666307 JAXXXX10.1177/1936724416666307Journal of Applied Social ScienceMorris
research-article2016
Journal of Applied Social Science 2016, Vol. 10(2) 96– 103 © The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1936724416666307 jax.sagepub.com
This article addresses the relationship between the discipline of sociology and social change. It argues that sociology, and its professional associations, are challenged to choose between being a progressive force for change or a legitmator of the status quo. The core focus of the article is the argument that the Association of Applied and Clinical Sociology has a responsibility to assist in the liberation of the oppressed because of its mission to serve the applied and clinical needs of its constituency.
I am honored to deliver the Keynote Address for the 2015 meetings of the Association of Applied and Clinical Sociology here in historic Montgomery, Alabama. I was invited by your esteemed president, Anthony Troy Adams of Alabama State University to address you today. I first met President Adams in the 1980s when he was a student in my graduate seminar at the University of Michigan.
Anthony knows how to use his power. When he asked me to keynote, I related I would be busy at that time finishing my new book, The Scholar Denied and teaching classes at Northwestern University. Because he persisted, I asked about the honorarium for the address. There came a pause. He answered, “Doc. we cannot pay an honorarium.” Before I eased out of a commitment, Anthony replied, “I was a student in your class and you were a real important influence on me doc.” As he figured, I melted, and I am honored to stand before you today.
Montgomery is historic for many reasons including its role as one of the anchoring locales of slavery for over two centuries, and its birthplace of the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott that ush ered in the modern civil right movement. Montgomery is also the site where a decade later, the Selma to Montgomery March reached its triumphant destination. It was that protest that enabled the majority of African Americans to seize the franchise. Indeed, on March 25, 1965, thousands of historic freedom marchers gathered in front of The Alabama State Capitol—the very bosom of Jim Crow. The “Moses” of his race, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., strode up the steps of the state capital to address the masses.
In his characteristically bold oratory, King thundered,
Aldon Morris, Northwestern University, 1810 Chicago Avenue, Evanston, IL 60208-1330, USA. Email: amorris@northwestern.edu
They told us we wouldn’t get here. And there were those who said that we would get here only over their dead bodies but all the world today knows that we are here and we are standing before the forces of power in the state of Alabama saying, “We ain’t goin’ let nobody turn us around.”
I want to remind this association of applied and clinical sociologists that its conference theme is “Social Justice from the Local to the Global: Sociology on the Move.” Clearly, there is a real connection between the 1965 March and the conference’s pursuits of social Justice. But there is also another bond; the conference declares it sponsors a sociology that is on the move, on the move, toward social justice.
Listen again to King in 1965:
Today I want to tell the city of Selma, today I want to say to the state of Alabama, today I want to say to the people of America and the nations of the world, that we are not about to turn around. We are on the move now. . . . Yes, we are on the move and no wave of racism can stop us. We are on the move now.
The Association of Applied and Clinical Sociology is also riveted on social justice and the movement toward its realization. My address, “Sociology and Social Justice: Confronting Challenges of the Twentieth-first Century,” is going to walk along the same journey. I begin with a brief personal story of my experiences with Jim Crow and proceed to lay bare how this wicked system of oppression was overthrown. I then explore how Martin Luther King viewed the role of social scientists in the liberation struggle and proceed by making an argument regarding the rel evance of W. E. B. Du Bois’s ideas to the pursuit of social justice. I conclude with lessons rele vant to current struggles for social justice.
The direct cause of the modern civil right movement was black oppression, especially the Jim Crow regime that emerged in the South following Reconstruction. Jim Crow replaced slavery and differed from it only in specific details. To explore the civil rights movement was desperately needed, I visit my childhood.
In 1949, I was born in the heartland of Jim Crow racism in rural Tutwiler, Mississippi, just 265 miles northwest of Montgomery. As a boy, I experienced black life in the deep south of the 1950s, drinking from the “colored water” fountain and receiving ice cream through the small shutter in back of the segregated Dairy Queen. I attended the ill-equipped, colored school, where during fall terms my classmates, who had not yet reached puberty, disappeared for several months to pick cotton so their families could survive. I was aware that in the early hours of fall mornings, white men drove pickup trucks to the Negro side of town and loaded blacks to drop off on farms. I remember in blistering hot weather how whites sat under shade trees while blacks worked the fields dripping sweat from sunup to sundown. Yet, with all the backbreaking work, we never had enough food or adequate clothes.
There was also fear and violence, which I experienced through the indoctrination of Jim Crow rules early in life. Those rules dictated how blacks were to respond to whites with deference, respect, and formality. They prescribed how black males were to act toward white women includ ing looking downward when in their presence and crossing the road when approaching them. Violating Jim Crow rules either out of ignorance or deliberatively could result in severe punish ment including death. I also sensed the presence of fear and violence through hearing adults whispering about the horrors of blacks hanging from trees. They embodied Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit where she sadly cried, “Southern trees bear a strange fruit, Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.” An early memory is the 1955 lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till, a Chicagoan visiting Money, Mississippi, located near my home. I am a member of the “Emmett Till Generation,” who consists of blacks traumatized by the lynching, which left a lasting imprint. When I was six, Till’s murder rudely awakened me to horrible racism and caused me to ask why whites committed such a horrendous crime against a boy not much older than I was.
Prior to the civil rights movement, black people suffered economic exploitation, political disenfranchisement, and personal oppression. Personal oppression was immediate for it robbed blacks of their personhood and ate away at their dignity. It reinforced the main ideological pillar of black domination that was the view that blacks were inferior and at best, subhuman. This per sonal oppression left blacks struggling over whether they were worthy of the privileges and respect whites routinely enjoyed. Personal oppression was personified in the strict legally enforced system of racial segregation. The logic implied that people so inferior had to be kept separate from whites so as not to taint their superior civilization.
Scholars have tended to misunderstand Jim Crow’s personal system of oppression. They reduce it to so-called more basic forms of domination including economic exploitation and politi cal disenfranchisement. Some even claim segregation was relevant only to middle class blacks who desired to swim and ride in airplanes with whites. But for those who lived it, segregation meant something entirely different. It was a daily albatross that taught its victims they were sub human. Segregation dictated that blacks deserved dirty restrooms and the use of woods as toilets while traveling, inferior to nonexistent health care, beatings from whites because they thought it fun, inferior education largely worthless, rituals of using backdoors and sitting in the rear of buses and trains, and enduring hundreds of personal insults routinely. Economic and political oppression reinforced segregation forcing blacks to move around in a straightjacket of daily humiliations that diminished the souls of black people.
For blacks, the civil rights movement was personal. It sought to incorporate them into the nation as citizens and destroy the imposed blankets of inferiority so that blacks could shed the burden of being treated as subhumans. The crux of Jim Crow segregation was its legality. The 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court Decision declared that racial segregation was the law of the land. This Decision made it legal for whites to treat blacks as subhuman while hiding behind the fiction that segregation created racial equality.
The question of power, more specifically the absence of power, is the great challenge facing insurgent movements seeking social justice. Power, according to Max Weber, is the ability to realize one’s own will despite resistance. This power deficit, which paralyzes the oppressed, is an issue of paramount importance for applied sociology. Applied sociologists are challenged to cre atively address the pragmatic problem of how the oppressed can generate power to defeat a powerful and determined adversary.
The question that confronted black people of the twentieth century was vexing: How can a perfectly legal system of racial domination be overthrown? Moreover, how do you disobey laws when you believe in just laws and how do you confront white oppressors sure to use all legal and extralegal powers to defeat any challenge you mount? Yet, this is a common problem faced by movements of the oppressed because to be successful, they must disrupt the system of domina tion they face; they must break the laws of servitude. Indeed, the power of social change move ments rests with their ability to generate social disruption. Let me be clear: It is social disruption that provides the leverage enabling movements to negotiate with power holders and demand change. By failing to create disruption, the oppressed colludes in its own subordination.
The production of social disruption was the power driving the civil rights movement from Montgomery to Memphis. Underneath all of King’s deeply held beliefs in racial brotherhood, the need for reconciliation, turning the other cheek, and loving thy enemy, was his shrewd under standing that the movement had to disrupt Jim Crow to overthrow it. He came to understand that it was disruptive mass demonstrations that created the fire to burn Jim Crow to the ground.
It was the Gandhi movement in India that provided a protest model for King and the other architects of the modern civil rights movement. That struggle justified breaking unjust laws on moral and political grounds. An earlier generation of black freedom fighters before King caught the Gandhian fire. Howard Thurman, Benjamin Mays, Mordecia Johnson, Bayard Rustin, and James Lawson were all students of Gandhi’s nonviolent revolution. They counseled King on the tactic of disruption. So did the great black leader, A. Philip Randolph, who used mass nonviolent techniques to force President Roosevelt to ease racial discrimination in the military and defense industry during the World War II period.
During the Montgomery bus boycott, King embraced mass nonviolent direct action that he used throughout his career. Therefore, boycotts, mass marches, sit-ins, freedom rides, mass arrests, filling the jails, defying injunctions, kneel-ins, wade-ins all had one purpose: Disrupt the Jim Crow order and force segregationists to capitulate to movement demands.
Nonviolent direct action was a strategy only effective if implemented by masses. Rev. Lawson captured the tactical shift:
The point of the whole problem is that when people are suffering they don’t want rhetoric and processes which seem to go slowly . . . so nonviolent direct action put into the hands of all kind of ordinary people a positive alternative to powerlessness and frustration. That’s one of the great things about direct action. (Morris 1984)
Dr. King was clear about his mission: I must confess that I am not afraid of the word, tension. I have earnestly worked and preached against violent tension, but there is a type of constructive tension that is necessary for growth. “Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue . . .” (Letter from a Birmingham 1963).
King understood that he was calling upon the oppressed to become lawbreakers because law breaking generated the power of disruption capable of overthrowing Jim Crow. The King genera tion overthrew the legal system of racial segregation because it solved the movement’s power deficit problem.
A central concern for applied sociologists should be whether their science is one of liberation or a science of oppression. I am going to apply the reflections of Dr. Martin Luther King and Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois to interrogate the role of applied and clinical sociologists. Before so doing, I believe it is accurate to argue that historically, important applied and clinical sociologists have thrown their support behind oppressors rather than liberators.
The mission statement of the Association of Applied and Clinical Sociology states that its scholars are to
Promote the application of sociological knowledge for beneficial social change through scholarly, educational, programmatic, community, and policy activities; Enhance the understanding of the interrelationship between sociological knowledge and sociological practice; and advance theory, research, methods, and training that promote the use of sociological knowledge for beneficial social change.
Yet, is there a latent contradiction between the Association Mission Statement and its Code of Ethics? That Code of Ethics declares,
In particular, sociological practitioners are committed to avoid any act intended to support racism, sexism or ageism.
As employers and employees, sociological practitioners refuse to participate in any practices that are inconsistent with legal, moral, and ethical standards regarding the treatment of employ ees or of others.
But what if existing legal, moral, and ethical standards stand between the Association’s con stituencies and the social justice they crave and deserve? What if those legal, moral, and ethical standards need to be violated if people of the Association champion are to become free?
Based on an address Dr. King delivered on September 1, 1967, to the American Psychological Association, I argue that applied sociologists failed in the civil rights era to meet their responsi bility to provide answers to the intellectual and political needs of the civil rights movement. King’s address, “The Role of the Behavioral Scientist in the Civil Rights Movement” was deliv ered seven months before he was assassinated.
In fact, the speech was still in galley proofs for publication in the Journal of Social Issues when Martin Luther King, Jr., was viciously murdered by the assassin’s bullet. I urge all applied social scientists read this remarkable address for it contains valuable lessons on how to practice sociology. King begins the speech, declaring, “The Civil Rights Movement needs the help of social scientists.” He cited favorably the 1965 book, Applied Sociology, by sociologists S. M. Miller and Alvin Gouldner that stated, “It is the historic mission of the social sciences to enable mankind to take possession of society.” King argued that any efforts to generate social transfor mation would be greatly advanced by knowledge of social scientists. For King, sociological knowledge of the social conditions and the social-psychological states of oppressed African Americans were crucial to informing the movement as to how to proceed.
King also argued that the dominant white majority was sorely in need of sociological knowl edge to inform them that they were wrapped in a make-believe world of white superiority and were the architects of undemocratic racism of outrageous proportions. He concluded,
The present crisis arises because although it is historically imperative that our society take the next step to equality, we find ourselves psychologically and socially imprisoned. All too many white Americans are horrified not with conditions of Negro life but with the product of these conditions— the Negro himself.
Therefore, applied sociological knowledge was required on both sides of the color line to help make America a real democracy.
King also informed the psychologists that applied social scientific knowledge concerning the dynamics of social movements was desperately needed to push forward the black freedom strug gle. Because of the movement’s continuing need of an effective tactic of disruption, King con cluded, we may be facing an agonizing crisis of tactical theory. He believed that applied social scientists should use their knowledge and skills to develop an effective theory of tactical imple mentation. Because, as King argued, without a more effective tactic for upsetting the status quo, the power structure could maintain its intransigence and hostility.
Yet, King was disappointed that applied social scientists woefully dropped the ball regarding developing an effective tactical theory to guide the civil rights movement. He wrote, “It was the Negro who educated the nation by dramatizing the evils through nonviolent protest. The social scientist played little or no role in disclosing truth. The Negro action movement with raw courage did it virtually alone.”
To be sure, sociologists during the early 1950s had no idea that the conditions for a black movement were gathering organizational and political strength. They could not have anticipated the movement because white social scientists were preoccupied with developing theories of black biological and cultural inferiority and arguing that the only possible solution for the Negro problem hinged on whites addressing their race prejudice. In this view, racial change was the white man’s burden.
Rather than fueling the creative fires of the black freedom struggle, some applied sociologists were intent on smothering the flame. That was the case with applied sociologist, Charles P. Loomis, who was President of the American Sociological Association in 1967. In his Presidential Address, “In Praise of Conflict and its Resolution,” delivered in San Francisco on August 30, Loomis argued that black militants who could not adjust should leave America and establish an all-Negro community in South America in the valleys of the Andes Mountains. Loomis explained,
It should be noted that this ideal settlement—some might call it a second Israel—is only for those who cannot come to terms with the United States after that Point is reached where all that can be done has been done to bring about social justice.
King rejected this version of applied sociology:
I was distressed when I read in the New York Times of Aug. 31, 1967; that a sociologist from Michigan State University, the outgoing president of the American Sociological Society, stated in San Francisco that Negroes should be given a chance to find an all Negro community in South America: ‘that the valleys of the Andes Mountains would be an ideal place for American Negroes to build a second Israel.’ He further declared that ‘The United States Government should negotiate for a remote but fertile land in Equador, Peru or Bolivia for this relocation.’
I feel that it is rather absurd and appalling that a leading social scientist today would suggest to black people, that after all these years of suffering exploitation as well as investment in the American dream, that we should turn around and run at this point in history. I say that we will not run!
Thus, applied sociology can be retrogressive and a staunch supporter of an oppressive status quo.
Earlier I inquired whether a latent contradiction existed between Association of Applied and Clinical Sociology’s mission of avoiding actions intended to support racism, sexism, or ageism and its Code of Ethics which declared sociological practitioners must refuse to participate in any practices that are inconsistent with legal, moral, and ethical standards regarding the treatment of employees or of others. King confronted this contradiction head-on by challenging social scien tists to think outside the practices and inclinations of their professions.
King explained that a central reference point in the psychologist’s tool box was the concept of the “maladjusted.” That is, the aim of psychologists and by extension, other social scientists, is to generate and sustain normality. Maladjustment, in this view, is a condition to be overcome, dismantled, and vanished. King turned this conceptualization of maladjustment on its head:
I am sure that we will recognize that there are some things in our society, some things in our world, to which we should never be adjusted. There are some things concerning which we must always be maladjusted if we are to be people of good will. We must never adjust ourselves to racial discrimination and racial segregation. We must never adjust ourselves to religious bigotry. We must never adjust ourselves to economic conditions that take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. We must never adjust ourselves to the madness of militarism, and the self-defeating effects of physical violence.
King was unsure applied social scientists were capable of thinking creatively and courageous enough to become change agents promoting the disobeying existing laws, morals, and ethics that prevented the realization of social justice. If this were not possible, he advanced a radical idea:
“Thus, it may well be that our world is in dire need of a new organization, The International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment.” Hopefully, AACA can help achieve social justice without having to go out of business to do so.
I turn to W. E. B. Du Bois and the potent academic and applied sociology he developed to inform social scientists whose goal is to help construct a better world. My recent book, The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology, examines Du Bois’s radical sociology. The book’s central argument is that Du Bois is the founder of both scientific and applied sociology. He produced a sociology of human liberation that explored the structural and cultural roots of oppression and uncovered the source of human agency capable of transforming humanity. We should go back and grapple with to move positively and affirmatively toward social justice.
Today black blood flows in streets throughout the nation. A century ago, the great sociologist, W. E. B. Du Bois, witnessed white mobs murder and maim African Americans to keep them in their place. Little did I know when I started my research over a decade ago for The Scholar Denied that his role as scholar/activist would provide a lens for me to think and act in 2015. But I find myself seeking counsel anew from his work.
Over a century ago, Du Bois founded a field of sociology that demands that we hold up for examination hard truths about racism and that forces one to separate myth from reality. Du Bois set out to do nothing less that produce an academic and public sociology that sought to further social justice. As he observed,
I do not laugh. I am quite straight-faced as I ask soberly: “But what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire it?” Then always, somehow, some way, silently but clearly, I am given to understand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!
A century ago, Du Bois was challenging us to understand that race was a socially constructed, hierarchical machine, designed for the purpose of human exploitation. It seems to me, applied sociologist’s highest calling is to seek to dismantle social arrangements of exploitation and oppression.
As a sociologist committed to the need for social transformation, I find myself wondering about what responsibilities I have as a black intellectual, to speak out. As you know, it is risky to be an activist sociologist: as often as not it derails careers, limits social networks, and curtails upward mobility in the profession and in the public media. But, again, Du Bois illuminates my own path, declaring, “I am one who tells the truth and exposes evil and seeks with Beauty for Beauty to set the world right.” I have concluded that one of the primary tasks of black sociolo gists—actually all sociologists—is to produce pointed and critical scholarship, even when it is discomfiting to the powers-that-be.
Black intellectuals need to follow Du Bois’s lead in speaking truth to power. White sociolo gists—especially applied and clinical scholars—should also follow Du Bois’s lead and execute research enabling them to speak racial truth to power. But, ah, white privilege is a stubborn beast, standing in the way of truths. The bard, Countee Cullen, in a poetic conversation with God con cedes, “Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: To make a poet black, and bid him sing!” Our calling is to sing sociological truths and work to apply those truths to change wretched social conditions. Black scholars should heed Frederick Douglass’s insight: “He who would be free must himself strike the first blow!” Applied, clinically oriented, sociologists should follow that power wisdom as well. As I try to show in The Scholar Denied, our work needs to be political, engaged, rigorous— Du Bois has paved the way for us in his path breaking, brilliant body of scholarship and activism.
I leave you with this message: The Association of Applied and Clinical Sociology should always stay on the move, marching toward the realization of social justice! Thanks and Godspeed!
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
King Martin Luther, Jr.,
78-88.
1963. “Letter From A Birmingham Jail” The Atlantic Monthly. Vol. 212 No. 2.
King Martin Luther, Jr., 1968 “King’s challenge to the nation’s social scientists”, Journal of Social Issues
24: 1-149.
Aldon Morris is the Leon Forrest Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Northwestern University. Morris’ research focuses on race, social movements, and W. E. B. Du Bois. His latest book is
The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology.