Chicago School of Race Relations

Who Belonged

A recent academic debate has centered on the difficulty of determining who to include in various traditions at the University of Chicago, including the Chicago School. Many efforts to define the Chicago School, nonetheless, have established important network affiliations, influences, and contributions. Thus, the following people are usually included as scholars in the Chicago School: Horace Cayton, Bingham Dai, Frederick Detweiler, John Dollard, E. Franklin Frazier, E. C. Hughes, William H. Jones, Charles S. Johnson, Guy B. Johnson, Forest La Violette, Oscar Lewis, Andrew W. Lind, Joseph D. Lohman, Charles Parrish, Donald Pierson, Robert Redfield, E. B. Reuter, Samuel A. Stouffer, Robert Sutherland, Edgar T. Thompson, and Louis Wirth.

Most of the members of the Chicago School were students of George Herbert Mead or Mead's students W. I. Thomas and Ernest W. Burgess. The major figure was Robert E. Park, a student of John Dewey; the latter was Mead's closest colleague.

What They Thought

The widely recognized, or “legitimated,” Chicago School emphasized (a) the social origins of group prejudice; (b) a pattern of race relations that was cyclical and involved conflict, accommodation, competition, and assimilation; (c) an urban pattern wherein southern Black migrants became disenfranchised in the city, particularly in the North; and (d) the importance of natural histories to account for the emergence of communities and everyday life.

As a result of this overlapping training, the underlying ideas of the Chicago School are fairly coherent and consistent. Briefly, the Chicago School assumed that humans have great malleability, incorporated into the racialized genesis of the self, the definition of the situation, and the maintenance and creation of the community. These suppositions united the writings of the Chicago School not only during the period widely discussed in the scholarship, but throughout the period from 1892 to 1960, indicating that an extension of the school's era may be warranted.

[Page 270]Park held an intellectual and personal allegiance to the ideas of Booker T. Washington, who advocated an assimilationist model of race relations and vocational training for African Americans. Thus, the Chicago School played an accomodationist role in the analysis of the Black community that was crucial in the development of American thought. This often unexplored legacy of White bias was associated with Park's use of Washington's worldview and his patriarchal opposition to the work of women in sociology. Despite the many flaws in Park's epistemology, nonetheless, he helped build a major institutional anchor for the training of African American men in sociology based on the common epistemology of the entire network of the Chicago School.

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