Illustrated Souls of Black Folk

Toward a fusion of two lines of thought: creating convergence between Aldo Leopold and sociology through the community concept

“…17 Du Bois presents a nuanced, place-based concept of community in his classic work, The Souls of Black Folk, which he wrote in 1903, as a product of five dimensions of action and communication in a geographic area. The critical element is meaningful social interaction between people of various backgrounds living in proximity, the lack thereof being an important contributor to racial segregation and inequality (Du Bois (2005[1903), as opposed to theories of cultural or biological inferiority peddled by Park and other human ecologists (Morris 2015). 18 Moving ahead, the marginalization of the sociological concept of community and criticism of place-oriented approaches to it as being parochial, deterministic, and outdated (e.g., Cope et al 2016) have led some scholars to retain the elements that they deemed most relevant but unshackle them from the strictures of place.…”

“…18 Writing about the lack of community development between white and black people in the Southern USA, Du Bois (2005Bois ( [1903) argues, "despite much physical contact and daily intermingling, there is almost no community of intellectual life or point of transference where the thoughts and feelings of one race can come into direct contact and sympathy with the thoughts and feelings of the other" (p. 228). Similar to Du Bois being acknowledged primarily for being the first major sociologist of color, Mead's associate Jane Addams, credited as the founder of social work (but also seen as an unheralded founder of sociology by some, e.g., White and White 2019), and Harriet Martineau, known as the first female sociologist, are generally recognized as important to the history of the field primarily because of their gender, also made substantive contributions that could enrich sociological community (ibid., Warren 2008).…”

Race, Rare Genetic Variants, and the Science of Human Difference in the Post‐Genomic Age

“…Not all late nineteenth and early twentieth century scholars agreed with the inclinations of the aforementioned; Anténor Firmin, Franz Boas, and W.E.B. Du Bois, for example, while not denying the existence of racial difference, challenged hierarchical notions of race (Boas ; Du Bois ; Firmin ). During the times that Firmin, Boas, and Du Bois were active, the scientific evidence to support the nonbiological basis to race did not yet exist.…”