The Lost Black Scholar

Resurrecting Allison Davis in American Social Thought

David A. Varel

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780226534916
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

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, bypushing social science in bold new directions.Varel shows how Davis effectively helped to lay the groundwork for the civil rights movement.

CHAPTER 1

Coming of Age during Jim Crow

Dennis learned then, at age 11, exactly what it meant to be a Negro, and he never overcame the trauma, nor trusted white people again.1

Allison Davis

Only a few months after Allison Davis entered the world, W. E. B. Du Bois published one of the most profound statements on African American life ever put into print: The Souls of Black Folk (1903). For Davis as for so many African Americans, the book poignantly distilled his own experiences with coming of age as a black person during the Jim Crow era.2 Like Du Bois, Davis would soon learn that despite the lightness of his skin, he was simply a “Negro” like all other people who had any trace of African blood. He, too, would learn that to be black was to be a problem; it was to exist as part of a subordinate caste in a white settler society. Davis would be forced to accept the fact that no matter how much smarter or more talented he was than the white people around him, he would be deemed inferior, as well as unclean, uncivilized, and dangerous, and he would be denied full participation in American life. What is more, he would have to look on as white Americans and the state disfranchised, exploited, subjugated, harassed, and lynched those like him. These were hard truths to accept.

For Du Bois, to be African American was to be “shut out from [the white] world by a vast veil.” It was to be denied true self-consciousness and to always feel one’s “two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.” He famously wrote, “It is a peculiar situation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” Du Bois used the veil metaphor to evoke the physical and social separation of black and white people and to illustrate how that separation blinded white people to the reality of black people’s lives. He longed for a pluralist solution to the race problem in which it was “possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.”3

Yet Du Bois also emphasized that African Americans were “gifted with second-sight in this American world.”4 Here he meant that African Americans, in having to navigate the white world as well as the black one, gained a better intuitive sense of American social dynamics than the vast majority of white people, who could live comfortably within the white world alone. The soundness of this insight was abundantly evident when those precious few African Americans who gained access to the highest educational institutions in the country harnessed their formal and informal educations to lay bare America’s racial system. With The Philadelphia Negro (1898) and The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois led the way. Although his work was marginalized within mainstream social science at the time, it exerted a profound influence on the next generation of African Americans, including Allison Davis. Davis’s own “second-sight” would later come through powerfully in his anthropology, but it was rooted in the social and intellectual influences of the first third of his life, which took him from Washington to Williams, and from Harvard to Hampton.

Becoming “Negro” in Washington

Du Bois’s first realization of what it meant to be a “Negro” came when a white girl at school refused to exchange a gift with him. For Allison Davis, that same realization grew out of the horrendous ordeal his father experienced as an employee in the Government Printing Office (GPO) when Woodrow Wilson became president in 1913.

When Davis was born on October 14, 1902, his family was thriving. Over the course of twenty years, his father, John Abraham Davis, had worked his way up from a laborer making barely $500 a year to—by 1906—a counter clerk making $1,400 a year and supervising a crew of ten men, nine of whom were white.5 Such a coveted managerial position was extremely rare for a black man in those days, even for someone who excelled at school and who graduated as valedictorian from the highly regarded M Street School in Washington.

In part, Davis’s position testified to the relative racial progressiveness of the nation’s capital at the turn of the twentieth century. However, it was made possible only through Davis’s rigorous work ethic, his strong character, and his political prowess. At that time, political patronage carried the day, and Davis was effective at striking up relationships with progressive Republicans, including most importantly Iowa senator William Boyd Allison. Senator Allison was instrumental in securing Davis’s appointment as a clerk in the GPO in 1899. He also minimized the discrimination Davis continued to face, though Davis was consistently bypassed for raises and promotions.6 Such help made Davis a faithful Republican who sought to emulate Theodore Roosevelt in dress and appearance. Even more significantly, Davis honored senator Allison by naming his first son William Boyd Allison Davis.

Figure 1.1. John Abraham Davis among the employees he supervised in the Government Printing Office, circa 1904. Davis is seated in the middle of the front row. The only other African American on Davis’s team is standing at the far right in the back row. Courtesy of the Davis Family.

The Davises were also “riding high” during Allison Davis’s childhood for other reasons.7 John and his beautiful wife, Gabrielle Beale Davis, were proud owners of productive property in Virginia and across the District of Columbia. They owned two laundries and several small houses, in addition to one of the largest farms in Prince William County, Virginia. John Davis inherited most of this property from his mother, Caroline Gaskin Davis Chinn, who had bequeathed it to him in 1896.8 Davis refused to accept any support from his father, a white Washington lawyer named John Mandeville Carlisle, who had had a sexual encounter with Gaskin while she was working as his housekeeper in the 1860s. But Caroline Gaskin was a dynamic woman in her own right, becoming one of the first black women to secure white-collar work in Washington, serving as a clerk in the Treasury Department.9 At the turn of the century, John Davis and his family were squarely part of the “black bourgeoisie.”

Befitting his position, John Davis took up active roles in various fraternal and civic organizations. He served as treasurer of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, founder of Washington’s first chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), historian of the Oldest Inhabitants, and member of various other organizations.10 His youngest son, John Aubrey Davis, later recalled, “My father used to carry me on his strong shoulders at . . . antilynching demonstrations” in DC.11 John Abraham and Gabrielle Davis also loved the arts, and they cultivated a rich home environment for their children, reading Shakespeare aloud in the evenings.

Beneath the veneer of affluence, however, lay more precarious circumstances. The properties the Davises held were all mortgaged, and various family members occupied them and prevented them from being profitable. In reality the Davises relied heavily on John’s salary at the GPO. For a time his job seemed relatively secure, as he was clearly a productive worker who, despite opposition, managed to eventually win promotions through tireless work and personal advocacy.

Figure 1.2. The Davis family and others on the family farm in Nokesville, Virginia, circa 1908. John Abraham Davis, dressed in a style emulating Theodore Roosevelt, is seated in the chair, with Allison Davis to his right and Gabrielle Davis standing all the way to the right, holding Allison’s sister, Dorothy. Courtesy of the Davis Family.

But political circumstances were changing. Senator Allison, Davis’s great backer, died in 1908. The following year William Howard Taft became president, and he was no friend of traditional patronage politics.12 Although it was an imperfect system, patronage was one of the only tools available for African Americans to gain a modicum of power in a system set up to marginalize them.

The election of Woodrow Wilson, the first southern-born Democrat to take the office since Andrew Johnson, sealed the fate of John Davis and many other African Americans in Washington. Wilson never issued clear policy regarding the treatment of black federal workers, but his white southern appointees systematically demoted, fired, segregated, and otherwise humiliated African Americans. Under the Progressive Era guise of efficiency and good government, Wilsonians portrayed black workers as corrupt and inefficient and as obstacles to an orderly government in which ability rather than patronage wins out. The results were stark. Of ninety-seven black civil servants within the Taft administration and the first Wilson administration, “there were 66 promotions and 8 demotions/dismissals under Taft and 23 promotions and 35 demotions/dismissals under Wilson.”13

John Davis was one of the casualties of the deeply personal, unjust, and devastating nature of Wilsonian racism. After a quarter century of relentless work, Davis had advanced to a supervisory position making $1,400 a year. But his middle-class salary and position of authority over white workers made him a target for racists. In April 1913, Davis was summarily demoted with an almost 15 percent reduction in salary.14 At first, Wilsonians justified this in the bureaucratic language of a “necessary reduction of force.”15 But months later they continued to persecute him, now claiming that “it is impossible for him to properly perform the duties required (he is too slow)” and requesting that he be “assigned to some other duties in some other division.”16 Davis, in turn, made heartbreaking appeals to his supervisors’ “sense of justice and equity” by pointing squarely to the facts of his unblemished employment record, even as he recognized the “almost invariable futility of attempting defence in such cause.”17

The harassment continued into the following year, when the Wilsonians demoted Davis to the lowly position of laborer with the meager salary of $500. That had been his position and salary when he first joined the GPO back in 1882. His hard-fought gains over thirty years were erased overnight. The stress “affected my nerves, afflicted me with insomnia,” and tarnished his reputation, which, he wrote, “I have been able to acquire and maintain at considerable sacrifice of time and effort.” His reputation, he continued, “is to me . . . a source of personal pride, a possession of which I am very jealous, and which is possessed of a value, in my estimation, ranking above the loss of salary—though the last to a man having a family of small children to rear, is serious enough.” After being forced to return to laborious physical work for the rest of his career, in 1928 he passed away at the age of sixty-six, which his family understood to be directly related to the physical and mental strains placed upon him at work.18

Allison Davis was deeply affected by his father’s ordeal. He later recounted the essence of the experience in a largely autobiographical novel which he never published:

King saw his father return home early that day. He saw the stricken look on his face. Johnny kept repeating the story as if unable to understand or accept it. “They’ve kicked me out!” he said in hurt and indignation. “Kicked me out after 21 years. Like a dog without a bone! With nothing! Not even a clerk’s job. By God, I’ve got four children to feed and try to educate! What, in God’s name, can be their justification?” His father had tried to relight his pipe, but his hand kept shaking.

“Justification!” his mother said cynically. “What justification? They don’t need any justification! They’ll never care if you slave all your life, or if we go without a crust of bread! If all of us, children and mothers included, starved like dogs, John, I give you my word, white people wouldn’t care. They’d think it good riddance!”

King still remembered his mother’s sobs and his father’s efforts to reassure her. That day, for the first time, he realized his father was too gentle. He’d never get another good job. It was the end of the line for them all!

King never forgot the maiming and crushing of his father. The terrible wounds seared into King’s mind and heart forever.

Allison “felt castrated by the maiming of his father.” He continued to have nightmares and deep-seated anxieties over the ordeal for the next forty years. He recalled that he “learned then, at age 11, exactly what it meant to be a Negro, and he never overcame the trauma, nor trusted white people again.”19

John Davis’s demotion affected not only the psychological state of the Davises, but also their social and economic circumstances. The family was forced to surrender all their properties except for the home in Washington. The loss of the family farm in Nokesville, Virginia, was particularly difficult to stomach, for it was a source of both family pride and wealth. Out of desperation, Davis sold the eighty-acre land and the accompanying home for only a couple hundred dollars.20 Additionally, he sold at rock-bottom prices whatever he could of the family’s many valuable possessions on the farm, which included “fresh cows and calves, springing cows, horses, Berkshire sows and pigs, sows about to farrow, registered Berkshire boar, vehicles, farming implements and tools, kitchen and household furniture, etc.”21 Along with this loss of property went the Davises’ middle-class way of life.

The Davises were “on the skids,” as Allison Davis would later call it when investigating downwardly mobile families in the United States. As those later investigations suggest, Davis was profoundly affected by the changing social circumstances of his family.

John Davis, however, did not succumb to despair. He redoubled his efforts to create opportunities for his children, including Allison and his two younger siblings, Dorothy Davis (born 1908) and John Aubrey Davis (born 1912). His experiences with Republican politicians, coworkers, and subordinates at the GPO had led him to believe that northern whites could be allies in the cause of equal opportunity and social advancement.22 So he began preparing his children to be first-rate students who could secure educations at the best northeastern colleges.

Allison Davis was chastened by his father’s experiences, and he was never so optimistic about escaping white racism and advancing socially as a member of a subordinate caste. Still, he pursued excellence in education with a near-singular resolve, hoping that educational achievement would counteract the humiliations he felt.

In reality, Allison Davis’s humiliation...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 · Coming of Age during Jim Crow
• 2 · Harlem from Hampton
• 3 · The Making of a Social Anthropologist
• 4 · Into the Southern “Wilds”
• 5 · Caste, Class, and Personality
• 6 · Bending the Academic Color Line
• 7 · Critiquing Middle-Class Culture
• 8 · Rethinking Intelligence
• 9 · From Brown v. Board to Head Start
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Archival Abbreviations
• Notes
• Index