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Du Bois was an American sociologist, historian and black civil rights activist, the first African American to gain a doctorate from Harvard (in 1895), and professor of history, sociology and economics at Atlanta University. His work covered empirical studies, philosophy, sociological theory and history and is characterized by three highly significant books: The Philadelphia Negro (1899), The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and Black Reconstruction in America (1935).

In Souls, Du Bois focused on the failure of the abolition of slavery in the USA in the 1860s to bring about racial equality. He argued that black people in Southern states lived with a ‘double consciousness’; being both black and American, they should be able to be without ‘being cursed and spit upon by his [sic] fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face’ (Du Bois 1903: 2–3). He saw the main problem of the coming twentieth century was that of the ‘color line’, the segregation of whites and blacks. His meticulous empirical sociological study of a poor, largely black district of Philadelphia (2007 [1899]) was an ambitious mapping of urban poverty. Du Bois showed that white racism effectively set limits to the sectors and occupations that black people could enter, thus empirically falsifying the idea that their poverty was due to laziness and a lack of innate intelligence. Most scholars now acknowledge this study as a key forerunner to the work of the Chicago School of Sociology (see chapter 13, ‘Cities and Urban Life’).

Finally, Lemert (2000: 244) argues that the Marxist influence on Du Bois’s writing is strongest in Black Reconstruction, which traces post-emancipation structured relations between workers and plantation owners. In this, he saw that the color line ‘cut through the laboring class as well as between the labor class and the propertied’. Du Bois’s work was largely absent from the history of sociology, even in the USA, but interest in it has rapidly increased as a result of postcolonial scholarship and attempts to decolonize sociology.