier rather than Johnson was elected President of the American

Sociological Association in 1948. Frazier's election was consistent with

the low regard the sociologists of Albion Small gave to the Du Bois in-

spired sociology. The differences between Johnson's and Frazier's work

have been overlooked primarily because, by the later 1940s,the segrega-tion of blacks from mainstream sociology paralleled the separation in

sociologists' minds of social theory from race relations. What happens in

society between the races in as much a part of the social order as anyother social event. Race relations should be characterized within generalsocial theory and not separated and discussed with no general social con-

text. Frazier and Johnson also had differing methodological foci. Johnson

used interviews and personal histories, and did intensive field work, while

Frazier relied more on case histories and census materials. What is im-

portant in their approaches was the differing concentrations on field

work and primary as opposed to secondary data.

The potential contribution which Charles Johnson rather than E. F.

Frazier could have made at the time to general sociology was not in thedefining of a new theory and way of doing research. Johnson's example

was of more reliance on participant observation, getting primary in-

formation from field work, and giving more attention to historically

conditioned behaviors and inductively derived generalizations. In the

attention given to historic impact and to social mobility Charles John-

son's work was far more thorough than William L. Warner's. But

Johnson's work was relegated (segregated) to race relations not simply

because Johnson was black; his work also suggested a theoretic posture

(social conditionality) with which many sociologists in the 1920s and

early 1930swere still uncomfortable. An appreciation of Johnson's workwould have had to place it next to Robert and Helen Lynd's Middletown

and Middletown in Transition and William L. Warner's Yankee City

Series.Both the Lynds and Warner were trained as cultural anthropologists

rather than as sociologists out of the Sumner-Park tradition. It must be

remembered that Franz Boas and his students helped to discredit Social

Darwinist sociology. The Boas tradition rejected speculative armchair

theorizing as well as the idea of social laws or specifically natural laws.

The only way onecould learn about communities was through partici-

pant observation and induction.37This approach was almost identical to

that of Du Bois and Johnson.

3eC. Franklin Edwards, E.Franklin Frazier in Blackwell and Janowitz, op. cit., p. 111.87Harris, op. cit., p. 261.

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PHYLON

St. Clair Drake, Cayton, Reid, and Doyle, who later left sociology

altogether, enter the field as Robert Park's theoretical influence was

waning. They obviously had the same role and place as did Johnson and

Frazier, but their exposure was not along the ecological lines. Their workreflected the counter-tradition of a Boas-influenced William L. Warner.

Black Metropolis by Drake and Cayton was in method and sponsorship

closer to Du Bois and Johnson than it was to Frazier, and uncompromis-

ingly expressed a social conditionality thesis - one's group life circum-

stances are the results of another's intent and behavior. Drake and

Cayton, like Du Bois and Johnson, paid closer attention to historic and

mobility backgrounds than did Warner. Their observation, along with

that of Oliver Cox, that there are social values and beliefs which ver-

tically divide distinct social classes,is a

pointof

potentialuse in

general sociology. But like their predecessors, Drake and Cayton's

Black Metropolis and Oliver Cox's Caste, Class and Race (1948) were

isolated in race relations research. Their work simply did not fit into the

needs or interests of white sociologists.

World War II signalled the end of Western political colonialism;

indeed, as some whites had feared, the tide of color was rising. This was

further complicated by the West's international rivalry with the com-

munist and socialist world.38 Suddenly, the United States racial situation

took on a new importance. Segregation, lynchings, and other abuses were

now embarrassing to the nation's international image, and blacks had thepotential to be both a colored enemy within or an ally. It was

necessary therefore to assert a national policy on race relations. The need

was important enough to warrant the kind of innovative effort which

went into the social scientific research on troop morale and management

during the second world war.39 Instead of being asked to direct the

study, Frazier, Johnson, Drake, and others such as Ralph Bunche and

Kenneth Clark were commissioned to do field reports. Could a project

of such importance be headed by a black? In order to show impartiality

and to lend more credibility to the project, a Swedish social scientist,

Gunnar Myrdal, was invited to head the study. His research associate

was another white, the American Arnold Rose, who was a junior in both

experience and scholarship to the study's major black contributors.40

The result was An American Dilemma (1944), which turned out to be

largely the work of Arnold Rose since Myrdal was absent for a year of

the project due to the war.

An American Dilemma's thoroughness of content is to the credit of

its contributors. The problem arises with the summary and policy recom-

mendations. The black community was summarized as a pathological ex-

88If U. S. foreign policy makers had read and taken seriously the observation of GeorgePadmore in Pan-Africanism or Communism, the U.S. might have been spared its disastrousAfrican policy.

89Samuel Stouffer, et al., The American Soldier (Princeton, 1949).40G. F. Edwards in Blackwell and Janowitz, op. cit., p. 133.

192









pression of American society sustained by segregation.41The solution was

an integration (undefined) which would come about due to the moral

character of the American people.42What was on the surface a pro-

gressive and enlightened viewpoint relative to the segregation of the1940s was in fact an unintentional throwback to Gidding, Odum, and

Ellwood. Blacks as a collectivity were pathological (defective), but someindividual blacks were redeemable. The only positive note was that thereason for this defect was not instinct, evolution, or ecology but rather

the behavior of others, namely whites. If An American Dilemma had

suggested that the black community is of itself normal but distortedbecause of discrimination and segregation then it would have beencorrect. But this was not clearly said and the result was a broad and

tragic distortion of the viewpoints andcontribution of its contributors.

The idea that the white community would resolve the contradictionbetween its beliefs and its behavior toward blacks because of its moralcharacter results in a characterization of white community life as simplynormal and basically moral in contrast to black community life as

pathological.The succeeding years witnessed the reputation of the Boasian tradition

of research within sociology and the introduction of an updated evolu-

tionism, Talcott Parsons' The Social System. The Parsonian structured-

functionalism paralleled Spencer's evolutionism at a time when more

aggressive and insightful field work was needed. For Parsons, thestatus, role, place and function of social actors was fluid within a social

system which maximizes its own stability and has differing levels of

sophistication and division of labor.43In fact, Parsons claimed that the

American social system was an evolutionary outgrowth of older, less

specialized social systems.Needless to say, after An American Dilemma blacks virtually disap-

peared from sociology. By the early 1960s,with the exception of Drake,the second generation had passed or found their way into other pursuits,and there was no new generation to carry on. The few blacks still in

the field were effectively isolated in the South away from mainstreamsociology and would not have been allowed to contribute even if theyhad the circumstance to do so.45The failure of blacks to have an impacton sociology is due to no shortcoming on their part. The loss is that of

the science.

L Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma (New York, 1944).2 Ibid., pp. 210, 1003-04.

4aTalcott Parsons, The Social System (Glencoe, Ill., 1951).44Talcott Parsons, Societies (Englewood Cliffs, 1966).'c Butler A. Jones, The Tradition of Sociology Teaching in Black Colleges, in Blackwell and

Janowitz, op. cit. pp. 121-63.

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benjamin bowser_contributions of blacks to sociological knowledge

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