By David Varel/The Conversation
When black historian Carter G. Woodson founded Negro History Week in 1926 (expanded to Black History Month in 1976), the prevailing sentiment was that black people had no history. They were little more than the hewers of wood and the drawers of water who, in their insistence upon even basic political rights, comprised an alarming “Negro problem.”
To combat such ignorance and prejudice, Woodson worked relentlessly to compile the rich history of black people. He especially liked to emphasize the role of exceptional African Americans who made major contributions to American life. At the time, that was a radical idea.
W. Allison Davis (1902-1983) came of age in the generation after Woodson, but he was precisely the type of exceptional black person whom Woodson liked to uphold as evidence of black intelligence, civility and achievement.
Davis was an accomplished anthropologist and a trailblazer who was the first African American appointed full-time to the faculty of a predominantly white university – the University of Chicago in 1942. But Davis has faded from popular memory. In my forthcoming book The Lost Black Scholar: Resurrecting Allison Davis in American Social Thought, 1902-1983, I make the case that he belongs within the pantheon of illustrious African American – and simply, American – pioneers.
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Posted on February 10, 2017
