A credit to the race or a race man? Studying Sociology

Chicago’s most famous early African American alumni were sociologists: Monroe Nathan Work, Charles Johnson, E. Franklin Frazier, Horace Cayton, St. Clair Drake, and Allison Davis. They studied with white social scientists like Albion Small, W. I. Thomas, Charles R. Henderson, Robert Park, Robert Redfield, and Louis Wirth, who themselves had principal research interests in race.

As Professor Kenneth Warren puts it, “It is arguable that the School of Sociology here at the University of Chicago . . . invented the modern study of race, and conversely, that the modern study of race invented the School of Sociology.”

Charles Johnson’s study of the 1919 Chicago race riots, The Negro in Chicago, became the leading model for future commission reports (see Future Intellectuals: Georgiana Simpson section). Similarly, Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake’s monumental Black Metropolis (1945), a landmark study of black and urban life, remains in print today.

The Chicago School of Sociology was, however, controversial. Here is the 1944 Journal of Negro History obituary for Robert Park:

Dr. Park had many qualities to be admired. He was serious, methodical and practical in his approach to men and things. He was not the least emotional. He had no love for the Negro as such. He was merely interested in the Negro and his problems as he was in the plight and problems of other elements of the social order....

In all his contact with the Negroes of this country and others abroad, however, Dr. Park failed to understand the race thoroughly. In his theory of the conflict and fusion of cultures he insisted that the American Negro retained little of what he brought from Africa except his temperament. Negro and white scholars who have recently studied the race in both hemispheres have uprooted this theory.

Unfortunately, emotional Negroes trained under Dr. Park at the University of Chicago have carried this theory to the extreme and insist that the Negro is a race without a culture. Dr. Park, however, was not guilty of such extravagant statement. He merely failed to analyze properly what he observed among Negroes.

	2. Opportunity, a journal of Negro life. Vol. 4, no. 38, 1926. General Collections.
	3. Horace Cayton, eulogy of Robert Park, July 30, 1944. Robert Ezra Park Collection.
	5. Allison Davis, final version of Ph.D. thesis proposal, “The Operation of Color Caste in the Plantation Economic System of a Black County in Mississippi,” [ca. 1940]. Allison Davis Papers.