The Urban Laboratory

Race and Ethnicity
Park had accumulated extensive experience of his own in the field. Prior to his appointment to the University faculty, he had served as secretary to Booker T. Washington at the Tuskegee Institute and developed a deep interest in race relations and the culture of African-Americans. In his view, sociology could help accelerate black assimilation into American society.

Park, a former journalist, had also written a book about Chicago's foreign language press. At a time when many Americans regarded the prevalence of immigrant newspapers as a threat, Park interpreted them as a means of further assimilation into the broader society. Later work turned Park again to issues of race relations, which he felt some sociologists were not yet approaching objectively. One of the first sociologists to send students to investigate Chicago neighborhoods troubled by racial conflict, Park viewed racism as an inevitable cycle in human relations, but he believed it would be overcome gradually as society evolved.

Louis Wirth, a student of Park and Burgess, maintained that fundamental research concerning the effects of discrimination and ethnic conflicts could help develop social policy for housing, urban planning, and race relations. In The Ghetto (1928), Wirth examined the consquences of centuries of discrimination on Jewish community life, ranging from Renaissance Italy to Chicago's Maxwell Street. The Ghetto served as a model for the University's researchers in ethnicity, many of whom later studied under Wirth when he joined the University's faculty.

While most of the studies of race relations were conducted by the whites who made up the bulk of the sociology department, Park, Burgess, and Wirth also attracted a highly capable group of African-American scholars, many of whom were to have distinguished careers in the social sciences. Among them were Charles S. Johnson, America's first professionally trained black sociologist, who later served as president of Fisk University. Another, E. Franklin Frazier, examined the combined issues of family and race in his 1932 study, The Negro Family in Chicago. Frazier subsequently taught at Howard University and was elected president of the American Sociological Association in 1948.

As an academic committed to social action, Louis Wirth became involved in numerous groups, committees, and associations concerned with the effects of racial prejudice on community life. He was a founder and president of the Chicago-based American Council on Race Relations, which sponsored research into problems of fair employment, education, housing, and integration. In 1947, with funds from the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations, Wirth also established the Committee on Education, Training, and Research in Race Relations at the University of Chicago. Led by Wirth, demographer Philip Hauser, and anthropologist Sol Tax, the committee played a key role in addressing the social and political factors underlying racial discrimination in the city of Chicago.