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

Abstract

Biographies give an in-depth view of individual lives, providing insight into how central figures faced the cultural, social, economic, and political climate of their time. David A. Varel's The Lost Black Scholar examines the life of William Boyd Allison Davis (known as Allison Davis), one of the nation's first black anthropologists. After graduating from Williams College, he started his academic career at Hampton Institute and Dillard University, two historically black institutions of higher education in Virginia and Louisiana, respectively. He later became the first African American tenure-track faculty member at the University of Chicago, and the first at a predominantly white university. At Chicago, Davis dedicated himself to exposing how structural racism (through notions of class and race) permeated all aspects of American life. Two of his seminal works, Children of Bondage: Personality Development of Negro Youth in the Urban South (1940, coauthored with John Dollard) and Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class (1941, coauthored with Burleigh B. Gardner and Mary R. Gardner). Both books (assisted by his wife Elizabeth Davis) explored the impact on African Americans of racial segregation on job and housing opportunities, educational prospects, and health disparities. While Allison Davis produced groundbreaking scholarship, Varel argues he was a scholar ahead of his time. Davis's work was interdisciplinary, utilizing such fields as English, education, psychology, and anthropology. As a result, he was penalized due to the overemphasis on single disciplinary approaches in the academy at the time. His focus on class disparities did not help him either as many black academics of the period were relegated to focusing only on matters of race. Varel notes numerous times when Davis was the lead author of a work, but his white co-contributors received greater recognition from other scholars. Despite these shortcomings of his peers, Davis used his scholarship to expose the structural inequalities in the United States with the intent of improving conditions.