Allison Davis

William Boyd Allison Davis (October 14, 1902 – November 21, 1983) was an American educator, anthropologist, writer, researcher, and scholar who became the third 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. Patrick Healy and George F. Grant, where he served for the remainder of his academic life. He was considered one of the most promising black scholars of his generation.

Among his students during his tenure at the University of Chicago were anthropologists St. Clair Drake and sociologist Nathan Hare. 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, caste, 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.

Biography

Family history Born in 1902 as the first child of John Abraham Davis and Gabrielle Dorothy Beale-Davis, William Boyd Allison Davis, who would later be known as Allison Davis, was raised in an affluent family well-acquainted with both achievement and activism. He had a younger sister, Dorothy, and a younger brother, John Aubrey Davis, Sr. Davis's grandfather had been an abolitionist lawyer. His father held a managerial position in the Government Printing Office, and named Davis after Iowa senator William Boyd Allison, who was instrumental in his securing an appointment in that office. Davis' father was later demoted under the segregation policies of President Woodrow Wilson's administration, losing nearly two-thirds of his salary and the family's affluent status.

His father also chaired the anti-lynching committee of Washington D.C.'s chapter of the NAACP. 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. He was the father of Allison S. Davis, an attorney in Chicago.

Early education and university studies Davis entered Washington D.C.'s prestigious Dunbar High School in 1916 and, like his father before him, graduated as its valedictorian. 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. 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. 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. Williams College had a singular arrangement with Dunbar that allotted one full merit-based scholarship called the Horace F. Clark Prize Fellowship per year to the valedictorian. 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.

Davis excelled at Williams, graduating as valedictorian in 1924 with a degree in English summa cum laude as well as membership in Phi Beta Kappa. 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. 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. Nonetheless, the atmosphere at Williams was relatively progressive for its time, and Davis got along well with many of his white peers, among whom were several Southerners. He also became close friends with Sterling Brown, a fellow Dunbar alumnus, who later recalled the instances of prejudice and social isolation he and other black students endured while at Williams in his essay "Oh Didn't He Ramble." In spite of an excellent academic performance and amicable relationships with peers and faculty, Davis was rejected for a teaching assistant position upon graduation in 1924 under the pretext that the school had too many Southern students to permit his appointment. They had two sons, Allison Stubbs Davis and Gordon Jamison Davis. Alice died in 1966.

Davis later married Lois L. Mason on January 7, 1969. In 1933, Davis traveled back to Harvard to serve as the Co-Director of Harvard's Anthropological Field Research for the next two years.

Early anthropology work Davis taught anthropology at Dillard University from 1935 to 1939. It was there that he embarked upon a major course of fieldwork—in collaboration with Yale psychologist John Dollard and supported by the American Youth Commission of the American Council on Education. Davis worked at the University of Chicago for over two decades before retiring in 1970.

Awards In 1971, Davis was awarded the Education Journal Educator of the Year.

In 1977, the Columbia Teachers College awarded him the Distinguished Service Medal Recipient. He also received the Solomon Carter Fuller Award winner from the American Psychiatric Association.

From 1978-1980 and 1981-1982, Davis was the Spencer Foundation Grantee. He is also depicted with his wife in the 2023 film Origin by Ava DuVernay.

Bibliography of works by Allison Davis

Davis, A. (1939). The Socialization of the American Negro Child and Adolescent. The Journal of Negro Education, 8(3), 264–274. https://doi.org/10.2307/2292628. Davis, A. (1941). American Status Systems and the Socialization of the Child. American Sociological Review, 6(3), 345–356. https://doi.org/10.2307/2086191. Davis, A & Havighurst, R. J. (1943). Child Socialization and the School. Review of Educational Research, 13(1), 29–37. https://doi.org/10.2307/1168808. Davis, A., & Havighurst, R. J. (1945). Human Development and Intergroup Education. The Journal of Educational Sociology, 18(9), 535–541. https://doi.org/10.2307/2263099. Davis, A., & Havighurst, R. J. (1946). Social Class and Color Differences in Child-Rearing. American Sociological Review, 11(6), 698–710. https://doi.org/10.2307/2087065. Davis, A & Havighurst, R. J. (1955). A Comparison of the Chicago and Harvard Studies of Social Class Differences in Child Rearing. American Sociological Review, 20(4), 438–442. https://doi.org/10.2307/2092743.