Scholar-Activist St. Clair Drake and the Transatlantic World of Black Radicalism

Abstract

In his later years, St. Clair Drake (1911–1990) the eminent scholar, activist, and member of the founding generation, first of US-based African Studies during the 1950s, later of Black Studies in US universities, found himself preoccupied with his past. Perhaps best known as coauthor (with Horace Cayton) of the classic study of African-Americans in Chicago, Black Metropolis (1945), Drake’s career as an anthropologist was synonymous with the liberation struggles of the Black world over the course of the twentieth century1 In his later reflections, Drake was intent on recovering the full international scope of his scholarly and activist pursuits, and indeed, the cosmopolitanism and diversity of the black experience. His associates included the Mississippi-born novelist Richard Wright, Trinidadian activist intellectuals George Padmore and C. L. R. James, and the future president of the West African nation of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah. A pragmatic leftist, Drake worked both within and outside the system to achieve change. During the early 1960s, Drake ran a teacher-training program for Peace Corps volunteers, to assist with the expansion of Ghana’s elementary education system. Back in the states after Nkrumah’s overthrow by a military coup in 1966, Drake advised activists in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), by then the most radical among US civil rights organizations through its embrace of Black Power, its support of third world revolutions, and its opposition to the war in Vietnam.