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I chapter 2 I Charles S. Johnson and the Parkian Tradition Robert Park was forty-nine years old and on the threshold of a new career when he taught his first classes at the University of Chicago in 1913. In less than a decade, he emerged as the dominant star in a brilliant constellation known to posterity as the Chicago School of Sociology. Not the least of his achievements was creation of a cadre of African American social scientists to carry on a tradition of inquiry, much of it centering on the Great Migration . Among them was Charles S. Johnson, whose life and career weave together many threads in this narrative. While studying at the University, Johnson also worked with Park at the Chicago Urban League, where he documented the living conditions of blacks on the South Side. He nearly perished in the 1919 riot, which convulsed the city as whites reacted savagely to destabilized race relations and shifting neighborhood boundaries. When the governor convened an investigative commission, Johnson assumed a key role, overseeing research on the riot’s background. He served as principal author of the commission’s report, The Negro in Chicago (1922), a landmark of social scientific inquiry and a testament to his optimistic faith in the power of scrupulous research, reasoned discourse, and interracial contact to improve race relations. As editor of the National Urban League journal Opportunity from 1923 to 1928, Johnson extended Parkian notions about the relation between public opinion and social change in an effort to organize a full-fledged literary and cultural movement centered in Harlem. The Teacher As Park settled into a new position at an institution that was itself barely two decades old, his first task was to master his own discipline. He had studied philosophy at five universities , but his only formal instruction in sociology was a single course with Georg Simmel at Berlin. His apprentice years were devoted to extensive reading in sociology, anthropology, and social psychology, under the mentorship of his friend William Thomas, who was about the same age, but already an established figure in the field. Park found a congenial intellectual atmosphere at the University. His undergraduate professor, John Dewey, had moved from Michigan to Chicago in 1894 and taught there for ten years while developing his pragmatic philosophy in dialogue with sociology and other disciplines. George Herbert Mead, Dewey’s colleague in the philosophy department, taught at Chicago from 33 I 1894 to 1931, and his course “Advanced Social Psychology” profoundly influenced graduate students and faculty in the social sciences.1 Park was initially appointed professorial lecturer in the Divinity School, based on his “special knowledge of the Negro” and expertise in collective psychology.2 In 1914 he introduced a course in the department of sociology called “The Negro in America.” This was its catalog description: “Directed especially to the effects, in slavery and freedom, of the contacts of the white and black race, an attempt will be made to characterize the nature of the present tensions and tendencies, and to estimate the character of the changes which race relations are likely to bring about in the American system.”3 Park next offered a course titled “Crowd and Public,” which addressed such topics as “crowds, mobs, panics, manias, dancing crazes, stampedes, mass behavior, public opinion, fashion, fads, social movements, reforms and revolutions.”4 As Park’s exploratory reading progressed, he added new courses. “The Newspaper” grew out of his earlier career as journalist and focused on the influence of the press on public opinion amid the rapidly changing conditions of city life. “The Survey” addressed methodological problems in studying urban environments. Shortly after American entry into World War I, Park developed a fifth course, “Race and Nationality,” which linked his knowledge of black life with broader theoretical interests in migration and cultural assimilation. Park is best remembered for some thirty essays on race, ethnicity, and culture published during his tenure at Chicago.5 His central contribution was the concept of a race relations cycle through which alien peoples necessarily pass once they are brought into close proximity.6 Park identified four successive stages: contact, conflict, accommodation, and assimilation. Throughout human history, he observed, cross-cultural contacts have occurred as a result of war, commerce, and migration, while in modern times dramatic changes in modes of communication and transportation have mobilized formerly isolated peoples. Initial contact zones, which Park described as cultural or racial frontiers, become arenas of competition and...

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