The Lost Black Scholar: Resurrecting Allison Davis in American Social Thought

308 Pages·2018·3.318 MB·English

by  David A. Varel

The Lost Black Scholar

The Lost Black Scholar
Resurrecting Allison Davis in
American Social Thought
David A. Varel
The University of Chicago Press Chicago & London
publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the bevington fund.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2018 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations
in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the
University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.
Published 2018
Printed in the United States of America
27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 1 2 3 4 5
isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 53488- 6 (cloth)
isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 53491- 6 (e- book)
doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226534916.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Varel, David A., author.
Title: The lost black scholar : resurrecting Allison Davis in
American social thought / David A. Varel.
Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017041483 | isbn 9780226534886 (cloth : alk. paper) |
isbn 9780226534916 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Davis, Allison, 1902–1983. | African American anthropologists—
Biography. | African American college teachers—Biography. | African American educators—
Biography. | African American scholars—Biography. | University of Chicago—Biography.
Classification: LCC GN21.D37 V37 2018 | DDC 301.092 [B] —dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017041483
♾ This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48- 1992
(Permanence of Paper).
C o n t e n t s
Introduction 1
1 · Coming of Age during Jim Crow 12
2 · Harlem from Hampton 43
3 · The Making of a Social Anthropologist 62
4 · Into the Southern “Wilds” 82
5 · Caste, Class, and Personality 108
6 · Bending the Academic Color Line 133
7 · Critiquing Middle- Class Culture 151
8 · Rethinking Intelligence 172
9 · From Brown v. Board to Head Start 196
Conclusion 215
Acknowledgments 227
Archival Abbreviations 231
Notes 233
Index 283

Introduction
Allison Davis was not just a “race” scholar concerned with race issues. . . . He was an
American intellectual whose ideas were intended to and did in fact change America.1
John Aubrey Davis
On a warm summer day in 1970, Allison Davis stepped before a large audi-
ence of students and their families to deliver the commencement address at the
University of Chicago. As he had considered what to say in the days and weeks
before, he’d had a wealth of experiences upon which to draw. His extraordi-
nary sixty- seven- year life had been filled with more than its share of triumphs
and travails.
Davis had risen from humble beginnings to become a pioneer in more
ways than one. He was one of the first African Americans to secure a truly
elite education, earning a BA from Williams College in 1924, an MA from Har-
vard in 1925, and finally a PhD from the University of Chicago in 1942, after
studying once again at Harvard as well as the London School of Economics.
In the 1930s he became one of the first black anthropologists in the country,
and he soon published two major social- anthropological books, Deep South
(1941) and Children of Bondage (1940). These monographs were theoretically
pioneering, exploring the interconnections between culture, social structure,
and personality development decades before other social scientists took this
approach. His research was also methodologically innovative, combining tra-
ditional ethnography with psychological assessments not regularly applied
in social science in that era. Furthermore, Davis’s publications were socially
significant. His most popular books sold tens of thousands of copies between
the 1940s and the 1960s.
As if that were not enough, Davis transgressed professional racial bound-
aries a full generation ahead of most of his peers. When the University of Chi-
cago hired him in 1942, they made him the first full- time black faculty member
2 Introduction
at a predominantly white university. He did not squander the opportunity. At
Chicago he successfully challenged racial segregation in the schools, class in-
equalities throughout society, and cultural biases within intelligence tests. His
efforts prompted Chicago in 1970 to name him the first John Dewey Distin-
guished Service Professor of Education.
Yet Davis understood that the very exceptionalism of his story testified to
the persistent oppression facing African Americans. He knew that his achieve-
ments did not open the floodgates for other blacks to follow, for most of them
remained constrained by structural inequalities that circumscribed their lives.
He would know that, for he spent his career exposing those very inequalities.
But Davis also knew that his own story was filled as much with discrimination
and hardship as it was with success and achievement, and the scars from those
struggles remained.
Sometimes such hardship had taken the form of direct threats of violence.
As a sixteen-y ear-o ld, he had observed with horror the 1919 race riot in his
hometown of Washington, DC. As a graduate student in 1933 he had to flee
Berlin as Nazis took control of the city and terrified minorities. As an anthro-
pologist studying the community of Natchez, Mississippi, in the mid-1 930s, he
had kept a gun nearby to protect against the ever- present threat of lynching. In
the middle of the twentieth century, his light- skinned children were targeted by
whites and blacks alike on the racially explosive streets of Chicago.
Much of the hardship Davis endured, though, stemmed not from direct
threats of violence to him or his family. Rather, Davis, like all African Ameri-
cans, had to suffer the indignities of racial segregation and exclusion across
the country. As a student at Williams College, he was forced to live off campus
with the handful of other token blacks at the school. As a faculty member at the
University of Chicago, he was barred from the faculty social club until 1948,
and he was denied housing in a white neighborhood near the university.
In addition to the psychological effects of such exclusion, Davis had to suf-
fer the restriction of opportunities. In the 1920s and 1930s he was denied teach-
ing positions in the North, and the president of Williams College refused to
recommend him for jobs even though he graduated as valedictorian from that
institution. In professional social science, his first- rate work was not enough
to win him acclaim. For that he relied upon the authority of well-k nown white
professionals who could vouch for him and his work. Even in projects in which
he was the lead author and researcher, the greater recognition went to his white
collaborators. He also had to muffle his radical views and to constantly control
his righteous anger over discrimination to avoid jeopardizing his career. Re-
sisting the larger culture’s stamp of inferiority was exhausting and debilitating,
Introduction 3
though it would have been worse had he not been nurtured by a strong family
and a resolute black community.
So as Davis stepped before the microphone to deliver the commencement
address at the University of Chicago, he stood poised to deliver his own guid-
ing philosophy of life, which was hard won and battle tested. In the great tra-
dition of the American jeremiad, he recounted the ills plaguing the United
States and the world. He captured the sense of anger and frustration boiling
over in American society at the end of the 1960s, as the disastrous war in Viet-
nam pressed on, as Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and the civil rights
movement lost steam, as armed guards fired upon students at Kent State, and
as the threat of nuclear war remained omnipresent. He recognized students’
pessimism about the future as they struggled to find worthwhile causes to
which they could dedicate themselves.
Then Davis offered up his abiding wisdom. He told the engrossed audi-
ence, “Although we seem trapped in the Age of Anger and Despair, the alter-
natives remain the same as in all other ages. We can scuttle— or we can sail the
seas. Navigare necesse est; non vivere est. ‘One must chart his course and set
sail; it is not enough merely to exist.’ ”2 As Davis understood it, life was often
cruel and full of arbitrary suffering, and it lacked any transcendent purpose.
Faced with that absurd plight, people needed to devise their own purposes
and dedicate themselves to fallible social projects for the betterment of others.
This, he believed, was the only way out of the abyss of despair, and it was the
only way to make the most of life.
This book is about the social projects that consumed Allison Davis and the
ideas that animated them. In other words, it is an intellectual biography of
Davis. Few figures are in greater need of restoration to the historical record,
for few people accomplished so much yet remain so little known. Remark-
ably, Davis’s marginalization within the historiography continues despite
more than forty years of scholarship focused on recovering the lives of African
Americans. We now know a great deal about comparable second-g eneration
black social scientists, such as Charles S. Johnson, E. Franklin Frazier, Ralph
Bunche, Abram Harris, Rayford Logan, and Zora Neale Hurston, not to men-
tion less influential figures such as William Fontaine and Oliver Cox. Davis, on
the other hand, has had relatively little written about him, and most of it exists
in snippets scattered throughout books and articles across the social sciences.3
Yet in many ways Davis’s accomplishments exceeded those of even his
greatest peers. Many of them never received offers of full-t ime appointments
at predominantly white universities, as he had. In the 1930s, when most of