• "Unlike most studies of black intellectuals, this one systematically illuminates the position of black scholars on the class rather than race question during the industrial era. . . . This is an exceedingly worthwhile contribution. It will help frame future discussions of African American and U. S. labor and working-class history."
—Joe W. Trotter, Carnegie Mellon University, author of The African American Experience

• "In an age when scholars working on black intellectuals seem to be satisfied with sweeping reassessments of the 'usual suspects,' often cast in the most current postmodern terminology, Wilson offers up something brand-new. Every page of Segregated Scholars either brings new insight into the ‘turn’ to the study of the black working class during the early twentieth century or brings to our attention key black intellectuals whose contributions have gone unnoticed—the latter almost entirely black women social scientists."
—Robin D. G. Kelley, Columbia University, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
 

The Segregated Scholars:
Black Social Scientists and the Creation of Black Labor Studies, 1890-1950
Francille Rusan Wilson
Foreword by William Julius Wilson
352 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
15 b&w illustrations
Print-on-demand paperback 978-0-8139-2788-6 • $22.50
Carter G. Woodson Institute Series
Order a Lightning Source print-on-demand copy


In Segregated Scholars Francille Rusan Wilson explores the lives and work of fifteen black labor historians and social scientists as seen through the prisms of gender, class, and time. This collective biography offers complex and vital portraits of these seminal figures, many of whom knew and worked with each other, following them through their educations, their often groundbreaking work in economic and labor studies, and their invaluable public advocacy.

The careers Wilson considers include many of the most brilliant of their eras. She sheds new light on the interplay of the professional and political commitments of W. E. B. Du Bois, Abram L. Harris, Robert C. Weaver, Carter G. Woodson, George E. Haynes, Charles H. Wesley, R. R. Wright Jr.—a succession of scholars bent on replacing myths and stereotypes regarding black labor with rigorous research and analysis.

Equally important is the special emphasis Wilson places on little-known female social scientists such as Gertrude McDougald, Emma Shields Penn, and Elizabeth Haynes. The result is more than simply a balanced picture; it is an act of recovery. Many of Wilson's portraits are the most extensive available. Their extraordinary lives are an opportunity to examine the ways in which labor history—and, more broadly, women’s and black intellectual history—have developed as separate and parallel discourses and disciplines.

Segregated Scholars makes a crucial and unprecedented contribution to our understanding of the black intellectual heritage, as well as the history of the social sciences, and of many of the practices and policies with which we now live and work.


Francille Rusan Wilson is Associate Professor of African American Studies at the University of Maryland.

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