Historian, journalist, educator, and civil rights advocate W. E. B. Du Bois was perhaps most accomplished as a sociologist of race relations and of the black community in the United States. This volume collects his most important sociological writings from 1898 to 1910. The eighteen selections include five on Du Bois's conception of sociology and sociological research, especially as a tool in the struggle for racial justice; excerpts from studies of black communities in the South and the North, including The Philadelphia Negro; writings on black culture and social life, with a selection from The Negro American Family; and later works on race relations in the United States and elsewhere after World War II. This section includes a powerful fiftieth-anniversary reassessment of his classic 1901 article in the Atlantic in which he predicted that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line."

Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction

Dan S. Green, Edwin D. Driver.

I: The Tasks of Sociology

1: The Atlanta Conferences
2: The Laboratory in Sociology at Atlanta University
3: The Twelfth Census and the Negro Problems
4: The Study of the Negro Problems
5: The Negro Race in the United States of America

II: Community Studies

6: The Philadelphia Negro
7: The Black North in 1901: New York
8: The Negroes of Dougherty County, Georgia
9: The Negroes of Farmville, Virginia

III: Black Culture and Creativity

10: The Negro American Family
11: The Religion of the American Negro
12: The Problem of Amusement
13: The Conservation of Races

IV: Changing Patterns of Racial Relations

14: The Relations of the Negroes to the Whites in the South
15: The Social Evolution of the Black South
16: The Problem of the Twentieth Century Is the Problem of the Color
Line
17: Prospect of a World without Race Conflict

Notes
Selected Bibliography of W. E. B. Du Bois
Index