[The following note was placed on the bottom of page 5 of the text:

 "Note.--The demand for the original edition of the College-bred Negro having exhausted the copies at hand, the present abridged edition has been issued for further distribution. It contains most of the essential facts of the original edition, omitting many of the statistical tables and much of the personal testimony."]

 And Atlanta University seeks to become a centre for the careful, earnest and minute study of the Negro problems, through the experience and active cooperation of other graduates scattered all over the south. For this purpose we have established a department of social inquiry and an Annual Conference to study the Negro problem; we have been careful not to let the size of the field or the intricacy and delicacy of the subject tempt us into superficial or hasty work. Each year some definite phase of the problem is taken, the inquiry is limited in extent, and every effort is made to get thorough unbiased returns. To establish such a work with few funds, and untrained investigators was difficult, but to-day, after nine years of work, we feel as though the department was permanently organized for efficient work, and that interesting and instructive results will follow its further prosecution. The nine investigations already accomplished make a fairly well rounded study of human life as lived by the American Negro.
     [ . . . . ]
     The results of these studies have been widely used; they are in the chief libraries of the world and have been commended by the London Times, The Spectator, The Manchester Guardian, The Outlook, The Nation, The Dial, The Independent, and leading daily papers.
     While we believe that social inquiry of this sort is fully justified if it seeks merely to know and publish that knowledge, we have also sought in addition to this to inspire our graduates in various communities to use the information we collect as a basis of concrete efforts in social betterment, and we can already point to some results of this policy.

 THE foregoing illustrations afford only a glimpse of the work done by Atlanta University. The institution gives instruction in every grade of study, from the lowest class in the primary school to the highest class in college. It accompanies its instruction with a training of the hand in the fundamental principles of various trades and industries. It builds up moral and religious character in an earnestly Christian but strictly unsectarian spirit. It seeks to develop a self-reliant and self-sacrificing manhood and womanhood in those who are to be the leaders of eight millions of our people.
     The University has been in operation twenty years, under a Board of Trustees holding a charter from the State of Georgia. In the last sixteen years, it has sent out two hundred graduates from its Normal and College courses. Of those now living, seventy per cent are at present engaged in teaching; while, in the remaining thirty per cent, are to be found successful ministers, lawyers, doctors and business men, together with a number of married women who are training their children in refined and Christian homes of their own. Hundreds of past undergraduates are also doing similar work; while, of the six hundred present undergraduates, as many as two hundred teach vacation schools every summer, and reach as many as ten thousand children. Thus the leavening influence of the University is spread over Georgia and surrounding States.  [Unnumbered pages at the end of the book]
[. . . .]

    The University makes a specialty of the careful, scientific investigation of the social, educational, economic, and moral conditions of the Negro population, for the double purpose of supplying accurate information to students of social problems everywhere, and especially, for aiding and stimulating its graduates in efforts for social betterment. This work of Atlanta University has been highly commended by the London Spectator and the Southern History Association.  [p.22]

    In 1899, Atlanta University published a landmark study, "The Negro ln Business," the first attempt to assess the scope of black involvement in the free enterprise system in the 35 years since Emancipation. The study, edited by W. E. B. DuBois, reveals that, then as now, black aspirations for a share of the country's wealth could not be totally repressed by discrimination and political disadvantage.
    DuBois estimated that there were at least 5,000 black businesses in the country at the time of the study. Most of the 1,906 which responded to his extensive survey were located in the South, but 407 black entrepreneurs had gone west of the Mississippi, including 43 in California, 10 in the state of Washington, and 8 in Colorado.
    Not surprisingly, many of the businesses on the list were descended from skills learned in slavery. Valets became barbers; cooks became caterers, and storehouse keepers were transformed into storeowners. Many businesses were created to meet the needs of blacks living under strict segregation: undertakers, saloons, hotels, and restaurants. But there were also publishers, printers, druggists, wagonmakers, and blacksmiths. DuBois reported the existence of four black banks, several insurance companies, and 13 building and loan associations.
    "For a Negro to go into business means a great deal," wrote DuBois. "It is indeed a step in social progress worth measuring. It means hard labor, thrift in savings, a comprehension of social movements. and ability to learn a new vocation—all this taking place, not by concerted guided action, but spontaneously here and there, in hamlet and city, North and South."
    Four score years later, the words of DuBois continue to ring true. Black business has gone through cycles of prosperity and hard times. But those traditional businesses that prosper today have had to adjust to new political and economic circumstances that DuBois might not have imagined in l899. But he surely would have recognized the resilience and resourcefulness of these business people.  [p.198]

 Between 1895 and 1917 the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory made substantial contributions to the discipline of sociology, including the establishment of the first American school of sociology, institutionalization of method triangulation, institutionalization of the insider researcher, and institutionalization of the public acknowledgment of one's research. Despite these contributions that predate the Chicago School, the W. E. B. Du Bois led laboratory remains in the margins of American sociological discourse. This paper examines the contributions of the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory, offers explanations for the school's more than 100-year marginalization and examines its legacy in the discipline.

 While scholars are certainly aware that African American businesses existed, few are aware of the established and growing body of scholarship focused on this important field of business history. Since the late 1890s, scholars have interrogated the complex intersections of race and business. African American business historiography has taken a circuitous route; this essay attempts to periodize that historiography. It identifies five major periods and the major themes and points of contention within and between each period: Black Self-Determination, 1890s-1915; Golden Age of the Black Economic Nationalism, 1915-1935; Progressive Critique of Black Business, 1935-1960s; Black Political Economy, 1970-1980s; and Revisionist Period, 1990s to Present. The essay considers why African American business has been slower to materialize in relation to other areas of scholarship outside the field of business history—and within it. Finally, it offers conjectures about the future of the historiography of African American business.

 "The IBW with the help of Walter Rodney carried out Du Bois's legacy of applied scholarly activism. More important, the trajectory outlined by W.E.B. Du Bois, the IBW, and Walter Rodney provide examples of the responsibility for the next generations of intellectual-activists who desire to create a more humane world." (14th page)