"If we admit the deep importance of the Negro problems, the neces­sity of studying them, and certain shortcomings in work done up to this time, it would seem to be the clear duty of the American people, in the interests of scientific knowledge and social reform, to begin a broad and systematic study of the history and condition of the Ameri­can Negroes."

"Now the work of the next fifty years is to bring theory and practice in sociology nearer together, to connect more logically the statement and the demonstration and to make in truth the science of human action a true and systematic statement of the verifiable facts as ascertained by observation and measurement.

"Now to bring about this result it is certain that we cannot at once compass all human action in time and eternity — the field is too vast and much valuable time has already been wasted in trying to do the impossible under the brilliant but questionable leadership of Herbert Spencer. We must more and more school ourselves to the minute study of limited fields of human action, or observation and accurate measurement are possible and where real illuminating knowledge can be had. The careful exhaustive study of the isolated group then is the ideal of the sociologist of the 20th century — from that may come a real knowledge of natural law as locally manifest — a glimpse and revelation of rhythm beyond this little center and at last careful, cautious generalization and formulation."

[...]  "I determined to put science into sociology through a study of the condition and problems of my own group.

"I was going to study the facts, any and all facts, concerning the American Negro and his plight, and by measurement and comparison and research, work up to any valid generalization which I could. I entered this primarily with the utilitarian object of reform and uplift; but nevertheless, I wanted to do the work with scientific accuracy. Thus, in my own sociology, because of firm belief in a changing racial group, I easily grasped the idea of a changing developing society rather than a fixed social structure."

"The study of the Negro as a social group may be, for convenience, divided into four not exactly logical but seemingly most practicable divisions, viz:

1. Historical study.

2. Statistical investigation.

3. Anthropological measurement.

4. Sociological interpretation."

"How far are Negro children being educated to-day in the public schools of the South and how far is the effort to curtail that training increasingly successful?

"How far are Negroes leaving the farms and rushing to the cities to escape work and how far to escape slavery?

"How far is this race designated as Negroes the descendants of African slaves and how far is it descended from the most efficient white blood of the nation?

"What does actual physical and social measurement prove as to the status of these descendants of black men?

"All these are fundamental questions. Not a single valid conclusion as to the future can be absolutely insisted upon without definite skillful scientific answers to these questions and yet not a single systematic effort to answer these questions on an adequate scale has been made in these United States from 1619 to 1909. Not only this but on all sides opposition ranging from indifference and reluctance to actual force is almost universal when any attempt to study the Negro problem adequately is proposed."  [....]

"The book most constantly referred to is Mayo-Smith's "Statistics and Sociology," and after that the United States censuses. Our main object in this year of work is to find out what characteristics of human life can be known, classified and compared. Students are expected to know what the average death-rate of American negroes is, how it varies, and what it means when compared with the death-rates of other peoples and classes. When they learn by search in the census and their own mathematical calculations that 30 per cent of the negroes of New York City are twenty to thirty years of age, they immediately set to work to explain this anomaly, and so on. A large part of their work consists of special reports, in which the results of first-hand study of some locality or some characteristic of negro life are compared with general conditions in the United States and Europe. Thus in a way we measure the negro problem."  ["Negro" was not capitalized in the original]

"1896, Mortality among Negroes in Cities

1897, Social and Physical Condition of Negroes in Cities

1898, Some Efforts of Negroes for Social Betterment

1899, The Negro in Business

1900, The College-Bred Negro

1901, The Negro Common School

1902, The Negro Artisan

1903, The Negro Church

1904, Notes on Negro Crime

1905, A Select Bibliography of the American Negro

"I then essayed for the second decade a broader program, more logical, more inclusive, and designed to bring the whole subject matter into a better integrated whole. But continued lack of funds and outside diversions (like the request of the Carnegie Institution of 1907 for a study of co-operation) kept even the second decade from the complete logic of arrangement which I desired; finally, my leaving Atlanta in 1910 and at last the severing of my connection with the conference in 1914, left the full form of my program still unfinished. I did, however, publish the following eight studies:

1906, Health and Physique of the Negro American

1907, Economic Co-operation among Negro Americans

1908, The Negro American Family

1909, Efforts for Social Betterment among Negro Americans

1910, The College-Bred Negro American

1911, The Common School and the Negro American

1912, The Negro American Artisan

1914, Morals and Manners among Negro Americans

"With the publication of 1914, my connection with Atlanta ceased for 20 years. Although studies and publications were prepared by others at the university in 1915 and 1918, the war finally stopped the enterprise."

"In fact no one knows himself but that self's own soul. The vast and wonderful knowledge of this marvelous universe is locked in the bosoms of its individual souls. To tap this mighty reservoir of experience, knowledge, beauty, love, and deed we must appeal not to the few, not to some souls, but to all."  [OROM 1920: ¶ 20; capi­tal­i­za­tion in the original]

"I believe that what we need today is a frank admission of the limitations of scientific knowledge and a frank effort to lay down reasonable rules of logic in dealing with the unknown and the un-knowable world. As it is we are hampered by a Science which claims universality, and a Philosophy which seeks to come to grips with science on its own chosen and conquered territory."  [LCH 1943; capitalization in the original; "un-knowable" was hyphenated in the original]

"I assumed that Truth was only partially known but that it was ultimately largely knowable, although perhaps in part forever Unknowable." [LHA 1956: 394-395; capitalization in the original]

"The average American community of to-day has grown by a slow, intricate and hesitating advance through four overlapping eras. First, there is the struggle for sheer physical existence — a struggle still waging among the submerged tenth, but settled for a majority of the community long years ago. Above this comes the accumulation for future subsistence — the saving and striving and transmuting of goods for use in days to come — a stage reached to-day tentatively for the middle classes and to an astounding degree by a few. Then in every community there goes on from the first, but with larger and larger emphasis as the years fly, some essay to train the young into the tradition of the fathers — their religion, thought and tricks of doing. And, finally, as the group meets other groups and comes into larger spiritual contact with nations, there is that trans­fer­ence and sifting and accumulation of the elements of human culture which makes for wider civi­li­za­tion and higher development. These four steps of subsistence, accumu­la­tion, education and culture-contact are not disconnected, discreet stages."

•

"The Negroes of Farmville, Virginia" (NFVA 1898);

•

The Philadelphia Negro (TPN 1899);

•

"The Negro in the Black Belt" (NBBS 1899);

•

"The Negro Landholder of Georgia" (NLGA 1901); and

•

Atlanta University Publications (AUPs 1896-1916).

From Du Bois's works we can read, among others:

•

"The Conservation of Races" (TCOR 1897);

•

The Souls of Black Folk (SBF 1903);

•

The Gift of Black Folk (GBF 1924);

•

Black Reconstruction (BREC 1935); and

•

Black Folk, Then and Now (BLFO 1939).

From other scholars we can read, for example:

•

Lucius Outlaw 2010; and

•

Cornel West 2003.

"Students must be careful to insist that science as such — be it physics, chemistry, psychology, or sociology — has but one simple aim: the discovery of truth. Its results lie open for the use of all men — merchants, physicians, men of letters, and philan­thro­pists, but the aim of science itself is simple truth. Any attempt to give it a double aim, to make social reform the immediate instead of the mediate object of a search for truth, will inevitably tend to defeat both objects. The frequent alliance of sociological research with various panaceas and particular schemes of reform, has resulted in closely con­necting social inves­ti­ga­tion with a good deal of groundless assumption and humbug in the popular mind. There will be at first some difficulty in bringing the Southern people, both black and white, to conceive of an earnest, careful study of the Negro problem which has not back of it some scheme of race amal­ga­ma­tion, political jobbery, or deportation to Africa. The new study of the American Negro must avoid such misap­prehensions from the outset, by insisting that historical and statistical research has but one object, the ascertainment of the facts as to the social forces and conditions of one-eighth of the inhabitants of the land. Only by such rigid adherence to the true object of the scholar, can statesmen and philan­thro­pists of all shades of belief be put into possession of a reliable body of truth which may guide their efforts to the best and largest success."  [SNP 1898: ¶ 35]

"What I was laboriously but steadily approaching in this effort was a recurring cycle of ten studies in succeeding decades; with repetition of each subject or some modi­fi­ca­tion of it in each decade, upon a progressively broader and more exact basis and with better method; until gradually a foundation of carefully ascertained fact would build a basis of knowledge, broad and sound enough to be called scientific in the best sense of that term.

"Just what form this dream would eventually have taken, I do not know. So far as actually forecast, it had assumed in 1914, some such form as this:

1. Population: Distribution and Growth

2. Biology: Health and Physique

3. Socialization: Family, Group and Class

4. Cultural Patterns: Morals and Manners

5. Education

6. Religion and the Church

7. Crime

8. Law and Government

9. Literature and Art

10. Summary and Bibliography

"I proposed as I have said, to repeat each of these every ten years, basing the studies on ever broader and more carefully gathered data. Eventually I hoped to keep all the inquiries going simultaneously, only emphasizing and reporting on one particular subject each year. This would have allowed some necessary shifting or combination of subjects as time and developments might suggest; and adjustments to new scientific advance in fields like anthropology and psychology. The plan would have called in time for a large and well-paid staff of experts and a study of method and testing of results such as no group of Americans were engaged in at the time; beginning with a definite, circumscribed group, but ending with the human race. If it could have been carried out even imperfectly and with limitations, who can doubt its value today, not only to the Negro, but to America and to the still troubled science of sociology?"

"I want then to mention briefly the steps which groups of men have usually taken in their forward struggling, and to ask which of these steps the Negroes of the United States have taken and how far they have gone. In such comparisons we cannot, unfortunately, have the aid of exact statistics, for actual measurement of social phenomena is peculiar to the Nineteenth century — that is, to an age when the culture Nations were full-grown, and we can only roughly indicate conditions in the days of their youth. A certain youth and childhood is common to all men in their mingled striving. Everywhere, glancing across the seas of human history, we note it."

"It may well be asked, and as one who has done some historical research I join in the asking, why should one tamper with history at all in order to write truth? The answer of course is Never, if exact truth can otherwise be ascertained. But every historian is painfully aware how little the scientist today can know accu­rately of the past; how dependence on documents and memory leaves us all with the tale of the past half told or less. The temptation then comes to pretend we know far more than we do and to set down as accurate history that which is not demonstrably true. To me it seems wiser and fairer to interpret historical truth by the use of creative imagination, provided the method is acknowledged and clear.

"When in this world we seek the truth about what men have thought and felt and done, we face insuperable difficulties. We seldom can see enough of human action at first hand to interpret it properly. We can never know current personal thought and emotion with sufficient understanding rightly to weigh its cause and effect. After action and feeling and reflection are long past, then from writing and memory we may secure some picture of the total truth, but it will be sorely imperfect, with much omitted, much forgotten, much distorted."

[4]  "This is the eternal paradox of history. There is but one way to meet this clouding of facts and that is by the use of imagination where documented material and personal experience are lacking.

[5]  "In the great tragedy of Negro slavery in the United States and its aftermath, much of documented history is lacking because of the deep feeling involved and the fierce desire of men to defend their fathers and themselves. This I have sought to correct in my study of the slave trade and of Reconstruction. If I had had time and money, I would have continued this pure historical research. But this opportunity failed and Time is running out. Yet I would rescue from my long experience something of what I have learned and conjectured and thus I am trying by the method of historical fiction to complete the cycle of history which has for a half century engaged my thought, research and action.

[6]  "I have personally lived through much of the history of the American Negro from 1876 to 1956. Yet wide as my experience has been, by travel, seeing, hearing and knowing, I of course actually knew but an infinitesimal fraction of all that happened. The gaps of knowledge I can in part supply by the memory of others, by reading published and unpublished matter. Yet with all this I am far from being able to set down an accurate historical account of those fatal eighty years.

[7]  "Therefore I have assayed first to gather such verifiable facts as I can. This body of knowledge I have compared with the reports of others. But even with all this, much, indeed most, is missing: just what men thought, the actual words they used, the feelings and motives which impelled them — those I do not know and most of them none will ever know. These facts are gone forever. But it is possible for the creative artist to imagine something of such unknown truth. If he is lucky or inspired, he may write a story which may set down a fair version of the truth of an era, or a group of facts about human history.

[8]  "This I have attempted to do: adhering as closely as I can to historic fact so far as I can ascertain. I have added the fiction of interpretation so as to make a reasonable story. I may have blundered in places; I may have widely misinter­preted what seemed truth to me. But I have tried and I believe the effort was worth while."

"When a social policy based on a supposed scientific sanction leads to such a moral anomaly it is time to examine rather carefully the logical foundations of the argument. And so soon as we do this many things are clear. First, assuming that there are certain stocks of human beings whose elimination the best welfare of the world demands; it is certainly questionable if these stocks include the majority of mankind and it is indefen­si­ble and monstrous to pretend that we know to-day with any reasonable certainty which these stocks are. We can point to degenerate individuals and families here and there among all races, but there is not the slightest warrant for assuming that there do not exist among the Chinese and Hindus, the African Bantus and American Indians as lofty possibilities of human culture as any European race has ever exhibited."

"Now in both these things there are certain facts that are naturally indisputable. The first is that science, organized human knowledge, does not pretend to give a complete answer to the riddle of the universe. It frankly acknowledges that there are a great many things that we do not know and perhaps never can know. The right of any person to go beyond this scientific position and say that they believe certain things to be true, even though they cannot prove them is undoubted. It may lead down to the petty super­sti­tion of avoiding black cats or it may lead up to the belief in a divine personal ruler of the universe. It may be criticized as dangerous to logic and mental integrity for a person to assume too much beyond what can be proven. But to this there is a valid answer in saying that all the time we are making certain assump­tions; we are assuming that the world which we see and hear and touch is the real world. We are assuming that the sun will rise tomor­row as it did yesterday[.] Life is largely and must be a series of assump­tions. In so far as these assump­tions are confirmed by the recurrent happenings of the world, we have a right to assume that they are approximately true. But we must even go beyond this. There is, for instance, faith in the triumph of good deeds; hope that the world will grow better; love of our relatives and our neighbors and of all humanity.

"It would be difficult to adduce scientific proof that these hopes and faiths are justified, and still there is good reason for our assuming that they are and guiding our conduct accordingly."

"What the age of Darwin has done is to add to the eighteenth century idea of individual worth the complementary idea of physical immortality of the human race. And this, far from annulling or contracting the idea of human freedom, rather emphasizes its necessity and eternal possibility — the boundlessness and endlessness of possible human achievement. Freedom has come to mean not individual caprice or aberration but social self-realization in an endless chain of selves, and freedom for such devel­op­ment is not the denial but the central assertion of the revolu­tionary theory. So, too, the doctrine of human equality passes through the fire of scientific inquiry not obliterated but transfigured; not equality of present attainment but equality of oppor­tu­ni­ty for unbounded future attainment is the rightful demand of mankind."

"We admit that clear knowledge of Things is the best way to understanding. Yet an embarrassing question may here be asked: What do we really know of the Things we think about if indeed there are any real Things beyond our thought of them? Common sense comes to support Science and says, let us act as though this outer world really exists and proceed to know and measure it. On this hypothesis we build up a world of mass and energy which moves in Time and Space and shows astonishing regularities. Indeed, last century we had reached the place where we believed we were on the track of the Universal Laws of action among Things and closing in on analogous laws governing all life, vegetable, animal and human. Then in our day came a halting.

"This moving mass, at one end infinitely small and at the other a vast reach of stars, with earth between, when interrogated not only refused to exhibit the same regularities, but differed widely and disturbingly. They contradicted each other so that at least among the atoms we could speak only of Probability and even of sheer Chance which the pre-scientific students had rather infelicitously called Free Will. Time and Space seemed to be but aspects of one Thing and the universe could only be explained scientifically if we mathematically assumed that we had measured what was at present Unmeasurable unless and until we know what is now apparently Unknowable.

"All this the oldest, exact scientist resented, the Priest ridiculed, but the mathe­ma­ti­cian proved true by splitting and fusing atoms; while bending rays of light and blending motion and mass. All of which challenges the present day student. In this complex the present conference, as I understand, takes its place. It will, so far as it can, measure human conduct in a distinct and controlled area and there either discover Law or delimit the boundaries of Chance."  [Capitalization in the original]

"In fact no one knows himself but that self's own soul. The vast and wonderful knowledge of this marvelous universe is locked in the bosoms of its individual souls. To tap this mighty reservoir of experience, knowledge, beauty, love, and deed we must appeal not to the few, not to some souls, but to all. The narrower the appeal, the poorer the culture; the wider the appeal the more magnificent are the possibilities. Infinite is human nature. We make it finite by choking back the mass of men, by attempting to speak for others, to interpret and act for them, and we end by acting for ourselves and using the world as our private property. If this were all, it were crime enough — but it is not all: by our ignorance we make the creation of the greater world impossible; we beat back a world built of the playing of dogs and laughter of children, the song of Black Folk and worship of Yellow, the love of women and strength of men, and try to express by a group of doddering ancients the Will of the World."  [Capitalization in the original]

[...]  "The real realm of freedom was found in experience to be much narrower than this in one direction and much broader in another. In matters of Truth and Faith and Beauty, the Ancient Law was inexcusably strait and modern law unforgivably stupid. It is here that the future and mighty fight for Freedom must and will be made. Here in the heavens and on the mountaintops, the air of Freedom is wide, almost limitless, for here, in the highest stretches, individual freedom harms no man, and, therefore, no man has the right to limit it." [Excerpted from ¶ 56]

"On the other hand, in the valleys of the hard, unyielding laws of matter and the social necessities of time production, and human intercourse, the limits on our freedom are stern and unbending if we would exist and thrive. This does not say that everything here is governed by incontrovertible "natural" law which needs no human decision as to raw materials, machinery, prices, wages, news-dissem­i­na­tion, education of children, etc.; but it does mean that decisions here must be limited by brute facts and based on science and human wants."  [¶ 57]