Along the Colorline

How a Du Boisian tradition in sociology evolved as other scholars, including Charles S. Johnson and Ida Wells-Barnett, engaged with and developed Du Bois’s scholarshipW. E. B. Du Bois’s famous declaration that the central problem of the twentieth century was the problem of the colorline—and that the colorline “belts the world”—influenced many other Black social scientists, who explored this colorline, not only studying its expression in the United States but also situating US racism in historical and global contexts. In Along the Colorline, Ali Meghji argues that Du Bois and those scholars developed a distinctive Du Boisian approach to sociology. Du Bois’s pioneering and innovative work is now part of the sociological canon. Meghji builds on this scholarship to consider the Du Boisian tradition as it grew beyond Dubois’s own work.Meghji analyzes the interpersonal and intellectual relations among Black sociologists in the early-to-mid-twentieth century, including Charles S. Johnson, St. Clair Drake, Franklin Frazier, Ida Wells-Barnett, Anna Julia Cooper, and Horace Cayton. Examining components of their methodology—in particular, case study–driven studies that helped to dismantle myths of Black cultural and biological inferiority, the normative yet objective study of racial terror, and sociological analysis developed in tandem with anticolonial movements—Meghji argues that the Du Boisian tradition is a vibrant sociological approach that can continue to guide and innovate research today.