He Comes with a Reputation
Everything you need to know about Aldon Morris and the foundations of what will be his presidency of the American Sociological Association can be found in the 2017 short documentary Aldon Morris: The Scholar Affirmed. Full disclosure that both of us are in the documentary. One of Mary’s favorite parts of the film shows Aldon and his family around the dinner table with Michael, who was Aldon’s mentor at Stony Brook University. Aldon asks Michael what his first impressions were when he arrived at Stony Brook. “You came with a reputation,” Michael replies. It was 1974, and the admissions committee had informed Michael that an honors student from Bradley University, a “Black militant,” was entering the program, and would most likely want to work with Michael. “And the question then became,” as Michael narrates in the film, “so what are we gonna do, you know. Because we’re activists and therefore we oughtta be doing something.” The ASA membership should know that Aldon comes with a reputation for both brilliance in action and brilliance and action.
Brilliance in Action
Action and activism is what Aldon studies. Aldon is a scholar and student of social movements, politics, organizations, and race and racism. His first book, The Origins of the Modern Civil Rights Movement (Free Press, 1984), won multiple prizes, including ASA’s Distinguished Scholarly Book Award in 1986, and the prestigious Gustavus Myers Award given to a book that “extend[s] our understanding of the root causes of bigotry and the range of options we as humans have in constructing alternative ways to share power.”
In Origins, Aldon challenged central assumptions in social movement theory, including collective behavior theory and Weber’s charisma theory, and instead focused analytic attention on the pre-existing resources and networks that African Americans formed in grassroots southern institutions and communities. In the early 1980s, sociologists were locked into the thrall of Gunnar Myrdal’s American Dilemma, which argued that Black people were too oppressed to engineer their own liberation, and that they would have to wait for white people to resolve the ‘American Dilemma.’ New social movement theorists – despite the success of the Civil Rights movement in dismantling Jim Crow – had not yet questioned this orthodoxy until Aldon demolished it in Origins. Fellow Stony Brook graduate J. Craig Jenkins, now Professor Emeritus at Ohio State University, wrote in his Contemporary Sociology review of Origins that “the most outstanding quality of this book is the wealth of new historical information that Morris has unearthed,” attesting to the fact that the book was not only theoretically innovative but also empirically extraordinary. Representing the new generation of Stony Brook University sociologists, Professor Crystal Fleming has written that Origins disproved “disempowering clichés” about African Americans and centered attention on “the indigenous cultural resources, institutions, and organizational structures that facilitated the emergence and establishment of the civil rights movement.”
Aldon co-edited Frontiers in Social Movement Theory, with Carol Mueller (Yale University Press, 1992), which was later translated into Chinese, co-edited Oppositional Consciousness: The Subjective Roots of Social Protest, with Jane Mansbridge (University of Chicago Press, 2001), and published scores of journal articles, book chapters, and review essays. David Cunningham, Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, remembered the impact of Frontiers on his generation of graduate students: “I well know how this work – more than any other – was soaked up, frequently referenced, and hotly debated by a rising generation of social movement researchers … Many of those chapters…remain strikingly relevant to cutting-edge work on the current frontier of scholarship,…[have] presaged more recent developments, and – as much as any other work – helped set the course for the field’s advance.” For all of these contributions, Aldon received the 2018 John D. McCarthy Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Scholarship of Social Movements and Collective Behavior.
When Aldon writes a book, it is always a masterpiece. His 2015 masterwork, The Scholar Denied: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology (University of California Press), won five best book prizes from three different professional associations—including the 2018 R.R. Hawkins Award of the Association of American Publishers as the “most distinguished scholarly” volume published in the United States—and from two sections of the ASA (Racial and Ethnic Minorities and History of Sociology). It is a must-read for all sociologists. Lawrence Bobo, Professor at Harvard University, wrote that the book offers a “fundamental re-organization of our thinking about the basic canon and history of sociological theory making.” This tour-de-force intellectual contribution contributed to Aldon being this year’s winner of the Association’s highest honor, the W.E.B. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award. This selection acknowledges Aldon’s lifetime of activism as well as scholarship, since it was Aldon who led the charge to change the name of that very award to honor Du Bois.
In The Scholar Denied, Aldon shows that “Du Bois’s sociology of race was developed two decades before that of [Robert] Park and the Chicago School” (p. 129), yet “Park and the Chicago School locked Du Bois out of the intellectual fraternity of sociology by systematically ignoring his scholarship” (p. 141). The Scholar Denied is a meticulously researched and passionately argued study of organizations and professions, the history of science, social networks, the evaluation of ideas and merit, and, of course, of race and racism. Morris rests his case on both the empirical and theoretical contributions Du Bois made to the field when few universities had sociology departments. The Scholar Denied shows that the purposeful, longstanding, and (even now) ongoing marginalization of Du Bois delayed for decades the incorporation of a structural understanding of racial inequality into mainstream sociology. Du Bois—who from the beginning had a sophisticated understanding of structure—was light years ahead in showing the ways that racism shaped the labor market, politics, the economy, families, urban life, and international relations.
As a University of Chicago PhD and a true believer in The Chicago School’s mystique, Mary experienced her first encounter with The Scholar Denied as a personal affront. Now, after absorbing the illuminating evidence and analysis, she is a convert to the Du Boisian School. As a cynical senior scholar, Michael first encountered The Scholar Denied as a dreary history of ancient and irrelevant ideas. Now, after discovering new worlds of exciting theory, he reads sociological history with relish, searching for other previously buried sociological gems written by Du Bois or his intellectual progeny. The Scholar Denied makes both of us proud to be sociologists; reminds us to recommit to the vision that Du Bois and the Atlanta School of Sociology had for the discipline; and compels us to ensure that future generations of scholars will be able to access and apply this richest vein of sociological wisdom. As Aldon wrote in the book: “A rare phenomenon occurred at the dawn of the twentieth century: the leaders of an oppressed people one generation removed from slavery embraced an intellectual discipline as a weapon of liberation” (p. 59). That is our intellectual ancestry. What will be our legacy?
Brilliance and Action
Here is where Aldon’s reputation for action comes in. Aldon’s roots are in struggle. He was drawn to activism because of his own experiences with racial and class oppression, in the South, in Chicago, and working right out of high school for Spiegel and International Harvester. His worldview and scholarship were forged in the crucibles of the activism and confrontations of the multiple movements of the 1960s and beyond, especially the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. Like many of the young people leading today’s Black Lives Matter Movement, he is determined to fight tragedy with effective activism. Aldon is of the Emmett Till generation and BLM protesters are of the George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Trayvon Martin generation. But the imaginative theorizing about and courageous demands for liberation are the same.
Aldon arrived in academia with the dual commitments that would become his life’s work. Michael knew him first as a “Black militant honors student,” a label that Aldon fulfilled in all respects. In addition to producing brilliant seminar papers that challenged and stretched the intellectual boundaries of the pre-Civil Rights sociology practiced at Stony Brook, Aldon set about organizing students (and at least one faculty member) to introduce the Du Boisian perspective into the research and teaching in the department. Qualitative and historical methods became part of the methods curriculum, race relations became an integral part of graduate education, the targeted recruitment of students of color began, and the first two Black faculty were hired. Aldon left Stony Brook for Michigan with a doctoral dissertation that would become Origins of the Modern Civil Rights Movement and a portfolio of activist achievements that prepared him to work for similar reforms as a new faculty member at the University of Michigan.
Aldon is currently the Leon Forrest Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Northwestern University. As his colleague for over 20 years, Mary has known him firsthand as a mentor as well as an activist for diversity and equity. When Aldon became chair of the Sociology Department in 1992, he confronted an unacceptable dearth of faculty and graduate students of color. To tackle the “pipeline” problem, Aldon started with graduate student recruitment, orchestrating a long series of difficult faculty meetings to convince our colleagues that the goal of diversity was important, and that some prospective students of color might bring a different academic profile to the admissions process than White students. Aldon put equal energy into faculty diversity. When Aldon began his work, there were few faculty of color in the department. We are not overstating the case when we say that he has been the architect of what is today an exceptionally diverse department. This is (just one part of) Aldon’s legacy.
His other legacy is the next generation of students that he has inspired. In a scene in the documentary, Northwestern graduate student Niamba Baskerville remarked that one of the “key takeaways in [The Scholar Denied] for me is this idea of liberation capital, which is sort of an advancement of Bourdieu’s idea of different types of capital.” And student Joshua Basseches said, “It taught me a lot about power both in academia and in broader society.” Karida Brown, Assistant Professor at University of California-Los Angeles, wrote: “I would not be a faculty member with an appointment in a sociology department had it not been for him. Like many young scholars of color in the discipline, I was riddled with an amorphous sense of insecurity about how my research, by a Black woman about Black people, would be received in the discipline. In the words of Du Bois, my ‘double consciousness’ was working on me. In one fortuitous exchange, Aldon Morris changed the course of my career.”
2021 ASA Annual Meeting
The theme for the 2021 conference is “Emancipatory Sociology: Rising to the Du Boisian Challenge.” It will take place at a conjunctive moment in history when sociologists are called upon to focus their minds on the project of emancipation. As Pam Oliver, Professor Emerita at the University of Wisconsin, wrote about Aldon’s sociological paradigm: “The vision of sociology charted by Morris…recognizes the importance of political and organizational sociology and the creation of states and institutions and policies that create structures of domination. It is a sociology that recognizes the importance of studying the social movements that challenge structures of domination…It is a sociology capable of critically analyzing sociology itself.” The 2021 conference invites us to build this emancipatory sociology. It promises to reflect the biography of its presider, a person who practices sociological rigor and translates it into action. Fittingly, the conference will be held in Chicago where Aldon has lived and worked on a range of freedom struggles for most of his adult life. It is also a sweet turn that Du Bois will be recognized in the city whose sociologists dismissed him for so long.
The most touching part of the film about Aldon comes at the end, when his mother reads from “For My People,” a poem by Margaret Walker. It is an ode to Aldon’s southern and northern roots, and shows his grounding in history, his love for Black people, his appreciation of beautiful things, and his reverence for struggle. Walker’s poem epitomizes the path that Aldon has charted as a scholar committed to action in the service of positive transformation: “Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born… [L]et a people loving freedom come to growth.”
Written by Mary Pattillo, Northwestern University and Michael Schwartz, Stony Brook University and originally published in Footnotes, Volume 48, Number 5.
