When Du Bois arrived at Atlanta University two studies had already been conducted and a third planned. But Atlanta University, which was a Negro institution down in Atlanta, Georgia asked me to come down there and teach and take charge of some such study’’ (1961: 3). But of course they didn’t do anything at all. I wanted the universities of Pennsylvania, and Harvard and Yale and so forth to go into a sort of partnership by which this kind of study could be forwarded. ‘‘What we needed was an academic study of the American Negro. In a 1961 interview, Du Bois discussed his desire to begin a large scale study of black Americans that would be housed at the member institutions whom we now refer to as the Ivy League. Once people were educated and provided with accurate data concerning those on the opposite side of the color line, he believed that relations between blacks and whites would improve. Du Bois ardently believed, at this point in his life, that the existing racial problems between blacks and whites resulted primarily from a lack of education and knowledge of basic facts concerning the other. According to Du Bois, ‘‘After I finished, or before I finished it, the question with me was how this kind of study could be carried on and applied to the whole Negro problem in the US’’ (1961: 3). President Bumstead’s offer to lead the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory coalesced with Du Bois’s desire to develop a program of research on the color line.
Upon completing research for The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois, who quickly became a sought after scholar, was providentially offered the position of director of research at Atlanta University. Several years prior to Du Bois’s appointment, the university institutionalized a program of research into the social, economic, and physical condition of black Americans. Du Bois was chosen to lead the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory, the term used to describe those engaged in sociological activity at Atlanta University between 18, by Atlanta University President Horace Bumstead. While each of these books, in addition to the many articles he wrote on the subject, are considered classic works in the area of race, arguably, Du Bois’s most impressive and influential research on the color line consists of the investigations he spearheaded as the director of research at Atlanta University between 18. Some of his book length treatments of the color line include his Harvard dissertation, Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870, The Philadelphia Negro, and The Souls of Black Folk. Research and propaganda on the color line would be Du Bois’s life’s work. This thunderous statement, appearing in his classic text The Souls of Black Folk, served as Du Bois’s clarion call for the nation, grappling with tense and volatile relations between blacks and whites, to engage in objective and thorough research on black Americans. In 1903, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois penned the phrase: ‘‘The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line – the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea’’ (Du Bois 1994 : 9).
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