The instruction of sociology in the United States dates back to the 1872–1873 academic year, when William Graham Sumner “gave up one of the three terms of his course on Political and Social Science to a discussion of Spencer’s [Study of] Sociology.”1 The discipline’s emergence at the religiously affiliated Yale University gave rise to some consternation: “Theologically it is probably the most objectionable book Spencer has written, making no secret of its contempt for believers in the Christian religion, who are told that they must lay aside their faith if they wish to study sociology.”2 Due to religious resistance, sociology disappeared from the college’s curriculum from 1880 to 1885. Sumner’s role in establishing sociology as a legitimate area of academic study in the United States, despite its brief banishment from Yale, was key in the discipline’s early acceptance and development. While not diminishing his important role in spearheading the academic instruction of the discipline in America, a moderated view of his significance to the discipline may be appropriately characterized by noting that “Professor Sumner’s priority in the sociological field may be referred to as incidental to the more general fact of awakening academic interest in social science.”3 Therefore, although Sumner’s instruction of the discipline was an important milestone, more central to the discipline’s development was its institutionalization at postsecondary institutions across the nation.
The accepted narrative on the development of sociology in America leads one to believe the discipline’s roots are grounded singularly within the soil of elite White institutions in America’s Midwest and Northeast regions. This narrative is incorrect. The early instruction and overall acceptance of the discipline in academia was nearly geographically homogenous and not dominated exclusively by elite institutions. A more accurate narrative on the institutional acceptance of the discipline is that in the years immediately following Sumner’s course at Yale a diverse array of largely southern institutions embraced and expanded the instruction of sociology. Although the sociology community acknowledges Sumner’s course at Yale as a defining disciplinary moment, a little-known fact is that the second institution in this nation to list a course in sociology was the University of Arkansas in 1881.
Instruction in the discipline in the South at this time extended beyond Arkansas and into areas that once comprised the Confederate States of America during the Civil War. Beyond Yale and Arkansas, the first schools to infuse sociology into their curriculums were largely southern-based institutions including, but not limited to, Trinity College of North Carolina (now called Duke University), Atlanta University (now called Clark Atlanta University), the Woman’s College of Maryland, and West Virginia University.4 That a discipline rooted in objectivity and the scientific understanding of human behaviors and interactions was warmly embraced in states where slavery and segregation were commonplace only a generation prior was understandable given the specific objectives of its use. I address this point later in this chapter when an explanation is offered for the divergence between the way sociology was practiced at Black versus White southern institutions. What is noteworthy at this juncture is that the early southern embrace of and influence on the discipline was prominent and, unfortunately, has been and continues to be largely ignored.
As sociology became more popular and expanded to campuses across the nation there soon came a demand for instructors trained in and specifically assigned to teach courses in the discipline. The listing of the word sociology in the title of a professor teaching classes in the discipline did not occur until thirteen years after the first sociology course was taught in this country. “The first university [faculty position] to be created with sociology designated by title as part of the professor’s teaching responsibility was probably that established at the University of Indiana in 1885,” for Arthur B. Woodford.5 The school listed Woodford as an assistant professor of economics and sociology and his assigned responsibilities included teaching a course entitled Sociology in 1885.6 Between 1885 and 1889 Woodford taught this course at Indiana University and used the textbooks “Spencer’s Study of Sociology, Wilson’s Anthropology and Letourneau’s Sociology Based upon Ethnography during the first and second terms on three days a week.”7 Despite the discipline having its first named instructor at Indiana University in 1885, no institution at this time had established an academic department that included the word sociology.
It is accepted as common knowledge in most polite American sociological circles that the University of Chicago established the nation’s first department of sociology. Whether or not one deems this assertion true depends on how one operationalizes the word department. The distinction of establishing the first department of sociology is accurate when applied to Chicago if it is explicitly understood that one is referring to a unit having only the word sociology as its singular department title. However, if the distinction of establishing the first department of sociology includes the simple inclusion of the word sociology as part of an academic unit’s title, then the answer is quite clear. The University of Chicago did not establish the first department of sociology in the United States. This distinction belongs to the University of Kansas and is a fact acknowledged by Chicago sociology’s founding department head, Albion Small.
In 1889 the University of Kansas established the Department of History and Sociology, making it the first department of sociology in the nation. Kansas’s path toward this founding was a curious one, which included overt and covert political interventions and concessions. More specifically, the direct involvement of political officials and the intensity of pressure placed upon school administrators was critical in the institution’s circuitous route toward establishing the department. The endeavor began with the institution’s nationwide search for a person to lead the newly proposed social science department. This task began in a low-key manner and led to the doorstep of an early and prominent sociologist. The institution’s search “for a man to take charge of a new department to be formed in the University of Kansas” led them to Frank Blackmar of Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Maryland.8 Blackmar, once a classmate of Albion Small at Johns Hopkins, differed from the founder of the unit in Chicago in that he “took [his] major in history of institutions” while Small majored in sociology.9 Despite not majoring in sociology, Blackmar was selected to chair the new department. Moreover, he was charged with naming the new unit.
Blackmar’s initial recommendation for the department name, History and Politics, was rejected because “the regents were very much excited, telling me it would not do to give a department that name, because ‘the people of Kansas would not tolerate a Department of Politics [sic] in the University, as they had enough politics in the state already.’”10 Seemingly undaunted at the rejection of his first recommendation, he offered the Department of History and Political Science as an alternative. Again he was rebuffed. The inclusion of a word similar or relating to politics or political was a deal-breaker for politicians whose support was critical for school administrators, who were thought to have ulterior progressive motivations in establishing the unit. Again, political opposition and the unease of the school and its supporters with a unit that, in their opinion, may have led to taxpayer-funded engagement in matters of government and politics on a college campus was untenable. This posture led to the establishment of the first named sociology department in the nation.
In making the decision to title the unit Department of History and Sociology, Blackmar noted, “So far as my knowledge goes, this was the first time that the word ‘sociology’ was used in connection with the name of a university department in the United States.”11 This distinction was also noted and bolstered by the founder of the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago, Albion Small, who wrote, “Professor Blackmar seems to be correct on this point. No evidence of priority in this respect over the University of Kansas is known [to me].”12 Despite Chicago not being the location of the nation’s first formalized department, sociologists historically and naively believe the discipline began in earnest upon the establishment of sociology at the University of Chicago three years after the Kansas effort.
When the University of Chicago opened in 1892 one of its primary charges was to become one of the finest research-intensive institutions in the United States. Reflecting on the school’s founding, assisted amounted to more than $25 million in today’s dollars, the University of Chicago Committee on Development proclaimed:
“Here is to be found intellectual freedom.” [The University of Chicago] established as its official motto, and has kept it: “Let knowledge grow, that life may be enriched.” By setting up lofty ideals of scholarship, by recognizing research as one of its primary aims, and by encouraging freedom of investigation as a prime condition of success in research, [the University of Chicago] began on a plane to which many other institutions have been slowly ascending.13
The institution’s commitment to the emerging discipline was evidenced by the fact that shortly after Chicago’s founding it established one of the nation’s first departments of sociology. Reflecting on the school’s establishment and commitment to its departmental founder, the Committee on Development proclaimed:
In Sociology, the name of a man like Professor Albion W. Small, Head of that Department of the University, stands for pioneer work in organizing a subject that belongs to the present generation and has made for a broader view of human society.14
While the Chicago School of mythical sociological renown did not emerge until the arrival of Robert Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and other members of the second-generation cohort circa 1914, Small created a formidable team of first-generation Chicago School scholars: William I. Thomas, Charles R. Henderson, George E. Vincent, and Charles Zeublin among them. Although Small acknowledged Kansas’s distinction in establishing the first department of sociology in the nation, he was adamant that the sociological research program he spearheaded in Chicago was the primary reason the discipline developed as fully in this nation as it did.
“After 1892 sociology came out into the open as an accredited university subject,” says Small, “but I very strongly [sic] doubt if this consummation would have been reached at that time—I am not sure that it would have occurred at all—if the University of Chicago had not been founded.”15 Allowing for a possible exception, Small stated, “In some respects Leland Stanford Junior University [Stanford University], founded the same year, was a similar dynamic factor, but it was so remote geographically that it did not produce the same visible effects.”16 Small was adamant that the development of sociology in America would not have occurred as fast, or possibly at all, without the substantial financial largess and commitment to excellence in research at schools like Chicago, Stanford, Princeton, and Johns Hopkins. In addition to these schools’ financial backing and commitment to social science research, Small argued, competition among the presidents of these elite institutions contributed to the discipline’s ascension in the early twentieth century.
Small lauded University of Chicago President Harper’s commitment to “opening the way for the subject of sociology in curricula which might not for years have made room for that division of social science.”17 The implication here was that many institutions did not share Chicago’s zeal for social science or sociological expansion. Add to this argument the fact that many institutions did not have access to the financial largess of a John D. Rockefeller to shepherd their ambitions into fruition, and we find that institutions not hampered by financial limitations and insufficient social science interests were establishing, supposedly, the most impactful sociological units in the nation. Curiously, the majority of these influential institutions were, largely, located in the Midwest and Northeast. A reasonable question to ask is, “did schools outside these regions make substantive contributions to the discipline during its formative years in this nation?” The answer to this question is a resounding yes.
The development of sociology at institutions in the Midwest, Northeast and, to some degree, west of the Mississippi River is well known. Less known are the sociological origins and exploits of southern-based institutions. Even less known are the sociological activities conducted at HBCUs. Before one can fully understand the development of sociology at HBCUs and HWCUs in the South, one must understand the social and racial milieu within which they emerged. Because the path to understanding the contributions of Blacks to the discipline uniquely and directly connects to this nation’s original sin, slavery, and includes the criminalization of education, a brief overview of the education of Blacks pre-emancipation and the establishment of HBCUs is offered.
The Audacity of Learning
Key to the development of Black sociology was the segregation of Blacks and Whites in education. This division forced the discipline to develop without intimate equal-status professional interactions between Blacks and Whites that could have led to innovative methodological, theoretical, and substantive sc...
