Aldon Morris - The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology

The origins of this book lie in my childhood in the heartland of Jim Crow racism in rural Tutwiler, Mississippi, where I was born in 1949. As a boy, I experienced and witnessed black life in the Deep South of the 1950s, drinking from the colored water fountain and receiving ice cream through the small shutter in back of the segregated Dairy Queen. I attended the small, colored elementary school, where during fall terms my classmates, who had not yet reached puberty, disappeared for several months to pick cotton so their families could survive. I was aware in the early hours of fall mornings that white men drove pickup trucks to the black side of town and loaded blacks to drop off on farms. I remember in blistering hot weather how whites sat under shade trees while we worked the fields dripping sweat from sunup to sundown. Yet, with all the backbreaking work, we never had enough to eat or adequate clothes to wear. As a young child, I tried to make sense of why we had it so bad while white children seemed to have it all. As an adult I now understand that I experienced a predicament that Du Bois had conceptualized as a caste system and a new slavery of debt peonage.

There was also fear and violence, both of which I experienced through the indoctrination of Jim Crow rules early in life. Those rules dictated how blacks were to respond to whites with deference, respect, and formality. They prescribed how black males were to act toward white women, including looking downward when in their presence and crossing the street when approaching them. Violating Jim Crow rules either out of ignorance or deliberately could result in severe punishment, including death. I also sensed the presence of fear and violence through hearing adults whispering about the horrors of blacks hanging from trees. They knew exactly what Billie Holiday meant when she sadly wailed, Southern trees bear a strange fruit, / Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, / Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, / Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees. One of my earliest memories was the 1955 lynching of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, a Chicagoan visiting Money, Mississippi, located less than thirty miles from my home. I am a member of what sociologist and freedom fighter Joyce Ladner coined the Emmett Till Generation, blacks traumatized by the lynching, which left a lasting imprint. When I was six years old his murder rudely awakened me to racism and prompted the question of why whites could commit such a terrible crime against a boy not much older than I was. Caste, peonage debt, and racial violence became an enduring emotional and intellectual obsession that I sought to understand from a young age.

As a member of the last generation migrating northward in search of the Promised Land, I arrived in Chicago at the age of thirteen with my family. Shocked that Chicago had many features associated with Mississippi, I came to realize that being north of the Mason-Dixon line meant only that discrimination was more subtle and sometimes hidden. In fact, residential segregation in Chicago was even worse than that in Mississippi. Not long after our fishtailed 1957 Plymouth pulled up to my new residence on the South Side, I recognized that our northern home was in the all-black section of the Morgan Park community east of Vincennes Avenue and that it was clearly unequal to the all-white section of the Morgan Park and Beverley communities west of Vincennes. These inequalities were stamped in my consciousness as I cut grass and shoveled snow at the home of a wealthy white family while my mother cooked and cleaned their house. As fall set in, I found myself in the all-black Shoop Elementary School, although some of our teachers were whites and my new northern classmates ridiculed and disobeyed them in ways unimaginable to a southern boy. There were stark inequities between the schools in white and black communities. Because Morgan Park High School, which I had been about to attend, was predominantly white, officials intent on preventing a black invasion transformed my middle school into a Shoop Branch of Morgan Park, forestalling my entrance into the real high school by a year. In my own family life, my brother, Freddie, and I learned to anticipate fights when we crossed the color line to shop in the Evergreen Mall, located in the all-white Evergreen Park community. Shouts of Niggers go home and the harassment of aggressive white gangs became all too familiar.