Work, Monroe Nathan

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Work, Monroe Nathan

August 15, 1866
May 2, 1945

Soon after the birth of Monroe Work, a sociologist, in rural Tredell County, North Carolina, Work's parents joined many other former slaves migrating westward and acquired a farm under the provisions of the Homestead Act. Remaining to help his aging parents, Work began secondary school when he was twenty-three. In 1903 he received his master of arts degree in sociology from the University of Chicago and accepted a teaching job at Georgia State Industrial College in Savannah, Georgia, where he met and married Florence E. Henderson.

Appalled by the plight of the city's African Americans, in 1905 he took two actions to improve conditions. He attended the conference called by W. E. B. Du Bois that established the Niagara Movement and founded the Savannah Men's Sunday Club, which combined protest, lobbying, and petitioning with the functions of a lyceum and civic club. By means of a streetcar boycott, the group attempted, but finally failed, to prevent the enactment of the city's first segregation law in 1906.

In 1908 Booker T. Washington offered Work a position at Tuskegee Institute in Macon County, Alabama. After his alliance with Du Bois, Work seemed an unlikely candidate to accept a job from Washington—the nemesis of the Niagara Movement. By 1908, however, Work was disillusioned with the power of protest and the Niagara Movement was floundering. Work reassessed his talents. Dignified instead of dynamic, he was a quiet scholar and researcher rather than a leader. Believing prejudice was rooted in ignorance, Work had long been compiling "exact knowledge concerning the Negro." The resources and audience available at Tuskegee for his research proved irresistible.

Work utilized his Department of Records and Research to compile a daily record of the African-American experience from newspaper clippings, pamphlets, reports, and replies to letters of inquiry. In 1912 he began publishing the Negro Yearbook and the yearly Tuskegee Lynching Report to enlighten black and white newspaper editors, educators, and leaders, especially in the South. In 1927 Work published A Bibliography of the Negro in Africa and America, the first extensive, classified bibliography of its kind. In addition, he was one of the participants invited to the conference held at Howard University on November 7, 1931, to plan the proposed (but never completed) Encyclopedia of the Negro.

Work also remained an activist after leaving the Niagara Movement for Tuskegee. He worked to improve black health conditions, to eradicate lynching, and to improve race relations. A pivotal figure in the establishment of National Negro Health Week in 1914, he subsequently organized it for seventeen years. He also participated in the southern antilynching movement of the Atlanta-based Commission on Interracial Cooperation and the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching. From those contacts he became involved in other interracial groups.

By the time of his death, Work had published over seventy articles and pamphlets, including pioneering studies of Africa's contributions to and its impact on African-American culture. In 1900 he was the first African American to publish an article in the American Journal of Sociology, and in 1929 he presented a paper at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association.

See also Niagara Movement; Sociology; Tuskegee University