About Phylon

Phylon

Phylon, subtitled the Clark Atlanta University Review of Race and Culture, is a peer-reviewed academic journal published in Atlanta, Georgia, devoted to the study of race and culture in the United States from an African-American perspective. Founded in 1940 by the scholar and civil-rights leader W. E. B. Du Bois at what was then Atlanta University, it is one of the oldest continuously recognised American journals in its field. It appears twice a year, is edited by the sociologist Obie Clayton of Clark Atlanta University, and is published through the Robert W. Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center together with Clark Atlanta University. Its International Standard Serial Number is 0031-8906, and its back run is archived on JSTOR. After a long interruption in regular publication, the journal was relaunched in 2015 as an online-only title, distributed through the Atlanta University Center's DigitalCommons repository.

Founding by W. E. B. Du Bois at Atlanta University

Du Bois founded Phylon in 1940 during his second period on the faculty of Atlanta University, the historically Black institution where he had earlier organised the sociology department and convened influential conferences on Black life. The journal was intended to replace the university's earlier publications, which had pioneered a more scientific approach to the study of race, and to carry that work forward on new terms. Du Bois edited the journal himself from 1940 to 1944. His name gave the new quarterly immediate standing in scholarly and literary circles, and the founding linked the journal from the start to the wider Du Boisian project of documenting African-American life rigorously and on its own terms, rather than through the distorting frameworks that then dominated much academic writing about race.

The founding programme and editorial circle

The journal's founding programme was deliberate. Where its predecessors and rivals had often approached race through biology and psychology, Phylon was designed to treat its subject culturally and historically. The original editorial board and contributing editors reflected that breadth, including the sociologist Ira De Augustine Reid, the poet and critic William Stanley Braithwaite, the diplomat and writer Mercer Cook, the educator Horace M. Bond and the historian Rayford W. Logan. Although the core of the journal was in the social sciences, its remit deliberately extended into the humanities, and that interdisciplinary structure — history, sociology, education and literary study published side by side — became a lasting characteristic of the title and of the special-topic issues it publishes today.

Poetry, fiction and literary criticism

Alongside its scholarly articles, Phylon published original poetry and fiction and serious literary criticism. Critics such as Arthur P. Davis, Nick Aaron Ford and Hugh Gloster addressed literary questions in its pages, and creative contributors included Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. A representative issue from the first quarter of 1950, volume eleven, number one, carried three Hughes poems grouped under the title "Three Poems of Harlem" — "New York," "Passing" and "Shame on You" — with Hughes also listed as a contributing editor, and included Alain Locke's survey "Wisdom of De Profundis: The Literature of the Negro, 1949." That mixture of scholarship and creative writing placed the Atlanta journal within the same intellectual world as better-known Black periodicals such as The Crisis and Opportunity, while keeping its base in a university rather than in a national organisation.

Editors after Du Bois

The journal's editorial succession is unusually well documented. Du Bois served from 1940 to 1944, followed by Ira De A. Reid from 1944 to 1948, Mozell C. Hill from 1948 to 1958, Tilman C. Cothran from 1959 to 1970, John D. Reid from 1971 to 1978, Charles F. Duncan from 1978 to 1980, Wilbur W. Watson from 1980 to 1989, Lucy C. Grisby from 1989 to 1998 and Jeff Porterfield from 1998 to 2002. The current editor, Obie Clayton, is the Edmund Asa Ware Distinguished Professor and a former chair of sociology and criminal justice at Clark Atlanta University. That unbroken list of named editors, spanning more than six decades, makes Phylon one of the more traceable institutional journals in African-American studies.

The Phylon Quarterly years

In 1957 the journal was renamed The Phylon Quarterly. The change lasted only a few years: in 1960 the original title, Phylon, was restored, and JSTOR accordingly catalogues the run in three linked sequences — Phylon from 1940 to 1956, The Phylon Quarterly from 1957 to 1959, and Phylon again from 1960 onward. Through these decades the journal moved from a quarterly rhythm toward its present semiannual frequency, and it served as a platform for scholarly discussion of the struggles and achievements of Black communities during the civil-rights era and afterwards, publishing influential work in sociology, history, education and the arts.

Freedom's Odyssey and the journal's scholarly footprint

The journal's standing among historians is reflected in Freedom's Odyssey: African American History Essays from Phylon, published in 1999 and edited by Alexa B. Henderson and Janis Sumler-Edmond. The volume collected twenty-nine scholarly essays on African-American history that had originally appeared in the journal, on subjects including slave revolts, abolitionism, desegregation and the civil-rights movement. The anthology demonstrated how much of the journal's back run had become source material for the field it helped to create: essays written for a university quarterly in Atlanta were, by the end of the twentieth century, being republished as a standard collection for students of African-American history.

Interruption and the Atlanta merger era

Regular publication faltered in the journal's later print decades. Reference sources differ on the exact point at which the print run wound down — one encyclopedia of Black journalism dates the end of the original run to 1988, the year Atlanta University merged with Clark College to form Clark Atlanta University, while the Atlanta University Center records that the journal was published until the early 2000s. What is clear is that by the time of its relaunch, Phylon had been absent for more than ten years. Plans to revive it had been discussed as early as the creation of a Du Bois institute at Clark Atlanta University, which proposed relaunching the quarterly Du Bois had started in 1940 as part of a wider revival of his Atlanta research programme.

Relaunch as an online journal in 2015

Phylon resumed publication in the spring of 2015 as an online-only journal. The relaunch was a collaboration between editor Obie Clayton and the Robert W. Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center, and the journal is hosted on the Center's e-scholarship repository, DigitalCommons, at digitalcommons.auctr.edu/phylon — the address carried in its directory listing. The move preserved the features that had defined the print journal — peer review, a base at the Atlanta institution Du Bois had served, and a focus on race and culture — while making new issues freely reachable to readers in the Atlanta University Center community and available by subscription arrangement beyond it.

Phylon today

Today Phylon is a semiannual journal in which each issue is organised around a special topic of general interest to scholars in the humanities and social sciences. Its stated method is deliberately Du Boisian and interdisciplinary: editors encourage joint authorship across disciplines so that a theme is treated historically, politically and socio-economically at once, on the premise that scholars in nominally separate fields are often working on the same problem from different angles. A special volume for summer and winter 2018, volume fifty-five, marked both the 150th anniversary of Du Bois's birth and the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King Jr., with contributions on ethnic bias in algorithms, housing policy and race, and the history of professional social work in Atlanta. A 2025 special volume honoured Rufus E. Clement, the longest-serving president of the Atlanta University system, and took the future of historically Black colleges and universities as its theme — a subject that returns the journal to the institutional world from which it sprang.

Place and legacy

Phylon occupies a distinctive place among American journals. It was founded not by a commercial publisher or a national advocacy organisation but by one of the twentieth century's most influential scholars, working at a Black university in the segregated South, and it has outlived its founder by more than sixty years. Its history mirrors that of its home institution — Atlanta University, the merger that created Clark Atlanta University in 1988, and the Atlanta University Center consortium — and its archive, preserved on JSTOR and in the Woodruff Library's repository, remains a primary record of how the scholarly study of race and culture in the United States developed from 1940 to the present. That a journal launched as a wartime quarterly is still publishing special issues in the 2020s is the clearest measure of the durability of the platform Du Bois built in Atlanta.