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Park - An Activist

Park soon gave up his previous ambition to teach because he felt "sick and tired of the academic world, and wanted to go back into the world of men." He wrote much later that he could "trace [his] interest in sociology to the reading of Goethe's Faust." "You remember," he explained, "that Faust was tired of books and wanted to see the world."

William James once read to his class his essay "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings." This essay greatly impressed Park. "The 'blindness' of which James spoke," writes Park, "is the blindness each of us is likely to have for the meaning of other people's lives. . . .What sociologists most need to know is what goes on behind the faces of men, what it is that makes life for each of us either dull or thrilling." James spoke of the "personal secret" that makes life boring to one person and full of zest to another. Park seems to have con- cluded after listening to James that his own "secret" consisted in his desire to alternate between active involvement in social affairs and detached analysis and social description. Having spent six years in the academy, Park resolved to return to the give-and-take of the social world which had fascinated him during his newspaper career.

The social problems of the Negro seemed to Park at the time to be the most acute in America. His interest in racial issues, which continued to be a prime focus of his concerns throughout his later career, was spurred by having met Booker T. Washington, the President of Tuskegee Institute. Park soon joined forces with Washington and became his informal secretary, accompany- ing him on his travels. He went along on the research trip to Europe, which resulted in Washington's book, The Man Farthest Down; experts agree that this account of the miseries of Europe's underclass was mostly written by Park. Park worked with Washington for nine years and had great respect for him. He once remarked to Ernest Burgess that he learned more from Washing- ton than from any of his teachers. Park seems to have been especially im- pressed by Washington's consummate skills in the strategy and tactics of social action.

Park met Washington when he was invited to become secretary and press agent of the Congo Reform Association, a group of reformers who wanted to draw public attention to the oppression, corruption, and depravity of the Bel- gian colonial regime in the Congo. He was about to go to Africa to study the situation at first hand, when Washington invited him to Tuskegee and con- vinced him that he might best start his studies of Africa in the South. As a result, Park spent seven winters, partly at Tuskegee and partly roaming about the South, "getting acquainted with the life, the customs, and the condition of the Negro people." During those years he also wrote a series of muckraking exposes of the Belgian colonial atrocities in the Congo for Everybody's Maga- zine.

From Coser, 1977:368-369.