Monroe Work

Who was Monroe Work?

Monroe Nathan Work, was a sociologist who founded the Department of Records and Research at the Tuskegee Institute in 1908 and expanded its national reputation. With much of his career he strove to advance credibility to the anti-lynching campaigns and the Negro Health Week movement. His chief works include the Negro Year Book and A Bibliography of the Negro in Africa and America -- a bibliography of 17,000 references on African Americans. These resources were the largest of their kind in an era when scholarship by and about black Americans was highly inaccessible, and overlooked or ignored by most academics in the US.

Work was born to former slaves in Iredell County, North Carolina and moved in 1867 to Cairo, Illinois where his father pursued farming. As a person who was able to hear about the many injustices his people suffered, he strove towards finding ways to make himself useful in the continued struggle for equality; the turn of the century was a period when the number of Jim Crow laws were increasing and race relations were deteriorating in periodic violence.