November 14, 2025 • 40 mins
In this landmark episode, JeffriAnne Wilder, Ph.D. welcomes Dr. Aldon Morris, professor emeritus, influential sociologist, and author of The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement and The Scholar Denied, to discuss how disruption and bottom-up leadership reshape our understanding of history, social movements, and American sociology. Morris shares the journey that led him to recover W. E. B. Du Bois as the true founder of scientific sociology and challenges listeners to confront systemic omissions and embrace scholarship from the margins. Drawing on Civil Rights history, Black intellectual tradition, and his personal activism, Dr. Morris demonstrates the power of ordinary people, everyday agency, and building new generations of scholars—illuminating why diversity, equity, and truth-telling are central to transforming institutions and creating lasting social change.
🔗 Find out more about Dr. JeffriAnne Wilder.
🔗 Follow the Center for DEI Innovation and Leadership on LinkedIn.
🌎Visit Oberlin College's website.
Podcast Produced by: Paradigm Media Group
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
SPEAKER_01 (00:00):
Welcome to the North Star, a space for conversation
on leadership, equity, andjustice.
This season we're exploringdisruption.
There's pivotal moments whenscholars, leaders, and
communities challenge systemsand reimagine the future.
Today's guest is none other thanDr.
(00:21):
Alden Morris, Professor Emeritusof Sociology, Northwestern
University, and one of the mostinfluential sociologists of my
time, one of my favoritesociologists, author of The
Origins of the Civil RightsMovement, and the scholar denied
W.
E.
B.
Du Bois and the Birth of ModernSociology.
Dr.
(00:42):
Morris has spent a lifetimediscovering and uncovering how
social movements transformsocieties and how institutions,
including academia itself,especially sociology, must
confront their own inequalities.
So, Dr.
Morris, welcome so much to theNorth Start Podcast.
(01:04):
Thank you so much for beinghere.
SPEAKER_00 (01:06):
Well, thank you for having me and thanks for all of
those generous uh remarks.
And so it's a pleasure to meetyou.
SPEAKER_01 (01:15):
Yes.
Now I've already shared you'reone of my favorite sociologists,
and I'd like to kind of sharemore with you why.
So I I kind of grew up insociology uh as someone who has
folks in my family who areprofessors and also sociologists
who have folks who are civilrights activists in their own
(01:39):
right every day, folks who arescholars, as it were.
But as someone who finished, Ifinished my my my PhD in
sociology in 2008.
It was a much, much differenttime in 2008.
I think we all know why.
Um, but my story is a little bitdifferent.
When I was doing my doctoralwork, especially my master's
(02:03):
work, I felt that I didn't havea lot of mentors and folks that
I could look up to whoencouraged me on a regular basis
to think about exploringsociologists who look like me.
And I am very encouraged andhave always been encouraged
about your work and your careeras a sociologist because it has
(02:26):
been very, very important to youto bring up the rear, if you
will.
You have, of course, you werethe 2021 president of the
American SociologicalAssociation, and your work and
your life has been aboutcommitting to building a
pipeline of scholars.
So can you tell us about whatthat has been like to you and
(02:49):
why you have been so intent onbringing up the rear, building
that next generation ofsociologists, particularly
scholars of color?
SPEAKER_00 (03:00):
Yes.
I think I try to influence otheryoung scholars, not just in
sociology, but in social scienceand in the humanities.
When I was in graduate school,there were hardly any black
professors that I knew.
(03:21):
There were very, very few blackgraduate students even in
sociology.
And I had been active even atthe undergraduate level in
trying to bring in more scholarsof color, students of color, so
that they could get degrees andbuild careers and so forth.
So when I went to grad school, Icontinued my activism.
(03:43):
I went to State University ofNew York in Stony Brook, and we
immediately started agitating tobring in more students of color
and to bring in faculty ofcolor.
So it's been one of the thingsthat I've just been dedicated
to.
I'm a child of the civil rightsmovement, just a few years
(04:04):
younger than your cousin, GeorgeLatin, whom I love and whose
work I deeply respect, both asan activist and as a scholar.
And so then while I was studyingfor my PhD, I recognized that we
hardly read any scholars ofcolor.
(04:24):
Never took an exam on any ofthem and so forth.
And but I had I had alreadystarted to read Scholars of
Color even before I went to gradschool.
So I knew about W.B.
Du Bois, I knew about E.
Franklin Frazier, I knew aboutOliver Cox, I knew about France
Fanon.
And but we had none of thatassigned to us.
(04:46):
And so one of the things is thatI said, you know, that this
needs to be different.
There's a whole history, a wholebody of scholarship that's being
omitted.
And so then I decided in gradschool, I asked my mentor or my
advisor why we didn't study W.B.
(05:08):
Du Bois.
And he essentially told me thatDu Bois was not a sociologist.
And so I argued a little bit,but I was a grad student, and so
I knew not to get too far out ofplace.
But I did it, but I I made himmade up my mind then that I was
going to set the recordstraight, that I was going to
bring Du Bois to the world ofscholarship, especially in
(05:31):
sociology and the socialsciences.
And that's how my quote, thescholar denied, came about.
But to conclude, in terms ofyour question, I think that it
is very important for scholarsin academia and even outside of
academia to bring differentvoices to the table.
(05:54):
Not just black, not just otherpeople of color, but scholars
from different kinds ofbackgrounds, from poor
backgrounds, women, and so on,because it enriches the academy.
And so I've been dedicated totry to make this happen as far
as I can as an individual.
(06:14):
But I don't, let me not hesitateto say that I'm I haven't done
this by myself.
There have been other scholarslike me who had the same
mission.
And I can say to you, since youjust described what it was like
when you went to grad school in2008, I can tell you that it's a
hundred times better now.
And there are many scholars ofcolor.
(06:37):
There are far more womenscholars, and they have brought
new paradigms to the academy.
They brought new sense ofunderstanding the world to the
academy.
And so, yes, I'm very dedicatedto diversifying the academy.
SPEAKER_01 (06:52):
I love that.
Now, you were told in the 60sthat Du Bois was not a
sociologist.
Your professor told you this,right?
Du Bois is not a sociologist.
SPEAKER_00 (07:07):
Though I'm old, that that did not happen in 60s.
That was in the 70s.
That was in the 70s.
I'm so sorry.
Yeah, then this stuff.
Early 70s.
This was about 76.
76.
I knew.
When I had begun, it's not aproblem.
When I had begun to work on mydissertation, and I discussed it
(07:28):
with my dissertation advisor,and I was told that Du Bois was
not a sociologist.
Now, I also want you to knowthat many of my colleagues,
black colleagues who were atother universities, they were
told the same thing.
And the reason was that this wasjust out of their ignorance.
They had not read Du Bois.
(07:49):
They had not studied Du Bois.
They were fixated on thescholars whom they admired,
especially European scholarslike Karl Marx, Max Weber, and
Emil Durkheim.
SPEAKER_01 (07:59):
Well, we'll talk more in a second, but you point
out in your book, The ScholarDenonic, right?
How Du Bois had influenced someof those folks.
So this was in 1976 that youwere told Du Bois was not a
sociologist.
Let's fast forward to 2000, whenI was a graduate student working
(08:23):
on my master's in sociology.
I won't share the name of theinstitution, but it was in my
hometown of Cleveland.
And I wanted to, I was sharingwith my major professor that I
wanted to write my dissertation.
Excuse me, I wanted to write mymaster's thesis on colorism.
(08:44):
And I wanted to write mymaster's thesis on colorism
because I had did myundergraduate thesis on that.
And I had all these, I had donethe readings, I had everything
ready.
And my my advisor said, No, youcan't write your your thesis on
that.
That's not sociological.
And I said, What are you talkingabout?
Yeah, of course it is.
(09:05):
Du Bois wrote about it.
Drake and Caden wrote about it.
Frazier, all I had written allthe I had my lit review ready.
And my advisor said, No, youcan't write Du Bois, that's not
sociological.
Right?
And I couldn't believe it.
So in 2000, I was told Icouldn't study X because at the
(09:27):
time I was I didn't realize thatmy advisor hadn't studied these
same people.
She just simply didn't know,right?
She she turned me down because Ididn't know.
Thankfully, it's 2025 thanks toyour work.
And by the way, I would I Itaught sociological theory for
(09:48):
many, many years.
And um the work that I the booksthat I taught my students, we
taught Scholar Denied, we taughtDeath of Black Sociology, we
taught a a huge canon, a breathof things.
We also taught DERCON and Labor,but we also taught all of the
(10:09):
things, right?
And we're at a a place now.
I went to ASA, the meetings inChicago in August, and you're
absolutely right, right?
You've got sociology of Cardi B,you have all these different
things now, because you havethis huge critical mass of
scholars who are studying all ofthe things, right?
(10:30):
Did you envision that sociologynot that it's perfect, but did
you imagine a discipline thatwould look like this back in
1976?
So here we are almost 50 yearslater.
Did you see a sociology, adiscipline looking like this in
(10:51):
50 years' time?
SPEAKER_00 (10:52):
At that time, I would describe myself as more of
a fighter who knew that changewas necessary.
I did not envision that therewould be a sociology like what
we have today.
By the way, there's still many,many limitations and exclusions
and stuff.
So we are not in the promisedland.
(11:13):
But we have definitely come avery, very long way.
And so the thing that I didknow, almost intuitive, is that
if you get people into theacademy who's never been there,
if you increase those numbersbecause we come from backgrounds
of poverty, of oppression, ofexclusion.
(11:35):
So when we come into theacademy, we want to understand
how that happened, how itpersists, and how it can be
changed.
And so I did have this sensethat we could shake things up.
Now, in uh, of course, I didenvision the possibility of an
academy like today.
(11:55):
I researched and wrote TheScholar Denied because I thought
that it could have a largeimpact.
I knew that it was going todisrupt the origin story of
sociology to some degree.
You can never know what impact awork will have.
And I have been pleasantlysurprised at the enormous impact
(12:22):
that the scholar denied has had.
Now there are what we callDuBorzian scholars who are
building, who are building awhole different kind of
sociology who's shaked thecanon.
And I can say, I think withoutany bragging, that I played a
big part in bringing this,making this change happen.
(12:44):
However, there were others, andI think a crucial point to be
made.
There are many younger scholars,many of them of color, who now
are just doing all kinds offantastic work as Duborsian
scholars, bringing in voicesthat we've never heard.
And so right now, if you look atthe syllabi, you taught theory.
SPEAKER_01 (13:33):
Absolutely.
Let's unpack that a little bitbecause you know, you and I know
Du Bois, you and I understandhow huge it is for people now,
because of your work, yourlife's work, for people to say
that Du Bois is the father ofAmerican sociology.
(13:57):
For folks who may not know, alot of people know W.E.B.
Du Bois as a civil rightsactivist in his own right.
Absolutely.
But let's talk more about thefolks who may not know Du Bois
as a scholar, as a sociologist.
Can we just spend a little bitof time talking about the
(14:18):
pioneer scholar that Du Boiswas?
Let's let's boil that down alittle bit.
SPEAKER_00 (14:24):
First of all, from the late 19th century up to the
mid-20th century, Du Bois wasprobably the most prodigious
sociologist and scholar in theUnited States.
From the age of about 15 to theage of 92, 93, Du Bois published
(14:48):
something on average every 15thday of his life.
And so if you talked about hisCV, if you talked about his
resume, it's just staggering howmuch scholarship that he
produced.
We, even the unpublished worksthat are very important, those
works are just staggering interms of the volume of them.
(15:13):
Now, I want to make what I thinkis a key point.
Many scholars have argued thatyou don't mix activism and
scholarship.
Du Bois' career is one thatdemonstrates that that is a
false dichotomy.
Du Bois, we gotta remember hewas a prodigious activist and a
(15:38):
prolific scholar, and he wasdoing all those things at the
same time.
And so the major movements ofthe period, the Niagara
movement, the NAACP, thePan-African movement, all of
those DuBoris was either founderor a major leader in.
At the same time, he was writingall of these profound books,
(16:03):
like The Suppression of theAfrican Slave Trade, like The
Souls of Black Folks, like BlackReconstruction, and on and on
and on.
And in these books, he waspresenting unique analysis.
That is, in contrast to themainstream, he was studying poor
(16:23):
people, oppressed people fromthe bottom up.
And he was showing, showing thebig difference that they made.
And so even before I wrote thescholar denied, my first book
was Origins of the Civil RightsMovement.
And that work was also very muchinspired by Du Bois' perspective
because I looked at the civilrights movement from the bottom
(16:44):
up.
I showed how local people,ordinary people, generated that
movement, sustained thatmovement, came up with the
strategies for that movement.
And so the origins of the civilrights movement is a very Du
Boisean type of text.
And so what I'm saying then isthat in contrast to the
(17:05):
mainstream sociology by whitesociologists, they looked at
society from the perspective ofelites.
They looked at society from theperspective of the white
dominant group.
And Du Bois turned all of thatupside down and looked at it
from the perspective of peoplewho were colonized, from the
perspective of women, from theperspective of black people.
(17:28):
And it just brought in a wholenew way to see the world.
And I would also add that thesociology before Du Bois and
during the period in which hewas marginalized, did not
document the agency of people atthe bottom and the extent to
which they have changed society.
So one key example is that inBlack Reconstruction, which Du
(17:53):
Bois published in 1935, Ibelieve, what he showed is that
the slaves themselves, who wereactually responsible for the
Union winning the Civil War.
And in that case, what he'sarguing with in and presenting
data is that the slaves freedthemselves through their own
agency.
(18:13):
And so that is the profunity ofDu Bois' scholarship.
And as I said, there's neverbeen a scholar, well, certainly
on the American landscape, thathas produced more scholarship
than Du Bois.
And our job now is to discoverthat scholarship, to read that
scholarship, to dissect thatscholarship, because there's
(18:36):
still so much we don't yetunderstand.
SPEAKER_01 (18:39):
So the main difference between Du Bois and
other sociologists is that sortof the traditional, and I'm
putting that in quotes, thetraditional academic was someone
who is stuck in the ivory tower,peering out of the ivory tower,
(19:02):
looking at sort of the people,you know, from a distance, sort
of gazing on the people and sortof pontificating about what they
think is happening in society,in culture, without necessarily
really asking people what'shappening.
Whereas Du Bois was among thepeople.
(19:25):
Du Bois was the people, Du Boiswas on the ground.
And you know, by the way, youyou kind of you hit me with
something that I need to sort ofr repeat back just to make sure
I understand.
He was writing to me the time hewas 15 years old, and the time
he was 92 years old, and he wasessentially the math works out
to where he was puttingsomething out every two weeks,
(19:47):
essentially.
SPEAKER_00 (19:48):
Yes, that's exactly right.
SPEAKER_01 (19:50):
He was writing for 80 years of his life, and he put
something out every two weeks.
SPEAKER_00 (19:56):
Yeah.
When Du Bois was when Du Boiswas in was in high school, he
was writing articles for blacknewspapers.
So he even started writing andpublishing before he went to
Fisk as an undergraduate.
So yes, he he not only that, wecan talk about Du Bois as a
(20:19):
historian, we can talk about himas a sociologist, we can talk
about him as a philosopher.
But Du Bois was a novelist, hewrote novels.
Du Bois was a poet, he wrotepoetry.
Uh, he was a photographer, hewas a journalist.
His magazine that he created,The Crisis, was the most
important magazine, especiallyfor black people, in the early
(20:43):
20th century.
And the Crisis magazine islegendary.
Another major scholarly journalthat Du Bois founded was Phylon.
And so Du Bois was a, he was ahe was an institutional builder.
He was an activist and he was ascholar.
From my standpoint, I'm prettyprolific.
(21:05):
I have no understanding of howDu Bois did all of this.
I do not understand how you arefounder and a leader of the
major movements of your era, andthat you are constantly writing
all kinds of scholarship, andthen you are creating magazines
and you're writing poetry andyou're writing novels.
And by the way, he also wasclear that he was having a lot
(21:28):
of fun at the same time.
And so I don't, I don't, so Idon't, I don't, I don't clearly
understand how he did all ofthis.
But you know, there are geniusesthat that come along.
And I think another thing thatis very important for me is that
I was pissed off in grad schoolthat I couldn't study anybody
(21:50):
who looked like me.
That scholars who looked like mewere being totally ignored.
I mean, even E.
Franklin Fraser and Drake andCaden and Oliver Cox and all of
them, they weren't really beingtaught either.
And and this is a generation ofblack scholars that Du Bois had
really seriously influenced.
And so, yes, I think that it isso here's the thing.
(22:13):
Martin Luther King, this is whathe said about Du Bois.
He said, you cannot understandwhere Du Bois' scholarship began
and where his activism ended,that they were blended all
together as one piece.
And so for me to, I've never,I've never just been an
(22:34):
academic.
I've always been an activist.
I've always been involved inmovements.
By the way, one of the things Iwant to echo what you said a
moment ago, what made Du Bois sospecial at the beginning of
American sociology is that, likeyou said, he was out in the
communities studying people.
(22:56):
He was in their homes, studyingthem, asking them questions.
He was in their churches,studying their churches.
He was inside of their voluntaryassociations, like the lodges
and the sororities and thefraternities and so forth.
And so in his first his firstbook, The Philadelphia Negro,
he, for that study, he studiedthe black people in
(23:20):
Philadelphia, segment of theblack community in Philadelphia.
He literally went to every homeand interviewed those people,
went to all of their churches,went to all of the clubs, he
would hang out where people weredancing and everything.
And so what we see then is thiswork from the ground up, where
(23:42):
Du Bois was made clear.
I know from where I speak,because he has studied these
people on the ground.
Whereas white sociologists atthe University of Chicago, at
Yale, at Columbia, they weremuch more ivory towers, sort of
sociologists.
And this is why I say and makethe argument that Du Bois was
(24:05):
the first empirical theoreticalsociologist in the country and
built a great sociologydepartment, a great social
science department at an HBCU,Atlanta University, which is
Clark, Atlanta now.
And so what the scholar did notdid was I entered into a big
fight.
It was assumed, and had beendocumented, that the University
(24:28):
of Chicago was a place whereAmerican sociology was founded.
And so what I've done is turn itupside down and documented the
fact no, no, no, no.
It was actually a black scholarat an HBCU that is in the
vanguard of American sociologyas a founder of American
(24:49):
scientific sociology.
SPEAKER_01 (24:51):
So, you know, I have always wondered this.
So I'm gonna pose this questionto you.
I I was upset as a grad studenttoo.
I wanted to study moresociologists who look like me.
Because if I found them as agrad student, why hadn't my
professors found them?
So was Du Bois sort of casuallyomitted, or was it a systematic
(25:16):
exclusion?
So in other words, did did theyknow about Du Bois and his
contributions?
Or did folks did just didn't, orwas it just, oh I didn't, oh I
had no idea about Du Bois?
Or was it just a or was itreally a carefully strategic
exclusion from the broader canonbecause of the greatness and how
(25:39):
special this black sociologistwas?
SPEAKER_00 (25:43):
Well, I I I think that we have to understand that
black people have beenconsidered from the very
beginning as inferior.
It is very important for us tounderstand that the society at
large, as well as the academy,thought that black people were
(26:05):
inferior.
They argued it.
They claimed that science provedit.
And so if you think that peopleare inferior, then there's
nothing of worth for them tostudy.
There's no reason for them tostudy black scholars.
They did not think, by anystretch of the imagination, that
there was somebody black thatequaled Marx, equal Durkheim,
(26:30):
equal Max Vabe.
It just didn't come into theirminds.
And so what I argued is that itwas a profound ignorance in the
mainstream about scholars likeDu Bois.
They did not bother to readthem.
And so it was not like they gottogether and said, let's exclude
(26:51):
Du Bois, let's marginalize DuBois, let's exclude France
Fernand, let's exclude E.
Franklin Frazier, let's excludeOliver Cox, let's exclude Ida B.
Wells, let's exclude AnnaCooper.
They did not, they did not dothat.
They did not know their work,they did not consider them
important.
And so, even as E.
(27:14):
Franklin Frazier, for example,think about this.
He got his PhD in sociology atthe University of Chicago.
His advisor was considered oneof the founders of American
sociology.
And his name was Robert Park.
But when E.
Franklin Frazier finished atChicago with his PhD, he could
(27:35):
not work in a predominantlywhite institution.
He could not work at theUniversity of Chicago.
He could not work at Harvard.
He could not work at Yale.
He could not work atNorthwestern.
And so, of course, then he hadto work in HBCUs.
By the way, Du Bois, who was thefirst black person to get a PhD
at Harvard, he could not work atHarvard.
(27:57):
And so one of the things that DuBois said about all of it, he
said, you know, I went toHarvard, but I was not of
Harvard.
And he said, if anything, it's agreat honor for Harvard to claim
me, not the other way around,right?
And so I'm just, so what I'm,what I'm, what I'm saying to you
is that when I wrote the scholardenied my colleagues at
(28:21):
Northwestern and elsewhere, manyof them were very open to what I
had to say because theyrealized, God, have we been
ignorant?
God, we've we we never we neverthought of Du Bois.
Now I will add this.
Du Bois was portrayed as apropagandist.
He was portrayed as a politicalactivist who attacked Booker T
(28:43):
Washington.
Even within the black community,many of us, that was the only
story we knew.
WE B versus Booker T.
That was a story that we knew.
So many of us didn't know thescholarship of Du Bois.
There were many profound blackscholars at HBCUs, like Benjamin
Mays and others, who knew allabout Du Bois.
(29:05):
But for the most part, hisscholarship was not known.
And so what what I would say tothis is that we must forever
think about our ignorance.
We must never think that somehowwe are the enlightened ones.
We must know that there arelarge bodies of work out there
(29:27):
now that have not been unearthedand studied.
And it is our poverty because wecannot understand the world the
way we should understand it,because we don't have all of
these perspectives.
And so the thing about thescholar denied, my daughter, who
was relatively young while I wasfinishing up the scholar denied,
(29:48):
and we had a conversation aboutit, and she said, Dad, why is it
not the scholars denied?
And I said, You really have agreat point there, because there
have been And many scholars inthat.
In fact, somebody like PatriciaHill Collins, I'm sure you know
her work.
I mean, she showed exactly whatit meant to be ignorant about
(30:11):
the experiences and theknowledge of black women, for
example.
That's right.
The knowledge of black women hadbeen excluded from the academy
as well.
And so, what us Du Boisiascholars, or scholars coming
from different places in theworld, what we've done is that
we have brought great insight tonot only understanding us, but
(30:33):
understanding the world.
And I think that is one of thekey contributions of Du Bois and
many scholars like him.
SPEAKER_01 (30:40):
I love it.
So I mentioned before when thisbook came out, and you know,
there was so much buzz aboutthis before it even was
published.
You and I never met.
Like I said, you're one of myfavorite sociologists.
And I could not wait for thisbook to come out because at the
time I was at the University ofNorth Florida teaching.
I was there for a decade.
(31:01):
And I started teachingsociological theory because I
never, never, ever, ever in amillion years thought I would
teach theory because it wassomething that I was always, you
know, taught to be afraid of.
But I remember a couple of mycolleagues talking about how
many of the students of colorwho were failing theory and
(31:21):
having to repeat theory.
And I said, mm-mm, not on mywatch.
Let me teach theory.
And I knew why they kept failingtheory because nobody was really
speaking to them.
And so I started teaching theoryand I started teaching a diverse
canon of scholars, and peoplestarted enjoying theory.
SPEAKER_02 (31:41):
Yes.
SPEAKER_01 (31:42):
And so I started teaching your work.
I started teaching JoyceLatiner, my cousin's work, The
Death of Black Sociology, andpeople started really enjoying
theory.
SPEAKER_00 (31:53):
Yes.
SPEAKER_01 (31:54):
And so this work has, of course, been received so
many accolades and so much hasbeen so very, very well received
in the discipline and beyondbecause it is, to your point,
filled such a massive gap in thediscipline and beyond.
(32:14):
So here's my question to you.
Du Bois is sitting here with usin the Zoom.
What would he say about thisbook?
SPEAKER_00 (32:23):
There are a few individuals in history that
anticipate that many of theirinsights will be discovered long
after they are gone.
Du Bois said in his last messageto the world that there will be
others who will come along andcomplete work I did not finish.
(32:45):
And he said, perhaps they willeven do it better than I.
And he said, in that discovery,that will be my applause.
I think that Du Bois definitelyanticipated this Zoom visit.
The thing that's very, veryinteresting is that he left such
an organized trail behind.
(33:07):
I mean, when you go into thearchives and start reading Du
Bois' work, you're going to seea letter to his grandmother when
he was 13 years old.
So all of these papers, millionsof papers of his,
correspondence, manuscripts, andall, they're all organized and
(33:28):
easily discoverable.
Who does that?
And so I think that he was wellaware, he was well aware that I
have done something important inthis world.
And that though it is notrecognized now the way that it
should be, but like Dr.
King said, truth crushed earth,shall rise again.
(33:51):
And I think that Du Bois wouldsay, Well, Dr.
Morris, uh, pretty well done,but uh you've only just begun.
And we push all of us to carryon in this tradition that is
studying the agency of theoppressed, trying to figure out
how can all humanity beliberated.
I I think it's very importantfor me to say right now, Du Bois
(34:14):
was very interested in theliberation of African Americans.
He was very concerned about theliberation of black people in
Africa and all over the world.
But what is not that clearlyunderstood is that Du Bois was a
master humanitarian.
He cared about the uplift, theliberation of people globally.
(34:38):
And so he studied Asians.
He studied Africans, he studiedpeople all over the world,
India.
He was corresponding withleaders and scholars, Brazil,
Cuba, all over the world.
And he was one of the firstblack men, Frederick Douglass,
(34:59):
of course, was the first, butwho championed women's
liberation, who studied womenand argued about their
importance in the agency.
And so it is not just importantto discover Du Bois to find out
what he had to say about blackpeople and their oppression, but
what he had to say about theliberation of all humanity.
(35:24):
He um almost went to jailbecause he was a peace activist,
because he opposed nuclearweapons.
And he had to go to trial.
He was handcuffed as an ordinarycriminal and so forth, hurt him
deeply.
So I just want to point out thatDu Bois is a treasure to the
(35:51):
world and not to any one groupof people or segment of people.
But if we wish to move forwardin terms of civilization and
humanity, people like Du Boisneed to be studied.
SPEAKER_01 (36:04):
Yeah.
And this is the true promise ofsociology, right?
SPEAKER_00 (36:09):
Yes, yes.
SPEAKER_01 (36:10):
Du Bois is the epitome, the essence of true
sociology.
SPEAKER_00 (36:16):
Yes.
Yes.
SPEAKER_01 (36:17):
We're doing our jobs as sociologists.
SPEAKER_00 (36:20):
Yes.
You know, one of the things wehave the, we haven't, we haven't
talked about it very much, but Ifirst kind of came on the scene
with my first book, Origins ofthe Civil Rights Movement.
Origins had a, I would say, hasa great imp a great impact as a
scholar denied.
You know why?
Because almost all of thescholarship on the civil rights
(36:43):
movement had argued that thatmovement came about because of
what presidents did, because ofwhat Congress people did,
because of what the SupremeCourt did, because of what white
liberals did, because of whatthe media did, and because I
(37:05):
grew up in Mississippi under JimCrow, because I went to the
black church, because I knew howblack women worked in their
power.
And when I read all of thisscholarship on the civil rights
movement, I said, I don'tbelieve that these external
forces were the driving force ofthe civil rights movement.
(37:27):
And so when I started going out,originally the origins of the
civil rights movement was mydissertation research.
And so I had the very privilegeof going and interviewing many
of the major activists of thecivil rights movement.
Those interviews, some of themare in the origins of the civil
rights movement.
(37:47):
And what I was able to show isthat, no, if you really want to
understand the civil rightsmovement, you got to get in
those black communities.
You got to study these blackwomen who participated.
You got to study these blackstudents who participated.
You got to study these blacklawyers.
You got to study Rosa Parks andso forth from a different kind
of perspective.
(38:07):
They, I call it the indigenouspower of the civil rights
movement.
They were the people who drovethat movement and made it one of
the pivotal movements, not justin America, but in the 20th
century.
And so once again, it's becauseI had a kind of Du Boissian
approach, study the world fromthe bottom up and see what we
(38:29):
discover.
SPEAKER_01 (38:30):
Absolutely.
Ah, Dr.
Morris, I could talk to you forthe next week.
Oh my gosh.
Well, you have to promise mesomething.
The next conference that you'reat, you have to let me know so I
can come up to you and meet youin person because it would be
just my pleasure.
(38:51):
I have really enjoyed being inconversation with you today.
It has just been so, so amazing.
I know that everyone is gonnalearn so much from hearing from
you and that everyone is gonnabe truly, truly inspired.
And after hearing this, everyoneis gonna want to know as much as
(39:12):
they can about WEB Du Bois.
So thank you so much for joiningus on the North Star.
And uh, I'll give you the lastword.
SPEAKER_00 (39:21):
What is very meaningful to my life at this
stage of my life is that when Igo to conferences, I meet so
many young scholars like you whocome up to me and they first
tell me about how important I'vebeen to them, and of course I
(39:43):
love it.
But then, but then, far moreimportantly, they start telling
me about the work that they'redoing.
And I feel very, verycomfortable now that there are
so many young scholars, the newgeneration of scholars across
all colors, across all socialclasses, that is the hope in
(40:05):
these dark times.
And so I just want to say to youthat it will be as great a
pleasure for me to meet you asfor you to meet me.
And thanks for having me on.
SPEAKER_01 (40:16):
Absolutely.
Thank you so much.
Welcome to the North Star, a space for conversation
on leadership, equity, andjustice.
This season we're exploringdisruption.
There's pivotal moments whenscholars, leaders, and
communities challenge systemsand reimagine the future.
Today's guest is none other thanDr.
(00:21):
Alden Morris, Professor Emeritusof Sociology, Northwestern
University, and one of the mostinfluential sociologists of my
time, one of my favoritesociologists, author of The
Origins of the Civil RightsMovement, and the scholar denied
W.
E.
B.
Du Bois and the Birth of ModernSociology.
Dr.
(00:42):
Morris has spent a lifetimediscovering and uncovering how
social movements transformsocieties and how institutions,
including academia itself,especially sociology, must
confront their own inequalities.
So, Dr.
Morris, welcome so much to theNorth Start Podcast.
(01:04):
Thank you so much for beinghere.
SPEAKER_00 (01:06):
Well, thank you for having me and thanks for all of
those generous uh remarks.
And so it's a pleasure to meetyou.
SPEAKER_01 (01:15):
Yes.
Now I've already shared you'reone of my favorite sociologists,
and I'd like to kind of sharemore with you why.
So I I kind of grew up insociology uh as someone who has
folks in my family who areprofessors and also sociologists
who have folks who are civilrights activists in their own
(01:39):
right every day, folks who arescholars, as it were.
But as someone who finished, Ifinished my my my PhD in
sociology in 2008.
It was a much, much differenttime in 2008.
I think we all know why.
Um, but my story is a little bitdifferent.
When I was doing my doctoralwork, especially my master's
(02:03):
work, I felt that I didn't havea lot of mentors and folks that
I could look up to whoencouraged me on a regular basis
to think about exploringsociologists who look like me.
And I am very encouraged andhave always been encouraged
about your work and your careeras a sociologist because it has
(02:26):
been very, very important to youto bring up the rear, if you
will.
You have, of course, you werethe 2021 president of the
American SociologicalAssociation, and your work and
your life has been aboutcommitting to building a
pipeline of scholars.
So can you tell us about whatthat has been like to you and
(02:49):
why you have been so intent onbringing up the rear, building
that next generation ofsociologists, particularly
scholars of color?
SPEAKER_00 (03:00):
Yes.
I think I try to influence otheryoung scholars, not just in
sociology, but in social scienceand in the humanities.
When I was in graduate school,there were hardly any black
professors that I knew.
(03:21):
There were very, very few blackgraduate students even in
sociology.
And I had been active even atthe undergraduate level in
trying to bring in more scholarsof color, students of color, so
that they could get degrees andbuild careers and so forth.
So when I went to grad school, Icontinued my activism.
(03:43):
I went to State University ofNew York in Stony Brook, and we
immediately started agitating tobring in more students of color
and to bring in faculty ofcolor.
So it's been one of the thingsthat I've just been dedicated
to.
I'm a child of the civil rightsmovement, just a few years
(04:04):
younger than your cousin, GeorgeLatin, whom I love and whose
work I deeply respect, both asan activist and as a scholar.
And so then while I was studyingfor my PhD, I recognized that we
hardly read any scholars ofcolor.
(04:24):
Never took an exam on any ofthem and so forth.
And but I had I had alreadystarted to read Scholars of
Color even before I went to gradschool.
So I knew about W.B.
Du Bois, I knew about E.
Franklin Frazier, I knew aboutOliver Cox, I knew about France
Fanon.
And but we had none of thatassigned to us.
(04:46):
And so one of the things is thatI said, you know, that this
needs to be different.
There's a whole history, a wholebody of scholarship that's being
omitted.
And so then I decided in gradschool, I asked my mentor or my
advisor why we didn't study W.B.
(05:08):
Du Bois.
And he essentially told me thatDu Bois was not a sociologist.
And so I argued a little bit,but I was a grad student, and so
I knew not to get too far out ofplace.
But I did it, but I I made himmade up my mind then that I was
going to set the recordstraight, that I was going to
bring Du Bois to the world ofscholarship, especially in
(05:31):
sociology and the socialsciences.
And that's how my quote, thescholar denied, came about.
But to conclude, in terms ofyour question, I think that it
is very important for scholarsin academia and even outside of
academia to bring differentvoices to the table.
(05:54):
Not just black, not just otherpeople of color, but scholars
from different kinds ofbackgrounds, from poor
backgrounds, women, and so on,because it enriches the academy.
And so I've been dedicated totry to make this happen as far
as I can as an individual.
(06:14):
But I don't, let me not hesitateto say that I'm I haven't done
this by myself.
There have been other scholarslike me who had the same
mission.
And I can say to you, since youjust described what it was like
when you went to grad school in2008, I can tell you that it's a
hundred times better now.
And there are many scholars ofcolor.
(06:37):
There are far more womenscholars, and they have brought
new paradigms to the academy.
They brought new sense ofunderstanding the world to the
academy.
And so, yes, I'm very dedicatedto diversifying the academy.
SPEAKER_01 (06:52):
I love that.
Now, you were told in the 60sthat Du Bois was not a
sociologist.
Your professor told you this,right?
Du Bois is not a sociologist.
SPEAKER_00 (07:07):
Though I'm old, that that did not happen in 60s.
That was in the 70s.
That was in the 70s.
I'm so sorry.
Yeah, then this stuff.
Early 70s.
This was about 76.
76.
I knew.
When I had begun, it's not aproblem.
When I had begun to work on mydissertation, and I discussed it
(07:28):
with my dissertation advisor,and I was told that Du Bois was
not a sociologist.
Now, I also want you to knowthat many of my colleagues,
black colleagues who were atother universities, they were
told the same thing.
And the reason was that this wasjust out of their ignorance.
They had not read Du Bois.
(07:49):
They had not studied Du Bois.
They were fixated on thescholars whom they admired,
especially European scholarslike Karl Marx, Max Weber, and
Emil Durkheim.
SPEAKER_01 (07:59):
Well, we'll talk more in a second, but you point
out in your book, The ScholarDenonic, right?
How Du Bois had influenced someof those folks.
So this was in 1976 that youwere told Du Bois was not a
sociologist.
Let's fast forward to 2000, whenI was a graduate student working
(08:23):
on my master's in sociology.
I won't share the name of theinstitution, but it was in my
hometown of Cleveland.
And I wanted to, I was sharingwith my major professor that I
wanted to write my dissertation.
Excuse me, I wanted to write mymaster's thesis on colorism.
(08:44):
And I wanted to write mymaster's thesis on colorism
because I had did myundergraduate thesis on that.
And I had all these, I had donethe readings, I had everything
ready.
And my my advisor said, No, youcan't write your your thesis on
that.
That's not sociological.
And I said, What are you talkingabout?
Yeah, of course it is.
(09:05):
Du Bois wrote about it.
Drake and Caden wrote about it.
Frazier, all I had written allthe I had my lit review ready.
And my advisor said, No, youcan't write Du Bois, that's not
sociological.
Right?
And I couldn't believe it.
So in 2000, I was told Icouldn't study X because at the
(09:27):
time I was I didn't realize thatmy advisor hadn't studied these
same people.
She just simply didn't know,right?
She she turned me down because Ididn't know.
Thankfully, it's 2025 thanks toyour work.
And by the way, I would I Itaught sociological theory for
(09:48):
many, many years.
And um the work that I the booksthat I taught my students, we
taught Scholar Denied, we taughtDeath of Black Sociology, we
taught a a huge canon, a breathof things.
We also taught DERCON and Labor,but we also taught all of the
(10:09):
things, right?
And we're at a a place now.
I went to ASA, the meetings inChicago in August, and you're
absolutely right, right?
You've got sociology of Cardi B,you have all these different
things now, because you havethis huge critical mass of
scholars who are studying all ofthe things, right?
(10:30):
Did you envision that sociologynot that it's perfect, but did
you imagine a discipline thatwould look like this back in
1976?
So here we are almost 50 yearslater.
Did you see a sociology, adiscipline looking like this in
(10:51):
50 years' time?
SPEAKER_00 (10:52):
At that time, I would describe myself as more of
a fighter who knew that changewas necessary.
I did not envision that therewould be a sociology like what
we have today.
By the way, there's still many,many limitations and exclusions
and stuff.
So we are not in the promisedland.
(11:13):
But we have definitely come avery, very long way.
And so the thing that I didknow, almost intuitive, is that
if you get people into theacademy who's never been there,
if you increase those numbersbecause we come from backgrounds
of poverty, of oppression, ofexclusion.
(11:35):
So when we come into theacademy, we want to understand
how that happened, how itpersists, and how it can be
changed.
And so I did have this sensethat we could shake things up.
Now, in uh, of course, I didenvision the possibility of an
academy like today.
(11:55):
I researched and wrote TheScholar Denied because I thought
that it could have a largeimpact.
I knew that it was going todisrupt the origin story of
sociology to some degree.
You can never know what impact awork will have.
And I have been pleasantlysurprised at the enormous impact
(12:22):
that the scholar denied has had.
Now there are what we callDuBorzian scholars who are
building, who are building awhole different kind of
sociology who's shaked thecanon.
And I can say, I think withoutany bragging, that I played a
big part in bringing this,making this change happen.
(12:44):
However, there were others, andI think a crucial point to be
made.
There are many younger scholars,many of them of color, who now
are just doing all kinds offantastic work as Duborsian
scholars, bringing in voicesthat we've never heard.
And so right now, if you look atthe syllabi, you taught theory.
SPEAKER_01 (13:33):
Absolutely.
Let's unpack that a little bitbecause you know, you and I know
Du Bois, you and I understandhow huge it is for people now,
because of your work, yourlife's work, for people to say
that Du Bois is the father ofAmerican sociology.
(13:57):
For folks who may not know, alot of people know W.E.B.
Du Bois as a civil rightsactivist in his own right.
Absolutely.
But let's talk more about thefolks who may not know Du Bois
as a scholar, as a sociologist.
Can we just spend a little bitof time talking about the
(14:18):
pioneer scholar that Du Boiswas?
Let's let's boil that down alittle bit.
SPEAKER_00 (14:24):
First of all, from the late 19th century up to the
mid-20th century, Du Bois wasprobably the most prodigious
sociologist and scholar in theUnited States.
From the age of about 15 to theage of 92, 93, Du Bois published
(14:48):
something on average every 15thday of his life.
And so if you talked about hisCV, if you talked about his
resume, it's just staggering howmuch scholarship that he
produced.
We, even the unpublished worksthat are very important, those
works are just staggering interms of the volume of them.
(15:13):
Now, I want to make what I thinkis a key point.
Many scholars have argued thatyou don't mix activism and
scholarship.
Du Bois' career is one thatdemonstrates that that is a
false dichotomy.
Du Bois, we gotta remember hewas a prodigious activist and a
(15:38):
prolific scholar, and he wasdoing all those things at the
same time.
And so the major movements ofthe period, the Niagara
movement, the NAACP, thePan-African movement, all of
those DuBoris was either founderor a major leader in.
At the same time, he was writingall of these profound books,
(16:03):
like The Suppression of theAfrican Slave Trade, like The
Souls of Black Folks, like BlackReconstruction, and on and on
and on.
And in these books, he waspresenting unique analysis.
That is, in contrast to themainstream, he was studying poor
(16:23):
people, oppressed people fromthe bottom up.
And he was showing, showing thebig difference that they made.
And so even before I wrote thescholar denied, my first book
was Origins of the Civil RightsMovement.
And that work was also very muchinspired by Du Bois' perspective
because I looked at the civilrights movement from the bottom
(16:44):
up.
I showed how local people,ordinary people, generated that
movement, sustained thatmovement, came up with the
strategies for that movement.
And so the origins of the civilrights movement is a very Du
Boisean type of text.
And so what I'm saying then isthat in contrast to the
(17:05):
mainstream sociology by whitesociologists, they looked at
society from the perspective ofelites.
They looked at society from theperspective of the white
dominant group.
And Du Bois turned all of thatupside down and looked at it
from the perspective of peoplewho were colonized, from the
perspective of women, from theperspective of black people.
(17:28):
And it just brought in a wholenew way to see the world.
And I would also add that thesociology before Du Bois and
during the period in which hewas marginalized, did not
document the agency of people atthe bottom and the extent to
which they have changed society.
So one key example is that inBlack Reconstruction, which Du
(17:53):
Bois published in 1935, Ibelieve, what he showed is that
the slaves themselves, who wereactually responsible for the
Union winning the Civil War.
And in that case, what he'sarguing with in and presenting
data is that the slaves freedthemselves through their own
agency.
(18:13):
And so that is the profunity ofDu Bois' scholarship.
And as I said, there's neverbeen a scholar, well, certainly
on the American landscape, thathas produced more scholarship
than Du Bois.
And our job now is to discoverthat scholarship, to read that
scholarship, to dissect thatscholarship, because there's
(18:36):
still so much we don't yetunderstand.
SPEAKER_01 (18:39):
So the main difference between Du Bois and
other sociologists is that sortof the traditional, and I'm
putting that in quotes, thetraditional academic was someone
who is stuck in the ivory tower,peering out of the ivory tower,
(19:02):
looking at sort of the people,you know, from a distance, sort
of gazing on the people and sortof pontificating about what they
think is happening in society,in culture, without necessarily
really asking people what'shappening.
Whereas Du Bois was among thepeople.
(19:25):
Du Bois was the people, Du Boiswas on the ground.
And you know, by the way, youyou kind of you hit me with
something that I need to sort ofr repeat back just to make sure
I understand.
He was writing to me the time hewas 15 years old, and the time
he was 92 years old, and he wasessentially the math works out
to where he was puttingsomething out every two weeks,
(19:47):
essentially.
SPEAKER_00 (19:48):
Yes, that's exactly right.
SPEAKER_01 (19:50):
He was writing for 80 years of his life, and he put
something out every two weeks.
SPEAKER_00 (19:56):
Yeah.
When Du Bois was when Du Boiswas in was in high school, he
was writing articles for blacknewspapers.
So he even started writing andpublishing before he went to
Fisk as an undergraduate.
So yes, he he not only that, wecan talk about Du Bois as a
(20:19):
historian, we can talk about himas a sociologist, we can talk
about him as a philosopher.
But Du Bois was a novelist, hewrote novels.
Du Bois was a poet, he wrotepoetry.
Uh, he was a photographer, hewas a journalist.
His magazine that he created,The Crisis, was the most
important magazine, especiallyfor black people, in the early
(20:43):
20th century.
And the Crisis magazine islegendary.
Another major scholarly journalthat Du Bois founded was Phylon.
And so Du Bois was a, he was ahe was an institutional builder.
He was an activist and he was ascholar.
From my standpoint, I'm prettyprolific.
(21:05):
I have no understanding of howDu Bois did all of this.
I do not understand how you arefounder and a leader of the
major movements of your era, andthat you are constantly writing
all kinds of scholarship, andthen you are creating magazines
and you're writing poetry andyou're writing novels.
And by the way, he also wasclear that he was having a lot
(21:28):
of fun at the same time.
And so I don't, I don't, so Idon't, I don't, I don't clearly
understand how he did all ofthis.
But you know, there are geniusesthat that come along.
And I think another thing thatis very important for me is that
I was pissed off in grad schoolthat I couldn't study anybody
(21:50):
who looked like me.
That scholars who looked like mewere being totally ignored.
I mean, even E.
Franklin Fraser and Drake andCaden and Oliver Cox and all of
them, they weren't really beingtaught either.
And and this is a generation ofblack scholars that Du Bois had
really seriously influenced.
And so, yes, I think that it isso here's the thing.
(22:13):
Martin Luther King, this is whathe said about Du Bois.
He said, you cannot understandwhere Du Bois' scholarship began
and where his activism ended,that they were blended all
together as one piece.
And so for me to, I've never,I've never just been an
(22:34):
academic.
I've always been an activist.
I've always been involved inmovements.
By the way, one of the things Iwant to echo what you said a
moment ago, what made Du Bois sospecial at the beginning of
American sociology is that, likeyou said, he was out in the
communities studying people.
(22:56):
He was in their homes, studyingthem, asking them questions.
He was in their churches,studying their churches.
He was inside of their voluntaryassociations, like the lodges
and the sororities and thefraternities and so forth.
And so in his first his firstbook, The Philadelphia Negro,
he, for that study, he studiedthe black people in
(23:20):
Philadelphia, segment of theblack community in Philadelphia.
He literally went to every homeand interviewed those people,
went to all of their churches,went to all of the clubs, he
would hang out where people weredancing and everything.
And so what we see then is thiswork from the ground up, where
(23:42):
Du Bois was made clear.
I know from where I speak,because he has studied these
people on the ground.
Whereas white sociologists atthe University of Chicago, at
Yale, at Columbia, they weremuch more ivory towers, sort of
sociologists.
And this is why I say and makethe argument that Du Bois was
(24:05):
the first empirical theoreticalsociologist in the country and
built a great sociologydepartment, a great social
science department at an HBCU,Atlanta University, which is
Clark, Atlanta now.
And so what the scholar did notdid was I entered into a big
fight.
It was assumed, and had beendocumented, that the University
(24:28):
of Chicago was a place whereAmerican sociology was founded.
And so what I've done is turn itupside down and documented the
fact no, no, no, no.
It was actually a black scholarat an HBCU that is in the
vanguard of American sociologyas a founder of American
(24:49):
scientific sociology.
SPEAKER_01 (24:51):
So, you know, I have always wondered this.
So I'm gonna pose this questionto you.
I I was upset as a grad studenttoo.
I wanted to study moresociologists who look like me.
Because if I found them as agrad student, why hadn't my
professors found them?
So was Du Bois sort of casuallyomitted, or was it a systematic
(25:16):
exclusion?
So in other words, did did theyknow about Du Bois and his
contributions?
Or did folks did just didn't, orwas it just, oh I didn't, oh I
had no idea about Du Bois?
Or was it just a or was itreally a carefully strategic
exclusion from the broader canonbecause of the greatness and how
(25:39):
special this black sociologistwas?
SPEAKER_00 (25:43):
Well, I I I think that we have to understand that
black people have beenconsidered from the very
beginning as inferior.
It is very important for us tounderstand that the society at
large, as well as the academy,thought that black people were
(26:05):
inferior.
They argued it.
They claimed that science provedit.
And so if you think that peopleare inferior, then there's
nothing of worth for them tostudy.
There's no reason for them tostudy black scholars.
They did not think, by anystretch of the imagination, that
there was somebody black thatequaled Marx, equal Durkheim,
(26:30):
equal Max Vabe.
It just didn't come into theirminds.
And so what I argued is that itwas a profound ignorance in the
mainstream about scholars likeDu Bois.
They did not bother to readthem.
And so it was not like they gottogether and said, let's exclude
(26:51):
Du Bois, let's marginalize DuBois, let's exclude France
Fernand, let's exclude E.
Franklin Frazier, let's excludeOliver Cox, let's exclude Ida B.
Wells, let's exclude AnnaCooper.
They did not, they did not dothat.
They did not know their work,they did not consider them
important.
And so, even as E.
(27:14):
Franklin Frazier, for example,think about this.
He got his PhD in sociology atthe University of Chicago.
His advisor was considered oneof the founders of American
sociology.
And his name was Robert Park.
But when E.
Franklin Frazier finished atChicago with his PhD, he could
(27:35):
not work in a predominantlywhite institution.
He could not work at theUniversity of Chicago.
He could not work at Harvard.
He could not work at Yale.
He could not work atNorthwestern.
And so, of course, then he hadto work in HBCUs.
By the way, Du Bois, who was thefirst black person to get a PhD
at Harvard, he could not work atHarvard.
(27:57):
And so one of the things that DuBois said about all of it, he
said, you know, I went toHarvard, but I was not of
Harvard.
And he said, if anything, it's agreat honor for Harvard to claim
me, not the other way around,right?
And so I'm just, so what I'm,what I'm, what I'm saying to you
is that when I wrote the scholardenied my colleagues at
(28:21):
Northwestern and elsewhere, manyof them were very open to what I
had to say because theyrealized, God, have we been
ignorant?
God, we've we we never we neverthought of Du Bois.
Now I will add this.
Du Bois was portrayed as apropagandist.
He was portrayed as a politicalactivist who attacked Booker T
(28:43):
Washington.
Even within the black community,many of us, that was the only
story we knew.
WE B versus Booker T.
That was a story that we knew.
So many of us didn't know thescholarship of Du Bois.
There were many profound blackscholars at HBCUs, like Benjamin
Mays and others, who knew allabout Du Bois.
(29:05):
But for the most part, hisscholarship was not known.
And so what what I would say tothis is that we must forever
think about our ignorance.
We must never think that somehowwe are the enlightened ones.
We must know that there arelarge bodies of work out there
(29:27):
now that have not been unearthedand studied.
And it is our poverty because wecannot understand the world the
way we should understand it,because we don't have all of
these perspectives.
And so the thing about thescholar denied, my daughter, who
was relatively young while I wasfinishing up the scholar denied,
(29:48):
and we had a conversation aboutit, and she said, Dad, why is it
not the scholars denied?
And I said, You really have agreat point there, because there
have been And many scholars inthat.
In fact, somebody like PatriciaHill Collins, I'm sure you know
her work.
I mean, she showed exactly whatit meant to be ignorant about
(30:11):
the experiences and theknowledge of black women, for
example.
That's right.
The knowledge of black women hadbeen excluded from the academy
as well.
And so, what us Du Boisiascholars, or scholars coming
from different places in theworld, what we've done is that
we have brought great insight tonot only understanding us, but
(30:33):
understanding the world.
And I think that is one of thekey contributions of Du Bois and
many scholars like him.
SPEAKER_01 (30:40):
I love it.
So I mentioned before when thisbook came out, and you know,
there was so much buzz aboutthis before it even was
published.
You and I never met.
Like I said, you're one of myfavorite sociologists.
And I could not wait for thisbook to come out because at the
time I was at the University ofNorth Florida teaching.
I was there for a decade.
(31:01):
And I started teachingsociological theory because I
never, never, ever, ever in amillion years thought I would
teach theory because it wassomething that I was always, you
know, taught to be afraid of.
But I remember a couple of mycolleagues talking about how
many of the students of colorwho were failing theory and
(31:21):
having to repeat theory.
And I said, mm-mm, not on mywatch.
Let me teach theory.
And I knew why they kept failingtheory because nobody was really
speaking to them.
And so I started teaching theoryand I started teaching a diverse
canon of scholars, and peoplestarted enjoying theory.
SPEAKER_02 (31:41):
Yes.
SPEAKER_01 (31:42):
And so I started teaching your work.
I started teaching JoyceLatiner, my cousin's work, The
Death of Black Sociology, andpeople started really enjoying
theory.
SPEAKER_00 (31:53):
Yes.
SPEAKER_01 (31:54):
And so this work has, of course, been received so
many accolades and so much hasbeen so very, very well received
in the discipline and beyondbecause it is, to your point,
filled such a massive gap in thediscipline and beyond.
(32:14):
So here's my question to you.
Du Bois is sitting here with usin the Zoom.
What would he say about thisbook?
SPEAKER_00 (32:23):
There are a few individuals in history that
anticipate that many of theirinsights will be discovered long
after they are gone.
Du Bois said in his last messageto the world that there will be
others who will come along andcomplete work I did not finish.
(32:45):
And he said, perhaps they willeven do it better than I.
And he said, in that discovery,that will be my applause.
I think that Du Bois definitelyanticipated this Zoom visit.
The thing that's very, veryinteresting is that he left such
an organized trail behind.
(33:07):
I mean, when you go into thearchives and start reading Du
Bois' work, you're going to seea letter to his grandmother when
he was 13 years old.
So all of these papers, millionsof papers of his,
correspondence, manuscripts, andall, they're all organized and
(33:28):
easily discoverable.
Who does that?
And so I think that he was wellaware, he was well aware that I
have done something important inthis world.
And that though it is notrecognized now the way that it
should be, but like Dr.
King said, truth crushed earth,shall rise again.
(33:51):
And I think that Du Bois wouldsay, Well, Dr.
Morris, uh, pretty well done,but uh you've only just begun.
And we push all of us to carryon in this tradition that is
studying the agency of theoppressed, trying to figure out
how can all humanity beliberated.
I I think it's very importantfor me to say right now, Du Bois
(34:14):
was very interested in theliberation of African Americans.
He was very concerned about theliberation of black people in
Africa and all over the world.
But what is not that clearlyunderstood is that Du Bois was a
master humanitarian.
He cared about the uplift, theliberation of people globally.
(34:38):
And so he studied Asians.
He studied Africans, he studiedpeople all over the world,
India.
He was corresponding withleaders and scholars, Brazil,
Cuba, all over the world.
And he was one of the firstblack men, Frederick Douglass,
(34:59):
of course, was the first, butwho championed women's
liberation, who studied womenand argued about their
importance in the agency.
And so it is not just importantto discover Du Bois to find out
what he had to say about blackpeople and their oppression, but
what he had to say about theliberation of all humanity.
(35:24):
He um almost went to jailbecause he was a peace activist,
because he opposed nuclearweapons.
And he had to go to trial.
He was handcuffed as an ordinarycriminal and so forth, hurt him
deeply.
So I just want to point out thatDu Bois is a treasure to the
(35:51):
world and not to any one groupof people or segment of people.
But if we wish to move forwardin terms of civilization and
humanity, people like Du Boisneed to be studied.
SPEAKER_01 (36:04):
Yeah.
And this is the true promise ofsociology, right?
SPEAKER_00 (36:09):
Yes, yes.
SPEAKER_01 (36:10):
Du Bois is the epitome, the essence of true
sociology.
SPEAKER_00 (36:16):
Yes.
Yes.
SPEAKER_01 (36:17):
We're doing our jobs as sociologists.
SPEAKER_00 (36:20):
Yes.
You know, one of the things wehave the, we haven't, we haven't
talked about it very much, but Ifirst kind of came on the scene
with my first book, Origins ofthe Civil Rights Movement.
Origins had a, I would say, hasa great imp a great impact as a
scholar denied.
You know why?
Because almost all of thescholarship on the civil rights
(36:43):
movement had argued that thatmovement came about because of
what presidents did, because ofwhat Congress people did,
because of what the SupremeCourt did, because of what white
liberals did, because of whatthe media did, and because I
(37:05):
grew up in Mississippi under JimCrow, because I went to the
black church, because I knew howblack women worked in their
power.
And when I read all of thisscholarship on the civil rights
movement, I said, I don'tbelieve that these external
forces were the driving force ofthe civil rights movement.
(37:27):
And so when I started going out,originally the origins of the
civil rights movement was mydissertation research.
And so I had the very privilegeof going and interviewing many
of the major activists of thecivil rights movement.
Those interviews, some of themare in the origins of the civil
rights movement.
(37:47):
And what I was able to show isthat, no, if you really want to
understand the civil rightsmovement, you got to get in
those black communities.
You got to study these blackwomen who participated.
You got to study these blackstudents who participated.
You got to study these blacklawyers.
You got to study Rosa Parks andso forth from a different kind
of perspective.
(38:07):
They, I call it the indigenouspower of the civil rights
movement.
They were the people who drovethat movement and made it one of
the pivotal movements, not justin America, but in the 20th
century.
And so once again, it's becauseI had a kind of Du Boissian
approach, study the world fromthe bottom up and see what we
(38:29):
discover.
SPEAKER_01 (38:30):
Absolutely.
Ah, Dr.
Morris, I could talk to you forthe next week.
Oh my gosh.
Well, you have to promise mesomething.
The next conference that you'reat, you have to let me know so I
can come up to you and meet youin person because it would be
just my pleasure.
(38:51):
I have really enjoyed being inconversation with you today.
It has just been so, so amazing.
I know that everyone is gonnalearn so much from hearing from
you and that everyone is gonnabe truly, truly inspired.
And after hearing this, everyoneis gonna want to know as much as
(39:12):
they can about WEB Du Bois.
So thank you so much for joiningus on the North Star.
And uh, I'll give you the lastword.
SPEAKER_00 (39:21):
What is very meaningful to my life at this
stage of my life is that when Igo to conferences, I meet so
many young scholars like you whocome up to me and they first
tell me about how important I'vebeen to them, and of course I
(39:43):
love it.
But then, but then, far moreimportantly, they start telling
me about the work that they'redoing.
And I feel very, verycomfortable now that there are
so many young scholars, the newgeneration of scholars across
all colors, across all socialclasses, that is the hope in
(40:05):
these dark times.
And so I just want to say to youthat it will be as great a
pleasure for me to meet you asfor you to meet me.
And thanks for having me on.
SPEAKER_01 (40:16):
Absolutely.
Thank you so much.
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