Racism, W.E.B. Du Bois and the global color line

An interview with professor Aldon Morris

Professor Aldon Morris, a scholar on social movements, civil rights, and social inequality has been visiting the SNS during the month of May. Morris is also known for his research on W.E.B: Du Bois, the topic of his lecture at the Istituto Ciampi. Morris was also the 2021 president of the American Sociological Association. We have met him to discuss his work, starting with some personal stories that have played a role in the issues he went on to study.

“I grew up in a small town in Mississippi before moving to Chicago at the age of 13. As a young boy in the South, I experienced Jim Crow segregation firsthand: I had to sit at the back of the bus, use an inferior “colored waiting room” at bus stations, and was not allowed inside an ice cream store — black customers had to go around the back to be served. I also witnessed the deep economic inequality of the time, with most black people working as sharecroppers for white plantation owners, what Du Bois described as a new form of slavery. When I moved to Chicago, I quickly realized that “oh my goodness”, the race problem is not something unique to the South. For sure there was less in your face racism, but the city was heavily segregated by neighborhood and schools”.

During all those years you were following, as a kid, the civil rights movement

Indeed. The first protests that I remember was 1957. This was when nine black high schoolers managed to enroll in Little Rock High School. Then the marches. I was a kid and I followed through radio and Tv. When I went to community college in Chicago I was introduced to sociology and I discovered that sociologists studied protest movements. So that was just it for me.

Your first studies were on the civil rights movement

The scholars who had studied the civil rights movement were largely white scholars. They had a real top-down approach to the movement. You know, “the agency came from elsewhere outside of the black community”, either it was because of a Congress that was changing about race, or the presidency or the courts and so on. Anyway, I studied the civil rights movement interviewing almost pretty much all of the major people around Martin Luther King. Some people call them his lieutenants. I interviewed many, many organizers of the movement. This is how I developed my perspective.

Tell us about the places where the movement grew: churches

Churches were not the only places but played a crucial role because of the racism that existed in the United States during slavery and then during the Jim Crow period. The only place where Black people had some power was in the Black churches. This is where people met. This is where they felt free to express themselves. This was a place where they organized themselves. This is a place that gave them the hope to go on and where they acted collectively to achieve major goals. It was a sanctuary from the hostility of the larger white society. The Civil Rights Movement was going to be organized through the churches because the church has a mass base.

How did you meet Du Bois?

I started to read about Du Bois independently. Being Black and a sociologist, I wanted to know more about this guy. I made a promise to myself in grad school, though it was not taught, that I was going to set the record straight, that I was going to write a book on Du Bois. During my work I discovered that Du Bois wasn’t just a sociologist but one of the founders of sociology. He was a contemporary of Émile Durkheim and Max Weber. What I set out to do was to show that he was a thinker at the same level as these European founders of sociology.

I would say about that, I’ve been fortunate in my academic career. When I wrote the book on the civil rights movement, it had been enough time since the heyday of the movement that, it still needed to be analyzed differently than what had been done until that moment. The same thing has happened with Du Bois. When I wrote The Scholar Denied it made a big splash right away because it was a new way to reconstruct the origins of sociology in America. In the United States, sociology, had been argued to have been founded at the university of Chicago. That’s what sociologists grew up on. And so here comes Morris that criticizes this narrative claiming that the first major school of sociology was by this black guy at a black university in Atlanta, Georgia. And I went on to show how his research and writings was in many ways superior to the white sociologists at the university of Chicago, how it had a different perspective.

Another thing that really attracted me to Du Bois is that, Du Bois was not merely an academic. He was not just a scholar. He was a major, major activist of the 20th century, one of the founders of the civil rights movement, a founder of the Pan-African movement, a very important participant in the international peace movement. And so, he was a guy that is this prodigious scholar and a prodigious activist, he did them all the same time. He also wrote novels and poetry. It is just an amazing, figure.

There is a moment in which Du Bois “discovers” Marxism. You claim that you cannot call him a Marxist (while other scholars do). Why is that? 

Du Bois was initially a scholar of racial inequality. And a lot of people, including scholars, view him as someone who just studied racism in the United States. But from the very beginning, he argued that what he called the color line was global. He made this statement in his 1903 book, The souls of black folks, in which he said that the problem of the 20th century would be the problem of the color line.

And he went on to talk about it not just being something American, but something that had an impact throughout Africa, Asia, Europe. Very early on had a worldview of the problem of racism and wrote about it. Then in the 1930s, he was, directly, introduced to, Marx and, and read The Capital. He read Marx and acknowledged the way that economics is a real driving force in societies and that class relations are fundamental. Reading Marx gave him a clearer sense of the origins and the dynamics of capitalism.

He then integrates a Marxian perspective into his scholarship and into his activism. What you hear today from many scholars is that Du Bois completely changed the way he analyzed societies, after reading Marx. So, he’d be no longer the Du Bois we knew, but that he underwent what they call an epistemological break from just studying race and seeing race as a real driving force. I and others think that what he actually did was that he looked deeply at the relationship between race and capitalism and argue that racial inequality is a real driving force of capitalism, worldwide, and that you cannot understand capitalism largely only by looking at class and what Marx called the class struggle, that you have to take into account how class and race intersect and interact.

For Du Bois, race remain a driving force of societies, you have class stratification and you have racial stratification. And if you don’t see them as a combined system, then you, you won’t understand what’s going on in any kind of, a comprehensive way. From my perspective, Du Bois read Marx, absorbed Marx, his writings, his worldviews and then revised it, didn’t just take it, as a gospel or a doctrine, but revised it and, modified it, to fit the modern world and the role that race and class combined, play.

I think that this reading of DuBois as becoming Marxist is due to a prejudice. It’s very hard for white people and white scholars to really see black people as like independent thinkers, great thinkers. And so, when they come across great thinkers, they have to say some white man played a key role in producing them. Therefore, you have this interpretation of Bu Bois becoming a great thinker after reading Marx. In this reading the Du Bois modified and innovated Marxist, analysis is played down.

Today what is happening to a certain degree is that Du Bois is being written into the canon. There was even a major documentary that aired on PBS a few weeks ago. A lot of people are learning about Du Bois from this two-hour documentary.

Du Bois writes about the color line which seems to be more visible again

He was a scholar of race in the United States, they claim. But from the very beginning, he argued that the color line, what he called the color line was global.  Very early on, he had a worldview of the problem of racism and wrote a lot about it. And yes, I think that with some measures taken in Southern States after a Supreme Court ruling that is an attack on the Voting rights act of 1965, the color line is nowadays more visible than in the recent past. It’s not just voting rights, it is diversity programs and books. Many of our books and articles having to do with slavery and the Jim Crow years, or with inequality in general, are being banned. In the state of Florida, the introductory textbook sociology textbook has been rewritten by authors that were appointed by the state and are not sociologists.

I think that a lot of black people are feeling under assault, that they must come up with some way to fight or it is not unimaginable, that we will go back to the days of Jim Crow in many ways.  I think it’s important to stress that there are many whites in the United States who are against what is happening.