Allison Davis (anthropologist)
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William Boyd Allison Davis (October 14, 1902 – November 21, 1983) was an American educator, anthropologist, writer, researcher, and scholar who became the second African American to hold a full faculty position at a major white university when he joined the staff of the
University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chic ...
in 1942, after only Dr. Julian H. Lewis, where he served for the balance of his academic life. He was considered one of the most promising black scholars of his generation. Among his students during his tenure at the University of Chicago were anthropologists St. Clair Drake and sociologist Nathan Hare. Davis, who has been honored with a commemorative postage stamp by the
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, is best remembered for his pioneering
anthropology Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of be ...
research on southern
race Race, RACE or "The Race" may refer to: * Race (biology), an informal taxonomic classification within a species, generally within a sub-species * Race (human categorization), classification of humans into groups based on physical traits, and/or s ...
and class during the 1930s, his research on intelligence quotient tests in the 1940s and 1950s, and his support of "
compensatory education Compensatory education offers supplementary programs or services designed to help children at risk of cognitive impairment and low educational achievement succeed. Children at risk of disadvantages Poor children do worse in school than their well ...
," an area in which he contributed to the intellectual genesis of the federal
Head Start Program Head Start is a program of the United States Department of Health and Human Services that provides comprehensive early childhood education, health, nutrition, and parent involvement services to low-income children and families. The program's s ...
.


Early life


Family history

Born in 1902 as the first child of John Abraham and Gabrielle Davis, William Boyd Allison Davis, who would later be known as Allison Davis, was raised in a family well-acquainted with both achievement and activism. He had a younger sister, Dorothy, and a younger brother, John Aubrey Davis, Sr. Davis's grandfather had been an abolitionist lawyer. His father led a group of 17 white clerks as the head of a government printing office before his demotion under the policies of President
Woodrow Wilson Thomas Woodrow Wilson (December 28, 1856February 3, 1924) was an American politician and academic who served as the 28th president of the United States from 1913 to 1921. A member of the Democratic Party, Wilson served as the president of ...
's administration and chaired the anti-lynching committee of
Washington D.C. ) , image_skyline = , image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, Na ...
's chapter of the NAACP. Thus, he was a leader in his community, and Davis would describe him as a "brave man" who was "already marked in a town of 236 citizens" as a large landowner who "further angered whites by registering and voting." This contrasted sharply with the elitism of many upper-class African Americans, whom Davis would criticize throughout his life for their lack of leadership in the struggle for racial equality and attempts to distance themselves from lower-class blacks. He was the father of Allison S. Davis.


Early education and university studies

Davis entered Washington D.C.’s segregated Dunbar High School in 1916 and, like his father before him, graduated as its valedictorian. The school had been founded almost a half-century before, making it the nation's oldest public black high school, and had since developed a reputation that pulled black families to the nation's capital for the chief purpose of gaining residency within the school district. Bucking national trends, the school had settled firmly in the Du Bois camp regarding black education and offered a rigorous college preparatory curriculum that included Greek and Latin. Though the quality of black colleges would steadily increase through the mid-century, at the time of Davis's graduation most were still teaching primary and secondary curricula; the ticket to the white post-graduate program was most often through the white university.
Williams College Williams College is a private liberal arts college in Williamstown, Massachusetts. It was established as a men's college in 1793 with funds from the estate of Ephraim Williams, a colonist from the Province of Massachusetts Bay who was kill ...
had a singular arrangement with Dunbar that allotted one full merit-based scholarship per year to the valedictorian. From this agreement Williams derived the majority of its black cohort, and in 1920 drew Davis into its ranks by graduating first in his class at Dunbar. Davis excelled at Williams, graduating as valedictorian in 1924 with a degree in English ''summa cum laude'' as well as membership in
Phi Beta Kappa The Phi Beta Kappa Society () is the oldest academic honor society in the United States, and the most prestigious, due in part to its long history and academic selectivity. Phi Beta Kappa aims to promote and advocate excellence in the liberal ...
. During his studies, he gravitated toward the poetry of Robert Frost, whose stoic depiction of working-class people resembled his own admiration for their resilience and adaptability. Though Williams offered a racially integrated classroom environment and had a tradition of supporting the early abolitionist movement, Davis and other black students endured segregation in campus housing; during his years there, the few black students were forced to live together to avoid the possible scandal that could accompany housing them with white students, and they were not permitted to attend social events on campus. Nonetheless, the atmosphere at Williams was relatively progressive for its time, and Davis got along well with many of his white peers, among whom were several Southerners. He also became close friends with Sterling Brown, a fellow Dunbar alumnus, who later recalled the instances of prejudice and social isolation he and other black students endured while at Williams in his essay "Oh Didn't He Ramble." In spite of an excellent academic performance and amicable relationships with peers and faculty, Davis was rejected for a teaching assistant position upon graduation in 1924 under the pretext that the school had too many Southern students to permit his appointment.


Literary focus: Harvard, Hampton, and the Harlem Renaissance


Harvard

With his post-graduation ambitions at Williams frustrated, in 1924 Davis entered
Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...
on a scholarship, where he earned his master's degree in literature a year later. Among his professors were the well-known literary critics
Bliss Perry Bliss Perry (25 November 1860 – 13 February 1954), was an American literary critic, writer, editor, and teacher. Biography Perry was born in Williamstown, Massachusetts to Arthur Latham Perry, a prominent economist, and Mary Brown Perry. He was ...
and George Lyman Kittredge. However, the most influential intellectual tradition that Davis encountered during his year there came from Irving Babbitt and his New Humanism, in which he saw similarities with his own disdain for the materialistic culture of the black upper classes and the lack of moral leadership among blacks on a national level. This criticism recurred in his work in the late 1920s and early thirties when he participated actively in the explosion of black literature and culture known as the New Negro Renaissance.


Hampton

After graduation, the reality of finding a job in academics set in. Few universities would hire an African American teacher, so Davis's choices were limited. In the Fall of 1925 he began teaching at the
Hampton Institute Hampton University is a private, historically black, research university in Hampton, Virginia. Founded in 1868 as Hampton Agricultural and Industrial School, it was established by Black and White leaders of the American Missionary Association aft ...
, later Hampton University, one of the many Historically Black Colleges and Universities HBCU throughout the South. Davis realized that a cultural barrier separated him from his students, many of whom came from the most acutely segregated regions of the Deep South and lacked the rigorous academic training and privileged upbringing that he had enjoyed. This division, along with the paternalistic attitude of the Institute which manifested in the form of a strictly regimented campus life and an adherence to segregationist policies, frustrated him and eventually would drive him to change his academic focus from the arts to social sciences in a bid to make a greater impact on society. In the meantime, he fought the most egregious injustices at the Institute by helping students who were organizing a petition with a list of demands to the administration. The protest was quashed, but Davis continued to support a small group of promising students who grew to admire his work, among whom was St. Clair Drake, who was to make important contributions to Davis's research during the 1930s for ''Deep South'' and who later became an important anthropologist in his own right.


Harlem Renaissance

While at Hampton between 1925 and 1931, he remained actively involved in the literature of what was then known as the "New Negro Renaissance." Likewise, in 1927 he published " In Glorious Company," a narrative essay which describes a group of working-class blacks during their train ride North. This piece displayed his unique literary voice based on respect for the resilience of ordinary blacks who endured injustices every day, while at the same time it avoided an excessively romanticized depiction of African-American life or a reliance on realism as a way to scandalize the reader. This was a departure from many previous writers of the Renaissance who depicted success in the black struggle as part of an effort to highlight the artistic achievements of their race. Davis's approach, which David Varel identifies in the tradition of "Negro Stoicism," combined elements of Babbitt's New Humanism as well as his own belief that literature should focus on uplifting ordinary blacks. During the same period he regularly corresponded with
W.E.B. Du Bois William Edward Burghardt Du Bois ( ; February 23, 1868 – August 27, 1963) was an American-Ghanaian sociologist, socialist, historian, and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up i ...
and published several pieces in ''
The Crisis ''The Crisis'' is the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). It was founded in 1910 by W. E. B. Du Bois (editor), Oswald Garrison Villard, J. Max Barber, Charles Edward Russell, Kelly Mi ...
,'' including the poems "To Those Dead and Gone" and "Gospel for Those Who Must," always centered on the theme of perseverance in the lives of poor blacks. However, his most notable work during this era was the polarizing 1929 essay " The Negro Deserts His People," in which he harshly criticized the black bourgeoisie for having abandoned the masses in their struggle for equality; the concern of class stratification continued to guide his work throughout his career, as he transitioned from the arts to social science in the early 30s and sought to directly confront class differences in the black community.


Transition to Anthropology


Return to Harvard

By the late 1920s, Davis sought other ways to effect change on a broader scale, and he began to seek funding for an anthropological study of African Americans and their folk culture by studying its African roots, perhaps interested by the emphasis on pan-Africanism that emerged during the Renaissance. He corresponded with Bronisław Malinowski at the London School of Economics and Dietrich Westermann of the University of Berlin regarding funding to study in Europe, but eventually he decided to return first to Harvard for his M.A. in anthropology, which he did in the fall of 1931. While studying at Harvard, Davis participated in Lloyd Warner's research for his study of Yankee City, where he helped interview the town's black residents. The project dissected the social life of a New England town by dividing it into six social classes, which Warner maintained were reinforced by social cliques in which one's social class determined which cliques one had access to. Warner's theory of social classes would significantly shape Davis's thinking, and the two would later work together on the ''Deep South'' project.


University of Chicago

Davis went on to earn a PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago, where he was offered a full teaching position.


Postage stamp

Davis is depicted on a United States
postage stamp A postage stamp is a small piece of paper issued by a post office, postal administration, or other authorized vendors to customers who pay postage (the cost involved in moving, insuring, or registering mail), who then affix the stamp to the f ...
issued on February 1, 1994


References


Further reading

° David A. Varel,
The Lost Black Scholar: Resurrecting Allison Davis in American Social Thought
' (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). ° David A. Varel,
Bending the Academic Color Line: Allison Davis, the University of Chicago, and American Race Relations, 1941-1948
" ''Journal of Negro Education'' 84 (November 2015): 534–546. {{DEFAULTSORT:Davis, Allison Williams College alumni 1902 births 1983 deaths University of Chicago alumni Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni Dunbar High School (Washington, D.C.) alumni 20th-century American anthropologists