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

by David A. Varel

Allison Davis (1902–83), a preeminent black scholar and social science pioneer, is perhaps best known for his groundbreaking investigations into inequality, Jim Crow America, and the cultural biases of intelligence testing. Davis, one of America’s first black anthropologists and the first tenured African American professor at a predominantly white university, produced work that had tangible and lasting effects on public policy, including contributions to Brown v. Board of Education, the federal Head Start program, and school testing practices. Yet Davis remains largely absent from the historical record. For someone who generated such an extensive body of work this marginalization is particularly surprising. But it is also revelatory.

In The Lost Black Scholar, David A. Varel tells Davis’s compelling story, showing how a combination of institutional racism, disciplinary eclecticism, and iconoclastic thinking effectively sidelined him as an intellectual. A close look at Davis’s career sheds light not only on the racial politics of the academy but also the costs of being an innovator outside of the mainstream. Equally important, Varel argues that Davis exemplifies how black scholars led the way in advancing American social thought. Even though he was rarely acknowledged for it, Davis refuted scientific racism and laid bare the environmental roots of human difference more deftly than most of his white peers, by pushing social science in bold new directions. Varel shows how Davis effectively helped to lay the groundwork for the civil rights movement.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Biography

304 pages, Hardcover

First published April 13, 2018

Reviews

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The biography of my best friend's father.

[Soren Dayton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fascinating walk through the life of an academic partially lost to our collective memories.

Allison Davis was the first African-American scholar hired to a permanent academic position at a "white" institution, The University of Chicago. Like many of Chicago's greatest faculty, he was incredibly inter-disciplinary, bringing together methodologies from Anthropology, Psychology, and Education. He was a major participant in significant public policy debates that we are still think about.

But we don't remember Davis. Some of that is race. Some of that is disciplinary boundaries. Some of that is his later work seemed less relevant.

The things that I found most interesting were the "caste" based analysis of race and the discussion of how class and race intersect. (I should note that he really means class in a less Marxist sense than we tend to in the US) He is one of the first more contemporary scholars to really examine the similarities between black and white poverty in the US. Similarly, he is one of the first scholars to force us to conflict that so much of our analytic apparatus is pushing people to assimilate to middle-class norms.

The one thing that I was left unsatisfied with was why Davis's career seemed to have stalled out. He didn't have the big academic wins at some point once he landed at Chicago. That was both sad and also something that needed explanation.

[Tom Elliott · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you haven’t heard of Allison Davis, he was the first tenured Black American professor in the U.S. He articulated the intersectionality of race and class long before the Civil Rights Movement, and he and his wife put themselves at risk to conduct their research in Jim Crow era Natchez, Mississippi. I’m glad David Varel shone a light on his often overlooked (and substantial!) body of work. Thanks to Isabel Wilkerson for highlighting the work of the Davises in her book Caste.

[Mills College Library]

301.092 V293 2018