Aldon Morris

Aldon Douglas Morris is an American sociologist, born in 1949, an emeritus professor at Northwestern University specializing in social movements, civil rights and social inequality. His 1984 book The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change examined how existing Black church and community institutions supplied the organizational base of the civil rights movement. He is also known for arguing, most fully in his 2015 book The Scholar Denied, that W. E. B. Du Bois, rather than the figures traditionally credited, founded modern American sociology, and that Du Bois's contributions to the field were suppressed for decades because of institutional racism. He served as the one hundred twelfth president of the American Sociological Association in 2021 and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.