This essay surveying W.E.B. Du Bois' views on citizenship contends that the conventional canon in 'Du Bois as sociologist' studies tends to fixate on his pre-First World War years as a Social Darwinian reformer, focusing on the cultural and legal exclusion of African American and Pan-African citizens. Ignored in this focus is his turn to the left after his 1926 visit to the Soviet Union, which contributed to his gradual transformation into a Marxist-oriented world peace advocate and, during his last years, into a Communist. The Red Scare, the Cold War, the factor of race in Jim Crow America, and the anti-Marxist and anti-Communist perspectives of the third-generational sociologists who would come to define post-Second World War American sociology would assure Du Bois' political burial in American sociology and in American intellectual thought in general until a new Black pride generation emerged in the 1960s. But even then, post-1960s sociologists have yet to come to terms with Du Bois' post-1920s Marxist and otherwise left-of-center perspectives on the experiences of citizenship injustice among people of color and other dehumanized peoples around the world, which read so much like contemporary post-modern and restorative justice theories and parallel C.Wright Mills' The Power Elite, published in the 1950s.
