Bending the Academic Color Line: Allison Davis, the University of Chicago, and American Race Relations, 1941-1948

Abstract

In 1942, Allison Davis secured a three-year appointment as an assistant professor of education at the University of Chicago. This accomplishment made him one of the first African Americans to gain a full-time faculty position at a predominantly White university. The appointment was therefore a civil rights landmark in an era when similar desegregation landmarks were on the horizon-in the defense industries, in professional baseball, in education, and in many other many arenas. Based on extensive archival research conducted in 2013 at Fisk University and the University of Chicago, this essay recounts the story of this little-known but significant case of desegregation. It explains how the efforts of individual actors and institutions coalesced with a rapidly changing American society to make this appointment possible, and it makes clear the far-reaching consequences this appointment had for racial change. At the same time, this study highlights those forces that resisted Davis's appointment and constrained his career and life in Chicago in the 1940s. In the end, the article argues that this case of desegregation deepens the understanding of the modern civil rights movement and the dynamics of social change. Specifically, Davis's appointment at Chicago reveals the importance of academia as a multifaceted terrain for racial change, including both scholarly production and physical racial integration. Perhaps even more, though, the story of the appointment exposes the limits of the desegregation movement amid a society built on racial inequality. High-profile cases of desegregation such as Davis's were notable achievements, but they exposed a more glaring continuity in racial affairs. Such cases, in other words, bent rather than broke the color line.A Changing Racial ClimateWhen Edwin Embree and Ralph Tyler moved to challenge the academic color line and appoint Allison Davis to the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1941, they were responding to an American society that was in flux and that was newly ripe for racial change. During the 1930s, environmentalist interpretations of racial difference such as Davis's own Children of Bondage (Davis & Dollard, 1940) and Deep South (Davis, Gardner, & Gardner, 1941) displaced hereditarian ones in social science (Sitkoff, 1978). In culture, too, the leveling effects of the Great Depression impressed on many Americans the power of the environment to shape people's destinies. The ideological justifications for racial inequality therefore began to slowly break down.Political movements aided this process, since leftists made racism a problem as never before. Beginning in the 1920s, but erupting with the Scottsboro Boys case in 1931(www.scottsboro- boys.org) and the Angelo Herndon case in 1932 (see www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/article/history-archeology/angelo-herndon-case), the Communist Party USA linked racism to capitalist exploitation in a way that indicted America's entire economic and political system (Gilmore, 2008). Communists argued that racism grew out of class exploitation, and they publicized how this translated into a permanently subordinate Black nation-within-a-nation where southerners denied African Americans basic economic, political, social, and legal justice. Communists united with socialists and liberals in a broad-based popular front movement that fought broadly for workers' rights and economic justice (Denning, 1997). These movements helped break down the color line in labor organizations, since many leftists perceived the potential power of interracial labor organizing and rejected the racial divisions within labor as products of capitalists' attempts to divide labor. That an interracial labor union such as the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union could form even in the Deep South in 1934 demonstrated the extent to which economic inequalities could challenge racial divisions (Drake, 2002). All of these efforts eventually pushed the government to pass the Wagner Act (officially titled the National Labor Relations Act of 1935), which put the federal government behind the drive to unionize workers into interracial, industrial unions as led by the Congress of Industrial Organizations, a federation of industrial labor unions. …