The author addresses how, as a scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois transcended disciplinary boundaries and genre by providing answers to questions of racial colonialism and enslavement, the role of theory in social change, and the role of race in the dehumanization of the African, to name only a few. Here, the author offers a critical review of Du Bois’s application of sociology to the study of the African diaspora in America in The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. The article gives an overview of Du Bois’s sociological research as historical, statistical, demographic, and cultural in nature—the type of research that, Du Bois demanded, must lead to social action.
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