“The Philadephia Negro represented DuBois’s first sustained effort to produce a sociological study that broke from the tradition of armchair grand theorizing” (p. 50)

I took both of these quotes from the same section of the chapter because I think they illustrate the importance of DuBois’s work. He was able to both break from the school of thought that Black people were inferior due to biological factors or “evolutionary theory” and also did this not through “armchair grand theorizing” but to actually do empirical research to show the conditions by which Black people were living in the United States at the time and draw conclusions from this research. DuBois really was a pioneer of both Sociology and of our modern conception of the impact of slavery and racial oppression. 

“Whereas white male scholars, given their privileged position and the rewards they inherited from the status quo, were wary of efforts to use science to promote social change and considered such aims as detrimental to objectivity and detachment, Du Bois and settlement leaders, though believing that the purpose of research was to generate scientific knowledge using the best methods and theories available, viewed scholarship as having the additional goal of informing struggles against oppression.” (53)

As anthropologists Faye V. Harrison and Irene Diggs pointed out, “The method and theoretical point of view which Du Bois articulated for this study helped to lay foundations for research that changed the discourse on race and culture in the social sciences in the United States.” (p. 54)

Du Bois: p. 49 Through his extensive use of maps, Du Bois captured how spatial configurations of Philadelphia were shaped by racist practices generated by the color line. His geographical analysis documented the high levels of racial segregation in the city and how segregation resulted from decisions made by economic elites to protect White interests.