Mr.+Joyce

__**Sociology **__ African American Sociologist __** Sojourner Truth **__ Sojourner Truth was born into slavery in 1797 in New York as Isabella Baumfree. After her emancipation in 1827, she became a traveling preacher under her new name, a noted abolitionist, and advocate for women's suffrage. Truth's mark on sociology was made when she gave a now famous speech in 1851 at a women's rights convention in Ohio. Titled for the driving question she pursued in this speech, "Ain't I a Woman?", the transcript has become a staple of sociology and feminist studies. It is considered important to these fields because, in it, Truth laid the groundwork for theories of intersectionality that would follow much later. Her question makes the point that she is not considered a woman because of her race. At the time this was an identity reserved solely for those with white skin. Following this speech she continued to work as an abolitionist, and later, an advocate for Black rights. Truth died in 1883 in Battle Creek, Michigan, but her legacy survives. In 2009 she became the first Black woman to have a bust of her likeness installed in the U.S. capitol, and in 2014 she was listed among the Smithsonian Institution's "100 Most Significant Americans."



__** Anna Julia Cooper **__ Anna Julia Cooper was a writer, educator, and public speaker who lived from 1858 to 1964. Born into slavery in Raleigh, North Carolina, she was the fourth African-American woman to earn a doctorate--a Ph.D. in history from University of Paris-Sorbonne in 1924. Cooper is considered one of the most important scholars in U.S. history, as her work is a staple of early American sociology, and is frequently taught in sociology, women's studies, and race classes. Her first and only published work, //A Voice from the South//, is considered one of the first articulations of black feminist thought in the U.S. In this work, Cooper focused on education for Black girls and women as central to the progress of Black people in the post-slavery era. She also critically addressed the realities of [|r] acism and economic inequality faced by Black people. Her collected works, including her book, essays, speeches, and letters, are available in a volume titled //The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper//. Cooper's work and contributions were commemorated on a U.S. postal stamp in 2009. Wake Forest University is home to the Anna Julia Cooper Center on Gender, Race, and Politics in the South, which focuses on advancing justice through intersectional scholarship. The Center is run by political scientist and public intellectual Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry.



__** W.E.B DuBois **__ W.E.B DuBois, along with Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Harriet Martineau, is considered one of the founding thinkers of modern sociology. Born free in 1868 in Massachusetts, DuBois would become the first African American to earn a doctorate at Harvard University (in sociology). He worked as a professor at Wilberforce University, as a researcher at University of Pennsylvania, and later, a professor at Atlanta University. He was a founding member of the NAACP.

Today, DuBois's work is taught across entry level and advanced sociology classes, and still widely cited in contemporary scholarship. His life's work served as the inspiration for the creation of Souls, a critical journal of black politics, culture and society. Each year the American Sociological Association gives out an award for a career of distinguished scholarship in his honor.

Charles Spurgeon Johnson, 1893-1956, was an American sociologist and first Black president of Fisk University, a historically Black college. Born in Virginia, he earned a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Chicago, where he studied among the Chicago School sociologists. While in Chicago he worked as a researcher for the Urban League, and played a prominent role in the study and discussion of race relations in the city, published as //The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot//. In his later career, Johnson focused his scholarship on a critical study of how legal, economic, and social forces work together to produce structural racial oppression. His notable works include //The Negro in American Civilization// (1930), //Shadow of the Plantation// (1934), and //Growing up in the Black Belt// (1940), among others. Today, Johnson is remembered as an important early scholar of race and racism who helped establish critical sociological focus on these forces and processes. Every year the American Sociological Association gives an award to a sociologist whose work has made significant contributions to the fight for social justice and human rights for oppressed populations, which is named for Johnson, along with E. Franklin Frazier and Oliver Cromwell Cox. His life and work is chronicled in a biography titled //Charles S. Johnson: Leadership beyond the Veil in the Age of Jim Crow.//
 * __ Charles S. Johnson __**



E. Franklin Frazier was an American sociologist born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1894. He attended Howard University, then pursued graduate work at Clark University, and ultimately earned a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Chicago, along with Charles S. Johnson and Oliver Cromwell Cox. Prior to arriving in Chicago he was forced to leave Atlanta, where he had been teaching sociology at Morehouse College, after an angry white mob threatened him following the publication of his article, "The Pathology of Race Prejudice."
 * __ E. Franklin Frazier __**

Following his Ph.D., Frazier taught at Fisk University, then Howard University until his death in 1962. Like W.E.B. DuBois, Frazier was vilified as a traitor by the U.S. government for his work with the Council on African Affairs, and his activism for Black civil rights.



Oliver Cromwell Cox was born in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago in 1901, and emigrated to the U.S. in 1919. He earned a Bachelors degree at Northwestern University before pursuing a Masters in economics and a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Chicago. Like Johnson and Frazier, Cox was a member of the Chicago School of sociology. However, he and Frazier had greatly differing views on racism and race relations. Inspired by Marxism the hallmark of his thought and work was the idea that racism developed within the system of capitalism, and is motivated foremost by the drive to economically exploit people of color. His most notable work is //Caste, Class and Race//, published in 1948. It contained important critiques of the way both Robert Park (his teacher) and Gunnar Myrdal framed and analyzed race relations and racism. Cox's contributions were important to orienting sociology toward structural ways of seeing, studying, and analyzing racism in the U.S.
 * __ Oliver Cromwell Cox __**

From the mid-century on he taught at Lincoln University of Missouri, and later Wayne State University, until his death in 1974. //The Mind of Oliver C. Cox// offers a biography and in-depth discussion of Cox's intellectual approach to race and racism and to his body of work.



__** St. Clair Drake **__ John Gibbs St. Clair Drake, known simply as St. Clair Drake, was an American urban sociologist and anthropologist whose scholarship and activism focused on the racism and racial tensions of the mid-twentieth century. Born in Virginia in 1911, he first studied biology at Hampton Institute, then completed a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Chicago. Drake then became one of the first Black faculty members at Roosevelt University. After working there for twenty-three years, he left to found the African and African American Studies program at Stanford University.

Drake was an activist for Black civil rights and helped establish other Black Studies programs across the nation. He was active as a member and proponent of the Pan-African movement, with a career-long interest in the global African diaspora, and served as head of the department of sociology at the University of Ghana from 1958 to 1961.



__** Assignment **__

Students will complete an essay to be entered in Stop the Violence Black History Essay Contest. Students will complete a 3-paragraph essay that will encompass one of the topics provided through the contest. The Essay will be submitted through Google Classroom. Essay will be graded out of 15 assessment points according to the rubric provided. Due Date: February 9, 2018