W. E. B. Du Bois
However, the Northwestern University race scholar Aldon Morris argues in his book "The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology" (2015) that W. E .B. Du Bois was practicing public sociology long before the term was incorporated into the mainstream disciplinary vocabulary, and that scientific racism prevented Du Bois' contributions from being recognized by the discipline for nearly a century.