ABSTRACT
In 1903, William Edward Burghart Du Bois published the work for which he is most well-known, his eloquent classic and landmark in the literature of Black protest, The Souls of Black Folk. In it, he argues that the color line divided American society into two social worlds, one black and one white, and placed a veil between the them, setting off one from the other and filtering the information which passed between the two. Through his early work as a sociologist, Du Bois single-handedly initiated a tradition of serious empirical research on Black America, which had previously remained hidden behind the veil, unpenetrated by American sociology. Du Bois turned the Atlanta Conference into a systematic scientific study of the conditions of Negro life in America, produced eighteen major publications on a shoestring budget, and laid out an ambitious agenda for 100 years of longitudinal study of all areas of Negro social life.
