ABSTRACT
My story begins in the late 1950s at Haverford College, a small liberal arts institution. In my sophomore year, I took a class taught by Ira D.A. Reid, a charismatic teacher who had come to Haverford a decade earlier after working with Charles Johnson and E.W. Dubois, two legendary figures in sociology. Dubois had founded Phylon, a journal of race studies, and Reid was a co-editor before joining the faculty at Haverford. The only African American at the college and one of the few black PhDs in the field at the time, Reid offered a riveting class on race, power, and social conflict. We read what might now be called “critical sociology,” books of social commentary such as C. Wright Mills’ The Sociological Imagination (1959), David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (Reisman et al., 1961), and August Hollingshead’s Elmtown’s Youth (1949), among others. By the end of the semester, I had fallen in love with sociology, a love affair that continues to this day.
