ABSTRACT
In 1897, William Edward Burghardt DuBois was called to Atlanta University by President Horace Bumstead. The young Harvard Ph.D. was employed to supervise the sociology program and to direct a series of conferences on Negroes which Atlanta had newly sponsored. Bumstead, a New Englander, believed strongly in the progress of the Negro race through its "exceptional men;" he was attracted by Du Bois's brilliance and imagination. Du Bois could not have been considered a popular teacher or colleague, especially in his early years at Atlanta; he was respected because of his academic credentials and because of his undoubted ability, but he had a reputation for being extremely "exacting and impatient." The Atlanta studies were of uneven quality in planning, structure, methods, and content; and in order to demonstrate this disparity, one set of monographs which were poorly done will be contrasted with another group which, in the present writer's judgment, represents sounder research.
