Caroline Bond Day

Caroline Stewart Bond Day (November 18, 1889 – May 5, 1948) was an American physical anthropologist, author, and educator. She was one of the first African-Americans to receive a degree in anthropology.

Day is recognized as a pioneer physical anthropologist whose study helped future black researchers and is used to challenge scientific racism about miscegenation. In 1927, she returned to Radcliffe, where she obtained a master's degree in anthropology in 1930. Her thesis, "A Study of Some Negro-White Families in the United States," published in 1932, contained sociological and anthropological information on 350 mixed-race family histories with over 400 photographs. She subsequently spent a number of years teaching at Howard University. Although Day's work was not well received within contemporary scholarship in the early twentieth century and still remains controversial, her scientific research re-evaluates the accomplishments of African-American women in the white-male-dominated field of physical anthropology and marks the first step in understanding and promoting African-American biological vindication.

Early life

Caroline Bond Day was born on November 18, 1889, to Georgia and Moses Stewart in Montgomery, Alabama. According to her own calculations of blood quantum, Day was a mulatto; 7/16 Negro; 1/16 Indian; and 8/16 White. Day entered Radcliffe College in 1916. She took undergraduate courses with Earnest Hooton, the only physical anthropologist within the academic department at Harvard and became the editor of her research project. Day successfully published "A Study of Some Negro-White Families in the United States" in 1932.

It is possible that Day was influenced by W. E. B. Du Bois' sociological study of the African-American as a social group. Du Bois, the editor of The Crisis, was a professor of economics and history at Atlanta University from 1896 to 1910 while Day was attending the university. Day's archive is kept at the Peabody Museum of Harvard University. A digital edition of her thesis is available through Harvard University Library.