Sampling frame

Du Bois studied at Fisk and in Berlin, and in 1895 became the first African American to earn a Harvard doctorate. At Atlanta University he built one of the first programmes of empirical sociology in the United States. He co-founded the NAACP in 1909 and edited its magazine, The Crisis, for twenty-four years. He wrote through segregation, lynching, two world wars and the Cold War; indicted in 1951 and acquitted, he was denied a passport for most of the 1950s, and he died in Ghana on the eve of the 1963 March on Washington.

• 1897 · Strivings of the Negro People

  Double consciousness

  Black Americans were made to see themselves through the eyes of a society that held them in contempt, carrying two identities in tension within one person.

• 1899 · The Philadelphia Negro

  Measure the conditions

  A door-to-door survey of Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward explained a Black community’s problems through its history, its work and the discrimination it faced, not through race.

• 1903 · The Souls of Black Folk

  The colour line and the veil

  He named the colour line as the central problem of the twentieth century, and the veil as the barrier through which each side saw the other only partly.

• 1935 · Black Reconstruction in America

  The propaganda of history

  Historians had written Reconstruction to serve a political story, erasing what freed people did. He also argued that white workers accepted a public and psychological wage of status in place of solidarity.

1. What becomes visible from the position the dominant account excludes?
2. Who was counted when this was measured, and who was left out?
3. What does this look like from the side of the line the account was not written from?
4. Is the explanation pointing at people, or at the conditions they were placed in?

No single excluded standpoint speaks for every marginalised experience. His early hope that an educated tenth would lead was criticised as elitist, and he revised it himself in 1948.