ABSTRACT

William Edward Burghardt DuBois (1868-1963) was one of the first American criminologists to be formally trained in sociology. He first attended Fisk University, an all-black institution in Nashville, Tenn.; then he transferred to Harvard, where he studied with some of the country’s most eminent social scientists; and finally he studied in Europe for two years with Max Weber, the great German sociologist. While still young, DuBois was commissioned by white Philadelphia reformers to undertake a study of Negro life in their city; this became his book The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. Looking back in 1940, DuBois wrote of this work:

The fact was that the city of Philadelphia at that time had a theory; and that theory was that this great, rich, and famous municipality was going to the dogs because of the crime and venality of its Negro citizens, who lived largely centered in the slum at the lower end of the seventh ward. Philadelphia wanted to prove this by figures and I was the man to do it. Of this theory back of the plan, I neither knew nor cared. I saw only here a chance to study an historical group of black folk and to show exactly what their place was in the community. . . . [The study] revealed the Negro group as a symptom, not a cause; as a striving, palpitating group, and not an inert, sick body of crime; as a long historic development and not a transient occurrence.1