![]() Though Williams offered a racially integrated classroom environment and had a tradition of supporting the early abolitionist movement, Davis and other black students endured segregation in campus housing during his years there, the few black students were forced to live together to avoid the possible scandal that could accompany housing them with white students, and they were not permitted to attend social events on campus. During his studies, he gravitated toward the poetry of Robert Frost, whose stoic depiction of working-class people resembled his own admiration for their resilience and adaptability. From this agreement Williams derived the majority of its black cohort, and in 1920 drew Davis into its ranks by graduating first in his class at Dunbar.ĭavis excelled at Williams, graduating as valedictorian in 1924 with a degree in English summa cum laude as well as membership in Phi Beta Kappa. Williams College had a singular arrangement with Dunbar that allotted one full merit-based scholarship per year to the valedictorian. Though the quality of black colleges would steadily increase through the mid-century, at the time of Davis's graduation most were still teaching primary and secondary curricula the ticket to the white post-graduate program was most often through the white university. Bucking national trends, the school had settled firmly in the Du Bois camp regarding black education and offered a rigorous college preparatory curriculum that included Greek and Latin. The school had been founded almost a half-century before, making it the nation's oldest public black high school, and had since developed a reputation that pulled black families to the nation's capital for the chief purpose of gaining residency within the school district. Davis.Įarly education and university studies ĭavis entered Washington D.C.'s segregated Dunbar High School in 1916 and, like his father before him, graduated as its valedictorian. Thus, he was a leader in his community, and Davis would describe him as a "brave man" who was "already marked in a town of 236 citizens" as a large landowner who "further angered whites by registering and voting." This contrasted sharply with the elitism of many upper-class African Americans, whom Davis would criticize throughout his life for their lack of leadership in the struggle for racial equality and attempts to distance themselves from lower-class blacks. His father led a group of 17 white clerks as the head of a government printing office before his demotion under the policies of President Woodrow Wilson's administration and chaired the anti-lynching committee of Washington D.C.'s chapter of the NAACP. Davis's grandfather had been an abolitionist lawyer. He had a younger sister, Dorothy, and a younger brother, John Aubrey Davis, Sr. Early life Family history īorn in 1902 as the first child of John Abraham and Gabrielle Davis, William Boyd Allison Davis, who would later be known as Allison Davis, was raised in a family well-acquainted with both achievement and activism. Davis, who has been honored with a commemorative postage stamp by the United States Postal Service, is best remembered for his pioneering anthropology research on southern race and class during the 1930s, his research on intelligence quotient tests in the 1940s and 1950s, and his support of " compensatory education," an area in which he contributed to the intellectual genesis of the federal Head Start Program. He was considered one of the most promising black scholars of his generation.Īmong his students during his tenure at the University of Chicago were anthropologists St. Lewis, where he served for the balance of his academic life. William Boyd Allison Davis (Octo– November 21, 1983) was an American educator, anthropologist, writer, researcher, and scholar who became the second African American to hold a full faculty position at a major white university when he joined the staff of the University of Chicago in 1942, after only Dr. Williams College (BA), Harvard University (MA, Anthropology MA, Comparative Literature), University of Chicago (PhD Anthropology)
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