William Julius Wilson is an American sociologist, a professor at Harvard University, and an author of works on urban sociology, race, and class issues. Laureate of the National Medal of Science, he served as the 80th President of the American Sociological Association, was a member of numerous national boards and commissions. He identified the importance of neighborhood effects and demonstrated how limited employment opportunities and weakened institutional resources exacerbated poverty within American inner-city neighborhoods.
Robert Ezra Park was an American urban sociologist who is considered to be one of the most influential figures in early U.S. sociology. Park was a pioneer in the field of sociology, changing it from a passive philosophical discipline to an active discipline rooted in the study of human behavior. He made significant contributions to the study of urban communities, race relations and the development of empirically grounded research methods, most notably participant observation in the field of criminology. From 1905 to 1914, Park worked with Booker T. Washington at the Tuskegee Institute. After Tuskegee, he taught at the University of Chicago from 1914 to 1933, where he played a leading role in the development of the Chicago School of sociology.
Black studies or Africana studies, is an interdisciplinary academic field that primarily focuses on the study of the history, culture, and politics of the peoples of the African diaspora and Africa. The field includes scholars of African-American, Afro-Canadian, Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Latino, Afro-European, Afro-Asian, African Australian, and African literature, history, politics, and religion as well as those from disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, psychology, education, and many other disciplines within the humanities and social sciences. The field also uses various types of research methods.
Edward Franklin Frazier, was an American sociologist and author, publishing as E. Franklin Frazier. His 1932 Ph.D. dissertation was published as a book titled The Negro Family in the United States (1939); it analyzed the historical forces that influenced the development of the African-American family from the time of slavery to the mid-1930s. The book was awarded the 1940 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for the most significant work in the field of race relations. It was among the first sociological works on Black people researched and written by a black person.
Patricia Hill Collins is an American academic specializing in race, class, and gender. She is a distinguished university professor of sociology emerita at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is also the former head of the Department of African-American Studies at the University of Cincinnati, and a past president of the American Sociological Association (ASA). Collins served in 2009 as the 100th president of the ASA – the first African-American woman to hold this position.
E. Patrick Johnson is the dean of the Northwestern University School of Communication. He is the Annenberg University Professor of Performance Studies and professor of African-American studies at Northwestern University. Johnson is the founding director of the Black Arts Consortium at Northwestern. His scholarly and artistic contributions focus on performance studies, African-American studies and women, gender and sexuality studies.
John Gibbs St. Clair Drake was an African-American sociologist and anthropologist whose scholarship and activism led him to document much of the social turmoil of the 1960s, establish some of the first Black Studies programs in American universities, and contribute to the independence movement in Ghana. Drake often wrote about challenges and achievements in race relations as a result of his extensive research.
Ronald Weitzer is an American sociologist specializing in criminology and a professor at George Washington University, known for his publications on police-minority relations and on the sex industry.
Janet Lippman Abu-Lughod was an American sociologist who made major contributions to world-systems theory and urban sociology.
Elijah Anderson is an American sociologist. He is the Sterling Professor of Sociology and of African American Studies at Yale University, where he teaches and directs the Urban Ethnography Project. Anderson is one of the nation’s leading urban ethnographers and cultural theorists. Anderson is known most notably for his book, Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City (1999).
Ethnic succession theory is a theory in sociology stating that ethnic and racial groups entering a new area may settle in older neighborhoods or urban areas until achieving economic parity with certain economic classes. The concept of succession is well established in "both ecological and economic models of urban residential change." As the newer group becomes economically successful, it moves to a better residential area. With continued immigration, a new ethnic group will settle in the older neighborhood in a similar starting situation. This pattern will continue, creating a succession of groups moving through the neighborhood over time. Ethnic succession has taken place in most major United States cities, but is most well known in New York City, where this process has been observed since the 19th century.
Oliver Cromwell Cox was a Trinidadian-American sociologist. Cox was often misconceived as a Marxist due to his focus on class conflict and capitalism, however, Cox fundamentally disagreed with Marx's analysis of Capitalism. While Marx and other classical economists viewed foreign trade as trade in surpluses, Cox felt that foreign trade was the primary driving force in capitalist development. For Cox, capitalist systems were not isolated, but rather there was an interconnected network of global capitalist systems.
African-American neighborhoods or black neighborhoods are types of ethnic enclaves found in many cities in the United States. Generally, an African American neighborhood is one where the majority of the people who live there are African American. Some of the earliest African-American neighborhoods were in New Orleans, Mobile, Atlanta, and other cities throughout the American South, as well as in New York City. In 1830, there were 14,000 "Free negroes" living in New York City.
Leith Patricia Mullings was a Jamaican-born author, anthropologist and professor. She was president of the American Anthropological Association from 2011–2013, and was a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Mullings was involved in organizing for progressive social justice, racial equality and economic justice as one of the founding members of the Black Radical Congress and in her role as President of the AAA. Under her leadership, the American Anthropological Association took up the issue of academic labor rights.
H. Richard (Rich) Milner, IV is an American teacher educator and scholar of urban teacher education on the tenured faculty at the Peabody College of Vanderbilt University, where he is Professor of Education and Cornelius Vanderbilt Endowed Chair of Education at the Department of Teaching and Learning. Formerly, he was the Director of the Center for Urban Education, Helen Faison Endowed Chair of Urban Education, Professor of Education, Professor of Social Work, Professor of Sociology and Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Since 2012, Milner has served as the editor of the journal Urban Education. In 2012, The Ohio State University Education and Human Ecology Alumni Society Board of Governors recognized him with the Alumni Award of Distinction, "presented to alumni who have achieved success in their field of endeavor and have made a difference in the lives of others through outstanding professional, personal or community contributions". Milner is a policy fellow of the National Education Policy Center, and was appointed by Governor-elect Tom Wolf to the Education Transition Review Team in 2015.
Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, authored by St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Jr., is an anthropological and sociological study of the African-American urban experience in the first half of the 20th century. Published in 1945, later expanded editions added some material relating to the 1950s and 1960s. Relying on massive research conducted in Chicago, primarily as part of a Works Progress Administration program, Drake and Cayton produced, according to the Encyclopedia of African American History, a "foundational text in African American history, cultural studies, and urban sociology."
Aldon Douglas Morris is a professor of sociology and an award-winning scholar, with interests including social movements, civil rights, and social inequality. He is the 2021 president of the American Sociological Association. He has written article and books including one on W. E. B. Du Bois.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an American academic, writer, and activist. She is a professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (2016). For this book, Taylor received the 2016 Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book from the Lannan Foundation.
Zine Magubane is a scholar whose work focuses broadly on the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and post-colonial studies in the United States and Southern Africa. She has held professorial positions at various academic institutions in the United States and South Africa and has published several articles and books.
Zandria F. Robinson is an American writer and scholar. Her work focuses on popular music, ethnography, and race and culture in the American south. She is the author of two books: This Ain't Chicago:Race, Class, and Regional Identity in the Post-Soul South (2014) and Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life (2018). Robinson is an associate professor of African-American studies at Georgetown University.
