'Counsels of despair': W. E. B. Du Bois, Robert E. Park, and the establishment of American race sociology

The sociology movement of the late nineteenth century offered an opportunity for social progress through the power of information. By mustering the best evidence available and training the populace in scientific modes of observation, professional sociologists thought they could lead the nation toward salvation. Even a problem as deeply mired in confounding sentiment and popular prejudice as that of blacks in America looked to some as if it might finally meet its match.;This thesis follows the career of W. E. B. Du Bois in race sociology to demonstrate both the promise of the sociology movement and the prominence of Du Bois as a sociologist at the turn of the century. Counter to what Du Bois and his biographers have asserted, Du Bois was a very successful and sought after professional in the social science community, right up until his removal to New York and the NAACP. However, his hopes for national enlightenment through the sorts of comprehensive "social studies" that he and his students at Atlanta University were attempting to carry out were dashed by two factors. The mutability of facts placed before a prejudiced reading public warped the message Du Bois meant his work to convey. And the professionalization of sociology called for a systematized discipline, to which Du Bois was not driven to contribute.;Robert E. Park, however, devoted himself to defining race sociology. After his professional training, Park spent seven years trying to implement the goals of the sociology movement from the Tuskegee Institute. When Park came under the influence of W. I. Thomas of the University of Chicago, he turned from applied sociology to systematized sociology. Joining Chicago's Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Park successfully codified the prejudices of the times in his race relations cycle while retaining some vestiges of the hopeful strains of the sociology movement. The final sections of the thesis consider how Park's teachings sanctioned the extraction of Du Bois's sociological writing from the canon of the discipline, and how his student Charles S. Johnson's efforts to present a New Negro to the nation stemmed from Park's lingering faith in the transformative power of information.