Welcome to Week 8!

Lesson Overview

This week we will focus on the contributions of W.E.B. Du Bois in criminology. While he is not customarily identified as a criminologist, but many of his writings included discussions about crime. In the Philadelphia Negro he related the migration of former slaves to unfamiliar cities as a cause of crime and suggested that Emancipation was another cause. He wrote of the disproportionate number of black persons represented in the criminal statistics and discussed how penitentiaries serve as breeding grounds for intelligent criminals. His writings also focused on solutions for crimes.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this week, you will be able to:

• Recognize the contributions of W.E.B. Du Bois in the discipline of criminology.
• Discuss how W.E.B. Du Bois saw the problems of African American criminality at the beginning of the 20th century.
• Discuss the solutions to crime pioneered by W.E.B. Du Bois.

---

Workflow

Readings

Gabbidon, S. L. (2001). W.E.B. Du Bois: Pioneering American Criminologist. Journal of Black Studies, 31(5), 581–599. Download this article here.

W-E-B-Du-Bois-1-1

The Negro Criminal in W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro (1899). Download the article here.

Dubois_99_NegroCriminal-1

Videos

Discussion Forum

Discussion Forum 8: Criminology of W.E.B. Du Bois

PowerPoint