PARK, ROBERT E.

born Feb. 14, 1864, Harveyville, Pa., U.S. died Feb. 7, 1944, Nashville, Tenn. in full Robert Ezra Park sociologist noted for his work on ethnic minority groups, particularly U.S. blacks, and on human ecology, a term he is sometimes credited with coining. He was one of the leading figures in what came to be known as the Chicago school of sociology. Park studied under the philosophers John Dewey (at the University of Michigan), William James and Josiah Royce (both at Harvard University), and the sociologist Georg Simmel (in Germany). All his graduate work was done after 11 years' experience as a newspaper reporter in various large cities, where his interest in social problems was stimulated. He taught at Harvard (190405), the University of Chicago (191433), and Fisk University, Nashville, Tenn. (193643). In 1906 Park wrote two magazine articles about the oppression of the Congolese by Belgian colonial administrators. Turning to the study of the black population in his own country, he became secretary to Booker T. Washington and is said to have written most of Washington's book The Man Farthest Down (1912). He believed that a caste system produced by sharp ethnic differences tends, because of the division of labour among the castes, to change into a structure of economic classes. With Ernest W. Burgess, Park wrote a standard text, Introduction to the Science of Sociology (1921). In The Immigrant Press and Its Control (1922), Park argued that foreign-language newspapers in the long run would promote assimilation of immigrants. Three volumes of his Collected Papers, edited by Everett C. Hughes and others, were published between 1950 and 1955. The second volume deals with the city and also with human ecology, which was the title of a course taught by Park at the University of Chicago in 1926.