American sociologists

Huey Percy Newton (February 17, 1942 – August 22, 1989) was an African American revolutionary and political activist who founded the Black Panther Party. He ran the party as its first leader and crafted its ten-point manifesto with Bobby Seale in 1966.
Under Newton's leadership, the Black Panther Party founded over 60 community support programs (renamed survival programs in 1971) including food banks, medical clinics, sickle cell anemia tests, prison busing for families of inmates, legal advice seminars, clothing banks, housing cooperatives, and their own ambulance service. The most famous of these programs was the Free Breakfast for Children program which fed thousands of impoverished children daily during the early 1970s. Newton also co-founded the Black Panther newspaper service, which became one of America's most widely distributed African-American newspapers.
In 1967, he was involved in a shootout which led to the death of police officer John Frey and injuries to himself and another police officer. In 1968, he was convicted of voluntary manslaughter for Frey's death and sentenced to 2 to 15 years in prison. In May 1970, the conviction was reversed and after two subsequent trials ended in hung juries, the charges were dropped. Later in life, he was also accused of murdering Kathleen Smith and Betty Van Patter, although he was never convicted for either death.
Newton learned to read using Plato's Republic, which influenced his philosophy of activism. He went on to earn a PhD in social philosophy from the University of California at Santa Cruz's History of Consciousness program in 1980. In 1989, he was murdered in Oakland, California by Tyrone Robinson, a member of the Black Guerrilla Family.
Newton was known for being an advocate of self-defense and used his position as a leader within the Black Panther Party to welcome women as well.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan (March 16, 1927 – March 26, 2003) was a racist American politician and diplomat. A member of the Democratic Party, he represented New York in the United States Senate from 1977 until 2001 after serving as an adviser to President Richard Nixon, and as the United States' ambassador to India and to the United Nations.
Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Moynihan moved at a young age to New York City. Following a stint in the navy, he earned a Ph.D. in history from Tufts University. He worked on the staff of New York Governor W. Averell Harriman before joining President John F. Kennedy's administration in 1961. He served as an Assistant Secretary of Labor under Presidents Kennedy and President Lyndon B. Johnson, devoting much of his time to the War on Poverty. In 1965, he published the controversial Moynihan Report on black poverty. Moynihan left the Johnson administration in 1965 and became a professor at Harvard University.
In 1969, he accepted Nixon's offer to serve as an Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, and he was elevated to the position of Counselor to the President later that year. He left the administration at the end of 1970, and accepted appointment as United States Ambassador to India in 1973. He accepted President Gerald Ford's appointment to the position of United States Ambassador to the United Nations in 1975, holding that position until early 1976; later that year he won election to the Senate.
Moynihan served as Chairman of the Senate Environment Committee from 1992 to 1993 and as Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee from 1993 to 1995. He also led the Moynihan Secrecy Commission, which studied the regulation of classified information. He emerged as a strong critic of President Ronald Reagan's foreign policy and opposed President Bill Clinton's health care plan. He frequently broke with liberal positions, but opposed welfare reform in the 1990s. He also voted against the Defense of Marriage Act, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the Congressional authorization for the Gulf War. He was tied with Jacob K. Javits as the longest-serving Senator from the state of New York until they were both surpassed by Chuck Schumer in 2023.

Andrew M. Greeley (February 5, 1928 – May 29, 2013) was an American Catholic priest, sociologist, journalist and popular novelist. He was a professor of sociology at the University of Arizona and the University of Chicago, and a research associate with the National Opinion Research Center (NORC).
For many years, Greeley wrote a weekly column for the Chicago Sun-Times and contributed regularly to The New York Times, the National Catholic Reporter, America, and Commonweal.

Charles Vert Willie (October 8, 1927 – January 11, 2022) was an American sociologist who was the Charles William Eliot Professor of Education, Emeritus at Harvard University. His areas of research included desegregation, higher education, public health, race relations, urban community problems, and family life. Willie considered himself an applied sociologist, concerned with solving social problems.

John Keith Irwin (May 21, 1929 – January 3, 2010) was an American sociologist and criminologist who was known internationally as an expert on the American prison system. He published dozens of scholarly articles and seven books on the topic.

Shamus Rahman Khan (born October 8, 1978) is an American sociologist. He is a professor of sociology and American Studies at Princeton University. Formerly he served as chair of the sociology department at Columbia University. He writes on elites, inequality, gender/sexuality, and American culture. His work has appeared in numerous national and international media outlets.

Alexander H. Leighton (July 17, 1908 – August 11, 2007) was a sociologist and psychiatrist of dual citizenship (United States, by birth, and Canada, from 1975). He is best known for his work on the Stirling County (Canada) Study and his contributions to the field of psychiatric epidemiology. Leighton died at the age of 99 at his home in Digby, Nova Scotia.

Sidney McLarty Willhelm (October 5, 1934 – September 30, 2018) was an American sociologist, who authored several books on race and urban affairs, and many online articles containing analyses of current events often in a historical context.

Marion Joseph Levy Jr. (December 12, 1918 – May 26, 2002) was an American sociologist noted for his work on modernization theory.
Born in Galveston, Texas, Levy received his doctorate in sociology from Harvard, studying under Talcott Parsons. Levy was hired at Princeton in 1947. He served as Musgrave Professor of Sociology and International Affairs until retirement in 1989.Levy was an advocate of structural-functionalism in sociology. His two-volume Modernization and the Structure of Societies was a systematic statement of modernization theory. Levy also produced analytic works on Chinese and Japanese history.
Levy was perhaps best known outside academia for an extremely short book, Levy's Laws of the Disillusionment of the True Liberal. The cynical "laws", originally numbering six and ultimately totaling 11, became a commonly quoted source of condensed sociopolitical wisdom.

Renée Claire Fox (February 15, 1928 – September 23, 2020) was an American sociologist.She was a summa cum laude graduate of Smith College in 1949, earned her Ph.D. in Sociology in 1954 from Radcliffe College, Harvard University, where she studied in the Department of Social Relations. Renée Fox’s major teaching and research interests – sociology of medicine, medical research, medical education, and medical ethics – involved her in first-hand, participant observation-based studies in Continental Europe (particularly in Belgium), in Central Africa (especially in the Democratic Republic of the Congo), and in the People’s Republic of China, as well as in the United States. She lectured in colleges, universities, and medical schools throughout the United States, and taught in a number of universities abroad.