Students of the history of modern American social science are familiar with the foundation myth of American sociology: the discipline, birthed in Europe, was first honed in the United States by scholars at the University of Chicago, who contributed empirical rigor to what had been a more abstract, philosophical enterprise. The faculty of Chicago's sociology department, which was founded in 1892, would dominate the American social scientific landscape for decades thereafter. Confronting the problems of urbanization, industrialization, and immigration, the department trained graduate students to conduct fieldwork and survey research in the city and—thanks to the powerful University of Chicago Press—published scholarship that, it is held, laid the conceptual and methodological foundation for empirical sociology.

In The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology, sociologist Aldon D. Morris articulates a persuasive counterview to what he deems a “lily-white and elite conception of the origins of American sociology.” Morris argues that it was W.E.B. Du Bois who laid the foundations of empirical sociology in America, and that it was at Atlanta University, not Chicago, that the first school of scientific sociology emerged (p. 2). The Scholar Denied is a comprehensive examination not only of Du Bois's sociological scholarship, but also of the ways in which the dynamics of power, money and race, rather than strict academic meritocracy, shaped the trajectory of social science and the status of individual social scientists and emerging intellectual schools in the early twentieth century.

In one of his most powerful chapters, “The Rise of Scientific Sociology in America,” Morris asserts the centrality of race to the development of empirical sociological inquiry in the United States. Because the discipline developed alongside industrialization, an influx of European immigrants, and internal migration of southern African Americans, sociology has always been tasked with “providing explanations for racial issues” (p. 8). Before addressing Du Bois's social scientific innovations, Morris introduces Booker T. Washington as a little-known but significant player in the development of American sociology as a field that would address racial issues. In Washington, southern white supremacists and northern white elites found a black leader who would encourage African Americans to remain in the South and occupy a subordinate social position. His accommodationist approach to race relations appealed to a broad cross-section of whites, including southern segregationists, northern philanthropists, and social scientists. Morris asserts that by monopolizing access to resources, Washington essentially sabotaged the careers of African American intellectuals, including Du Bois, who disagreed with his positions.

In “Du Bois, Scientific Sociology, and Race,” Morris examines Du Bois's early intellectual roots, most importantly his time as a student at the University of Berlin, where, in addition to experiencing “personal liberation” (p. 17) outside of the confines of Jim Crow, he studied under the empiricist social scientists at Berlin's School of Economics, making him “one of the rare American social scientists being trained in statistics and quantitative analysis” (p. 21). The drive to produce generalizable, actionable findings (by observing human behavior through various methods as opposed to postulating) characteristic of the German historical school of economics was something Du Bois brought back to the United States and replicated in his own Atlanta school of sociology. Morris is to be commended for his analyses of Du Bois's The Negroes of Farmville, Virginia: A Social Study (1898) and The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899) as laying the foundations of sociology in the United States. The modern sociologist would find both studies familiar in structure and methods. In The Philadelphia Negro, for instance, Du Bois laid out the “Scope of the Study,” “The Problem,” and included a discussion on methods and validity.

Morris argues that Du Bois, responding to rampant social Darwinism in the emerging field of American sociology, developed a sociology of race that reflected the rigor he experienced at Berlin: he “formulated a social constructionist view of race,” which held, fundamentally, that “people who in his political and historical moment were defined as ‘Negroes’ were not inherently inferior to any other so-called race on earth” (p. 29). Further, Morris convincingly refutes scholars who claim that Du Bois's sometimes condescending-sounding references to African Americans indicated his acceptance, at least in part, of biological or cultural explanations for racial inequality. Problematic language aside, Morris argues, the findings in Du Bois's empirical studies reveal “a political sociology stressing power, economic exploitation, and social oppression as producers and sustainers of racial inequality” (p. 44).

In his chapters “The Conservative Alliance of Washington and Park,” and “The Sociology of Black America: Park versus Du Bois,” Morris details a dynamic that, he argues, served to cement Booker T. Washington as an influential figure in American sociology, set the tone for the sociology of race in America, and marginalized Du Bois as a scholar. Robert Ezra Park, trained at some of the same elite American and German institutions as Du Bois, took a more circuitous route to sociology, which included a long sojourn as Washington's ghostwriter and the director of public relations for Tuskegee. Park took this position in 1905, two years after the publication of The Souls of Black Folk, in which Du Bois launched his public criticism of Washington. Because of this timing, Morris writes, Park's job was “to be a political ally of Washington during the Washington-Du Bois controversy”—which involved attacking Du Bois in the press, to be sure, but also undermining opportunities for Du Bois to further his intellectual pursuits (p. 105). Because he had taken on Washington's racial philosophies as his own, Park had a vested interest in “rendering Du Bois irrelevant and invisible as a political actor and as an influential scholar” (p. 108).

After his tenure at Tuskegee, Park moved to the sociology department at the University of Chicago in 1914. While he had few academic accomplishments, Park's years at Tuskegee had given him what Chicago scholars considered an impressive depth of knowledge of “The Negro.” From his prestigious post at Chicago, until his retirement in the mid-1930s, Park would lay the theoretical groundwork for sociological understandings of black people, and would be known as the “premier sociologist of race in America” (p. 102).

Morris details the philosophical differences between the Du Bois-Atlanta school of sociology and the Chicago school. Under Park, the Chicago school's research paradigm had two characteristics that came to be embraced widely in American sociology. The first was strict objectivity and separation of scholarship from activism; the second was a variety of social Darwinism that combined evolutionary principles with an examination of social interactions. Du Bois's scholarship, however, was embedded in activism, and his sociology of race in particular was thoroughly opposed to social Darwinism.

Morris examines the scholarship emanating from the Chicago school and determines that Park and his colleagues played a major role in the scholarly marginalization of Du Bois in American sociology. “A cardinal sin of science,” he writes, “is for scholars to ignore scholarship bearing directly on their scholarship. Park and the Chicago school committed this sin by marginalizing Du Bois's work” (p. 136–37). The Chicago scholars simultaneously lamented the dearth of scientific sociology in America, and failed to cite, include in their expansive sociological bibliographies, or otherwise engage the empirical studies that Du Bois had been conducting since 1899. This ensured that, while overseas scholars such as Max Weber engaged with his work, Du Bois's scholarship would pass under the radar of white American sociologists. Morris argues that the ascendancy of Park as America's foremost sociologist of race, even as he failed to engage Du Bois's works, would further very limited modes of studying African Americans. This, Morris asserts, is because Park's sociology of race rested on four pillars of Washington's racial thought: 1) black primitivity, 2) black people as essentially rural and southern, 3) the black community as a “nation within a nation,” and 4) the idea that “social changes in race relations occurred only gradually, usually over centuries, and that outside agitators, political activists, reformers, do-gooders, and intellectuals could not hasten them by interfering” (p. 102–3).

Du Bois opposed each of these ideas and for both Washington and Park, he embodied the “outside agitator” figure interfering in the natural order of social change. Morris argues that Du Bois's research paradigm, which went against the commitment of American social science writ large to white supremacy, put him outside of the ideological mainstream of American sociology—a position from which he could garner neither financial support for his research nor gain access to other resources. The Chicago school's refusal to engage with his scholarship, in Morris's words, “relegated Du Bois to the institutional margins of American sociology because it was accompanied by his exclusion from scholarly networks that functioned as pathways to journal editorships, memberships in learned societies, and presidency of learned societies, including the American Sociological Society” (p. 141).

As historians of education, however, we were disappointed that Morris did not seriously engage Du Bois's extensive sociological work on education. Although Morris discusses The Philadelphia Negro, he does not mention the chapter on education. Of all the chapters in the book, “Education and Illiteracy,” is one of the most insightful in revealing Du Bois's approach of synthesizing empirical historical work and sociology. There were also lost opportunities regarding Du Bois's sociological analyses in the Atlanta University Studies. Although Morris mentions Du Bois?s Atlanta University Studies on education he does not engage them in a serious way. The College-Bred Negro (1900); The Negro Common School (1901); The College-Bred Negro American (1910); and The Common School and the Negro American (1911) collectively provide great understandings of Du Bois?s early sociological thinking about black education. In these studies, Du Bois explored the higher education and academic achievement of African Americans and the training of black teachers.

Despite little attention to education as a site of Du Bois's sociological work, The Scholar Denied is the comprehensive study of Du Bois and sociology that the academic community has been waiting on for decades. In addition to making a strong case for Du Bois as a founder of American sociology, Morris shows the many junctures at which Du Bois (and by extension the Atlanta school) was marginalized, whether by white sociologists directly or because of the influence of Booker T. Washington, and his contributions appropriated without attribution. This demonstrates the historical contingency and power dynamics inherent in the formation of both actual academic disciplines and the disciplines' creation myths.

Nearly 120 years after his first major sociological study, Du Bois is finally gaining recognition as a prominent sociologist in American history. Morris's groundbreaking work is largely responsible for this. In the years to come, Du Bois will be widely recognized and studied as one of the most important sociologists of the twentieth century. When this occurs, we will have Aldon Morris to thank.