The Labor Section and ABS Celebrate the DuBois Legacy

by Michael Schwartz, Stony Brook State University

The 2007 ASA Annual Meeting will celebrate a hallmark event at the awards ceremony: The name change of one of ASA’s highest awards to the “W.E.B. DuBois Career for Distinguished Scholarship Award” (see the November 2006 and May/June 2006 Footnotes). To commemorate this inaugural moment, the Association of Black Sociologists and the Labor Section of the ASA will host a special intellectual and social event, titled “W.E.B. DuBois and Labor.” The session will feature panelists David Levering Lewis, Edna Bonacich, Dorian Warren, and Aldon Morris, who collectively represent the remarkable range and impact of DuBois’ thought.

The premier scholar on the work and life of W.E.B. DuBois is David Levering Lewis, the Julius Silver University Professor at New York University. Both volumes of his DuBois biography (W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919 and W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963) won Pulitzer prizes (in 1993 and 2000), making him the only author to win Pulitzers for two works dealing with the same subject. The volumes provide energy and momentum for the surge of DuBoisian thought in the last two decades.

Edna Bonacich, Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Ethnic Studies at University of California-Riverside, has focused a lifetime of research on race and class, with an emphasis on racial divisions in the working class. She, like DuBois, has engaged in a generation of public sociology, working with several unions and workers’ organizations, including UNITE (the Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees), the Garment Workers Center in Los Angeles, the anti-sweatshop movement, the port trucker organizing effort, and the Writers Guild of America, west.

The fourth panelist is Dorian T. Warren, Assistant Professor of Political Science in the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He specializes in the study of inequality and American politics, the political organization of marginalized groups and the concatenation of American public policy with race, ethnicity and labor. His scholarly work interests replicate those of DuBois, and Warren relies on a DuBoisian perspective in seeking to deepen and extend our understanding of American political development.

Aldon Morris, Professor of Sociology and Associate Dean at Northwestern University will preside over the panel. His work focuses on race, religion and class, and movements for social change. The author of the classic Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, and winner of the ASA Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award, his work focuses on DuBois’ intellectual legacy. A lifetime as a political activist and public sociologist in the DuBoisian tradition, Morris was a consultant for the award-winning documentary Eyes on the Prize and frequently appears in the media on racial, class, and gender equality issues.