The segregated scholars: Black labor historians, 1895-1950

This study is a collective biography of three generations of Black social scientists whose scholarship accounted for most of the studies of Black workers between 1895-1950. This group of segregated scholars wrote over twenty monographs, dozens of articles, founded important scholarly organizations and journals, and also established major protest organizations such as the NAACP and the National Urban League. They include W. E. B. Du Bois, George Haynes, Carter Woodson, Ira Reid, Abram Harris, and Robert Weaver. The question posed by this study is--why were Black workers such a central theme in the writing of Black scholars for over three generations? This study is both a textual analysis of the major works in early Black labor history and a history of fifty years of political and scholarly interaction. The study employs such primary sources as interviews, the correspondence of the scholars, the papers of the institutions they founded or ran, and their writings on Black workers. This dissertation concludes that the Black labor history created by the segregated scholars was the result of self-conscious actions which reflected a shared value structure. An overall coherence of purpose and goals was maintained among these men, despite differences in academic disciplines and political ideology. At the core of their shared values was the desire of Black social scientists to provide an objective and scientific alternative to racist views of Blacks, and their belief that Black intellectuals had an obligation to find ways to defeat segregation and raise the status of their race