ABSTRACT
Charles Spurgeon Johnson is probably the least understood and the most misinterpreted inter-world war race relations sociologist due to the post-1960s critics of his life and career relying more on second hand information about him more so than doing extensive archival spade work and impartial evaluation of his academic and non-academic contributions. When such historical reconstruction work is accomplished, Johnson reappears far from being the dull, uncreative, and conservative intellectual his later day critics have attempted to portray him as, in the history of American sociological thought. Indeed, it becomes more than apparent, especially once we take off the racial lenses of defi ning career eminence which has marginalized, excluded, and otherwise dismissed and ignored black scholars deserving their due recognition in career status ranking, that during the 1930s-1940s, Charles S. Johnson of Fisk University was the most prolifi c sociologist in the American South. He was one of America’s most distinguished sociologists of national and international reputation. He was head over shoulders of his University of Chicago classmates of the 1920s to such an extent that even Edward Shils admitted toward the end of his long life, in the mid-1990s, that if it were not for Park’s racial prejudice, Johnson would have been the most logical choice to succeed him at Chicago once he retired in the mid-1930s (ironically Park spent his retirement years at Fisk due to Johnson’s invitation). Though Johnson has been viewed as an American bounded scholar in the history of American sociological thought, he actually considered Bitter Canaan: The Story of the Negro Republic as the best book he ever wrote, and it had lasting impacts on his sociological studies in the United States, especially in the American South. Bitter Canaan is a critical historical sociological assessment of the Amero-Liberian elite’s development of a caste-ridden society.
