To Agitate a Southern Audience: Revisiting the Impact of Abolition on Tuskegee Institute’s Institutional Interventions, Anti-Lynching Advocacy, and Sociological Contributions

Scholars have paid minimal attention to the political and practical objectives that guided Tuskegee Institute’s sociological program and institutional interventions in the 19th and 20th centuries. Leveraging a multi-modal, historical sociological approach grounded in primary and secondary analyses of biographical data, narratives, and archival data, I show that Tuskegee’s institutional interventions illustrate three abolitionist tactics: (1) building consciousness through research dissemination and place-based investment, (2) galvanizing Southern whites and political elites to abolish lynching locally, and (3) countering the propaganda used to justify lynching to inspire divestment from lynching and carceral punishment. Booker T. Washington’s commitment to eradicating structural racism and resource deprivation in the aftermath of slavery led to Tuskegee Institute’s formation of the first department of applied rural sociology in the United States, and the Negro Farmers’ conference and Movable School interventions supported a comprehensive anti-poverty strategy. Likewise, the research activism of Monroe Work disseminated via the Negro Year Book and individual publications sought to galvanize the abolition of lynching and carceral punishment. In the wake of re-emerged visibility of white supremacist terrorism and commitments to practicing Du Boisian sociology across the United States, I argue that reviving the memory of Tuskegee’s institutional practices makes a case for reconsidering the place of abolition in academic sociology in the 21st century.