#allison davis

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Monahan reassured me that it’s okay not to survive the shift. We all have permission to stay stuck at whatever makes us feel comfortable, and if that’s in 2016 or 2012 or 2010, that’s fine.

Allison P. Davis, A Vibe Shift Is Coming

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Isha Blaaker as Allison Davis and Jasmine Cephas Jones as Elizabeth Davis in Ava DuVernay’s Origin (2023).

This dynamic couple laid the academic foundation for many of the ideas explored in the film around the notion of caste in America. Their journey took them from the segregated south of the United States to Berlin, Germany during the rise of Nazism.

Isha and Jasmine beautifully embody these trailblazers as they endeavor on a landmark - and often dangerous - journey.

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The overlapping careers of Katherine Dunham and Allison Davis. Davis was ten years her senior by Dunham outlived him by almost a quarter of a century due to her remarkable longevity.

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The cover of Varel’s biography of Allison Davis, showing Davis in Natchez, Mississippi. These entries are based on that book.

Back in United States and with the depression in full swing, the Davises found work in the form of a project directed by W Lloyd Warner: A team study of Natchez, Mississippi which would examine the social structure of the Jim Crow south. The south had become an object of interest in the north as a result of the trial of the Scottsboro boys in 1931, a miscarriage of justice in which young homeless black men were convicted of rape on the flimsiest of charges. The Davises teamed up with another couple, Burleigh and Mary “Jackie” Gardner. St. Clair Drake, Allison’s old student from the Hampton institute, rounded out the team.

Fieldwork in Natchez was challenging, and perhaps unethical by today’s standards. Burleigh claimed to writing a social history of the town, and told people that Allison was his employee. In fact, the Gardners were studying the white community and the Davises and Drake the black side of town. Living under Jim Crow was exhausting for the Davises and Drake. Allison kept a gun in the glove box of his car. He could only meet with Burleigh occasionally, often only in long car rides, in order to avoid charges of the two of them ‘mixing’. Even Allison’s attempts to send field reports to Warner were stymied, since post office workers grew suspicious of a black man visiting the post office too often.

The final result was worth the effort. The team published their work as the book Deep South, which was well-received and widely taught. Liddie Davis and St. Clair Drake were not listed as authors, unlike other members of the team.  The book was ‘intersectional’ as we say today, examining the way that class and caste (race) interacted in the political economy and social structure of Natchez.

After the study the Davises and St. Clair Drake took faculty positions at Dillard University in New Orleans. Dillard has been created with the help of Rosenwald money, the result of merging two smaller Christian schools to create the first historically black university in Louisiana. Dillard must have appealed to the Davises given its mission to educate black people and fight racism, however the work was grueling: Allison was teaching five courses a semester.

During heir time at Dillard the Davises grew interested in psychology and psychoanalysis, the ‘culture and personality’ theme of 1930s American anthropology. How, Allison wondered, did black people cope with the psychic costs of Jim Crow? He gathered life histories from Natchez and New Orleans and in 1939 got a course release to work up this material into a book at the Institute of Human Relations at Yale. The Institute of Human Relations, or IHR, an ambitious and well-funded interdisciplinary research institute. The anthropological end of the Institute was managed by Edward Sapir, who spent the last years of his life there working on the relationships between psychology and culture. Another key scholar there was John Dollard, a white psychologist who worked on race relations, like Davis. As a student of Malinowski — who would replace Sapir at Yale after Sapir’s death — this focus on the individual’s needs would have been familiar to Davis. And as a Harvard student he would also have been happy to do interdisciplinary social science. Together he worked with Dollard to write the book Children of Bondage. 

Children of Bondage was a group of case studies of black men and woman (or, often, boys and girls) which used psychoanalysis to analyze their reaction to prejudice and segregation. In writing the book, Davis had achieved a rare feat in social science. Between Deep South and Children of Bondage Davis had described and analyzed racial inequality at the level of the individual psychology, up through the community, to a macrolevel analysis of the political economy of regional and national scales — by which I mean cotton farming — which relied on and perpetuated racial inequality.

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Allison and Elizabeth Davis with friends in Berlin in 1933. They couple is on the far right. Via Varel’s The Lost Black Scholar. This entry is basically a book report on that book.

Throughout the 1930s, the depression deepened, race relations worsened, and Davis grew restless. He decided to pursue a Ph.D. and conduct research on the social problems and racism which were at the center of his life. He grew interested in Africa — what was it like? How potent a force in behavior was African heritage — meaning both biological and cultural heritage? Allison and Liddie decided to study in Berlin, Paris, and London. Not only would this get them away from American racism, but German universities were regarded as the best in the world and the LSE offered an education that was politically relevant and cutting edge. In order to get there, they would first need some a record of success in graduate school, so the Davises both applied to Harvard (or, in Liddie’s case, Radcliffe) and Allison won an SSRC grant to support their studies. By the 1930s Harvard had used Rockefeller money to develop a robust graduate program in anthropology. There, they studied with a variety of professors, including physical anthropologist Earnest Hooten. However, Allison’s chief mentor at the time was W Lloyd Warner.

Warner’s life is a colorful story. He grew up in the early 1900s in Redlands, San Bernardino — not too far from where Ruth Benedict had done her first fieldwork. In fact, Benedict’s informants had only recently been dispossessed of their land by Warner’s ancestors, who turned it into the world center for growing navel oranges. Warner was just old enough to enlist in World War I, but was invalided out for tuberculosis before he could be deployed. He tried his hand at college instead, first at USC and then Berkeley. Bored, he set off for Broadway and tried for an acting career, only to returned to Berkeley and became interested in anthropology. When Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski came through town on their 1926 Rockefeller-funded tour of the US, Radcliffe-Brown took a shine to Warner. On his way to his new position at Sydney, Radcliffe-Brown asked Warner if he wanted to come along. The answer was ‘yes’, and was on his way to his position at Sydney and invited Warner along . After some coursework at Harvard with Hooton which “prepared him to take measurements of the native people”. Warner became one of Radcliffe-Brown’s closest students and friends and conducted fieldwork in Australia.

The anthropology to which Davis was exposed, then, was of a decidedly non-Boasian kind. It was, rather, ‘British’ social anthropology: Interested in social structure, generalization, and not at all limited to ‘primitive’. For Warner, the line between social anthropology and sociology was thin too non-existent. In fact, he was part of a trend of  ‘community studies’ at Harvard, and Warner would do fieldwork in urban New England inside a factory, and in rural Ireland on [see that article in the Irish Journal of Anthropology on Arensberg]. Not much has been written on Warner, he appears to have been pretty ‘woke’. There is a striking image of him doing fieldwork in Australia around 1928 [in Warner, Warner] with his arm around one aboriginal man while a second man has his arm around Warner. All three are smiling broadly for the camera — it is a strikingly more intimate and friendly image than any I have seen of white people doing fieldwork in Australia at that time (although perhaps I just have not seen enough in order to tell if it is representative or not). Warner was also a member of the Socialist Party at Berkeley. It’s hard to tell just how the left he was — a lot of people are socialists when they are in college — but given this background it is not surprising that he was willing to mentor a student like Allison Davis.

I go on at length about Warner because the Davises spent more time with him than they had originally planned. Allison received Rosenwald Fund money to travel to Europe for a year to study, and the Davises arrived at the LSE in September of 1932. It was not a good trip. The chances of earning a Ph.D. were slim, since it was a two year program and Davis only had one year of funding. His attempt to pursue education in Berlin was interrupted by Hitler’s ascent to power: Davis literally  watched Nazis burn books and jail political opponents before returning to the LSE by March 1933, when Hitler took power as chancellor. As for Paris, there was simply no money for that.

At the LSE the Davises attended Malinowski’s seminar. Malinowski would go on to write letters of recommendation for Allison and would influence Davis, providing him the other hall of the ‘functional’ revolution whose Radcliffe-Brownian variant Davis had already received from Warner. However, he was never close to Malinowski and he remained on the outskirts of Malinowski’s seminar. Rather,  Lancelot Hogbin, a white South African biologist, became Davis’s mentor. Hogbin was part of a wider ‘environmentalist’ movement (of which Boas was a part, for one) which pointed out the plasticity of people in their social and natural environments. Davis would learn it was social structure, not ‘bad genes’ which held African Americans back.

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Allison Davis (front row, center) with colleagues at the Hampton Institute, via The Lost Black Scholar, by Varel. This entry is basically a book report based on that book.

The Hampton Institute — now Hampton University — was founded in Hampton Virginia after the Civil War to provide an education to free black people. Perhaps its most famous graduate was Booker T. Washington, who advocated for vocational training for black people, not the classical liberal arts education given to white college students. Davis, like W.E.B. DuBois, disagreed, and as a teacher he supported students who sought to reform the school’s focus. One of his students was St. Clair Drake, who would collaborate with Davis in the future, and become a mentor to Faye Harrison. [unless noted otherwise, all of this entry on Davis is derivative of Varel]

It was this period that Davis tried his hand at poetry, establishing himself as a voice in New Negro Renaissance. Like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, Davis opposed ‘black bourgeoise’ thinkers such as Alain Locke and DuBois who felt poetry should be civilized and demonstrate black accomplishment. Rather, Hurston, and Davis valued popular, working class African American culture. But unlike Hurston, Davis wrote in a high style which combined poetic modernism with an appreciation of the strength and endurance working class and poor black people showed in the face of difficulty. Here [from the Varel] is his poem “Gospel for Those Who Must”

Unbroken

By the salt spume of the sea.

Tight-lipped against the whispering fears of age,

He holds her laughing.

In his keen eyes the gleam of one who knows

He must endure all the shifting winds, and hate

Of deep-embittered sons of slaving race,

Must outreach

The hunger of insatiate women,

And broken nets at sea.

Her brave face

Softens with a smile.

And light of youth’s long hopes and passion,

Sunk away;-

But she has seasoned in her proper time

And grown to mellow laughter.

Strong.

Another thing Davis tried his hand at during this period was marriage. His wife, Elizabeth “Liddie” Stubbs, came from a prosperous doctor’s family in Delaware and was educated at a private prep school in Massachusetts before receiving a BA at Mount Holyoke. She and Davis became intellectual partners, although she is more often listed in the acknowledgments of Davis’s books than she is listed as an author.

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“The Davis family on the family farm in Nokesville, Virginia, circa 1908. John Abraham Davis, dressed in a style emulating Theodore Roosevelt, is seated... with Allison Davis to his right” on a toy bike. Via The Lost Black Scholar. This post is largely a book report on that book.

Two of his grandparents were white, and the other two were ‘mixed’, but Allison Davis was never allowed to forget he was black. Born in 1902, he was the darkest of his family. His mother could pass, and when she took him to department stores the salesman would chastise her for bringing a black servant into a white space. Davis’s parents both had good federal jobs: his mother was a clerk in the Treasury Department and his father John had risen of prominence at the government printing office, where he managed a small staff of people (including both black and white men!). He John was talented and hard-working and would have risen higher if he was white, but had to rely on patronage to ensure the position he did have. Federal jobs were one of the few sources of white-collar employment for black people in the south, and were used by the Republican Party to ensure black support in elections and continue, in however attenuated a form, the emancipatory legacy of Lincoln. As a result, Davis’s father relied on his patron, Senator William Boyd Allison, to keep his job. So indebted to the senator was John that he named his son after him, thus giving Allison his name.

Davis thus grew up in an affluent, educated family. They owned a farm in Virginia, several houses, and two laundries. His family helped found the first Washington branch of the NAACP, and read Shakespeare aloud to their children in the evening. Davis’s earliest experiences, then, were of comfort and security. It was not to last.

When Woodrow Wilson was elected president, his Democratic administration cleaned up the Republican patronage system in the name of reform. In the process, his white south reformers also re-segregated the civil service. When Davis was eleven his father was demoted. Both father and son were devastated. Allison, who later studied psychoanalysis, recalled that the experience made him feel “castrated” and “maimed” [Varel, p. 17]. Beyond its psychic cost, the demotion had a financial effect. The family was forced to sell their businesses and the farm, and slid down the class ladder. The Davises were now poor.

Knowing that the Democrats could take their jobs, but not their education,  Davis’s parents enrolled him at Dunbar High School, his father’s alma mater. It was one of the best high schools in the country for black people — or anyone, really  — and gave him a top-notch education. It was also a place where Allison learned to resent what he called the “black bourgeoisie”. A poor child, he was looked down on by the wealthy children in his class who could afford to buy lunch in the cafeteria and go for ice cream during recess. Davis, in contrast, worked all night as an elevator boy and brought his own lunch in a paper sack. Davis happily met his parent’s demands that he excel in school, since academic success was also a form of revenge on wealthy children who looked down on him. He became the class valedictorian and won a scholarship to Williams College in Massachusetts.

His parents wanted him to get out of the south, and their timing was impeccable. The summer before his senior year was the ‘red summer’ of 1919 in which white mobs, often of servicemen returning from World War One, lynched black people. 39 people were killed in the riots in Davis’s home town of Washington DC. At Williams, however, Davis quickly found that the North was not an oasis of freedom either. When he got off the train in Williamstown, he literally couldn’t get a cab driver to take him to campus. Williams a had a token number of black students, it was true, but they had to live off campus in a boarding house. To support himself, Davis worked as a servant to his own classmates, in one case serving a meal to members of the Pen and Quill literary society and then, switching roles, giving a paper at that same meeting.

Williams did give Davis a great education, however. He studied modern literature and won another scholarship, this time for a one-year masters program in literature at Harvard. Davis was again in the top of his class and again experienced the segregation and social isolation at Harvard. Although he impressed his teachers, they would not write him letters of recommendation for teaching positions at schools with white students. Instead, he found a job as a teacher at the Hampton Institute. 

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Allison Davis is another anthropologist featured on a stamp. Via The Smithsonian