William Willis
William Willis was born in 1921 in Waco, Texas. His parents were affluent, college-educated African Americans. His father served first as an educator and then started a construction company. The family moved to Dallas when Willis was two "partly in response to an ultimatum from the Waco Klu Klux Klan" (Zumwalt 1). His father died a few years later and he was raised by his mother. Although he attended segregated schools, his family also traveled widely -- a habit he would keep up throughout his life.
William Willis from his Howard yearbook, via AmPhilSoc (as are all other images in this page)
Willis was a quiet, bookish child and went on to Howard University, where he graduate cum laude in 1942. It was there that he developed an interest in the sociology and history of the Black experience int he United States. Once out of school, he volunteered to join the Coast Guard and spent the war stationed in Boston. Afterwards, he decided to attend graduate school in anthropology at Columbia because he "assumed that this discipline was the vanguard in the attack against racist thought" (Zumwalt 2). He was thus in the same class of students as Eric Wolf, Marvin Harris, Morton Fried, Sydney Mintz, and Robert Murphy. He became interested in the history of Black and Indian relations, as wrote a dissertation based on library research on "colonial conflict and the Cherokee Indians, 1710-1760" and recieved his Ph.D. in 1955.
During his time at Columbia he married his life partner Georgine "Gene" Upshur, who came from a prominent African American family in Philadelphia. Her father was a Republican congressman in Pennsylvania's lower house and also, as it happened, the mortician who buried Bessie Smith, the great blues singer. She earned a BA in sociology and wanted to go on to study social work, but he father agreed to support her studies only if she also went to mortician school so that she would have a steady source of financial support. "People will always need an undertaker" he told her (Zumwalt 5). She was doing her masters in social work when she met Willis.
From 1955 to 1964 Willis tried unsuccessfully to pursue a career in anthropology. He applied to the Ford Foundation for a research grant and was turned down. He applied for teaching positions but was told by Duncan Strong (the department chair at Columbia) that no one would hire a black person. He and his wife lived in New York for nearly a decade and Willis published work while teaching part-time as a lecturer at Columbia and City College. In 1963 Willis's mother died of a heart attack and Willis and Gene decided to move back to Dallas to live in the family home.
Willis's luck turned on his return to Dallas. It was 1964, the high-water mark of the civil rights movement, and Southern Methodist University was looking to integrate its faculty. In 1965 he was hired to a position in anthropology. He was a tremendous success at the new institution, drawing large classes of students and helping to establish an MA and Ph.D. program in the department. He earned tenure and became a full professor. His wife became active in several local organizations -- at last, the Willis's were flourishing.
In the late 1960s, life again became difficult for Willis. His department chair, a racist, began harassing him -- this included actions like changing the locks on the office to his door and not giving him the key. Administrators above him supported his chair's behavior. Radical black politics came to campus, and militant student activists began making increasingly large demands on the administration. Willis -- a quite, reserved man who alway wore a bowtie in public -- found himself deeply sympathetic to the activists and became radicalized himself. As the only black professor on campus, he became a key player negotiating their relationship to the administration. It was in this context that he wrote his piece "Skeletons in the Anthropological Closet". He considered alternate titles for the essay, including "anthropologist as vulture" and "anthropologist as exploiter".
Willis at SMU, via APS
The Willises found it difficult to bear the brunt of the constant harassment they faced at SMU. Their health began to break down. Willis experienced constant pain in his abdomen and was afraid it was cancer -- in fact, it was stress. Gene began fainting in public. Willis decided to take a leave of absence in 1971 to recover. The administration then altered his request to make it a 'terminal leave of absence', making it sound as if he had resigned his position! Willis fought back against this attempt to remove him, but soon realized that if he stayed at SMU he would spend his entire life fighting the administration for his rights. When his leave of absence was over, he resigned from SMU. He had been there less than a decade.
Willis and Gene moved to Philadelphia, Gene's home town. They moved in with her mother and Gene's mortician experience ended up proving valuable, and the family business helped support both her and Willis. One of the upsides of the move was that the American Philosophical Society was based in Philly. Willis began his next and (as it turns out) final project there, combing through the massive archive of the Franz Boas paper. He became a fixture in the reading rooms of the society, well-known to the librarians and archivists who worked there. His initial plan was to write about the sort shrift Boas and his colleagues gave to Black Americans, but the more time he spent reading Boas, the more ambivalent he became. He came to see Boas as both an anti-racist activist and someone who at times seemed to harbor racist views of Black people.
Willis in the PBS Special "Shackles of Tradition" about Franz Boas. The entire documentary is on YouTube
Wilis began writing a book on the history of American anthropology's study of African Americans. Alas, this study was never to be finished. On 8 August 1983 Willis left the reading room, went home, and died of a massive heart attack. He was 62 years old. His papers are now in the APS library and his wife Gene has established a fund to support the study of race (APS Willis feature).
Via APS
Willis had little lasting influence on the discipline of anthropology. Although his "Skeletons" essay is now more widely taught, he did not train graduate students who could keep his memory alive. The first chapter of his book on Boas was published posthumously, but the rest of the work was already created. Today, Willis is remembered as a pioneer of African American anthropology but, to be honest, his biography shows us both the story of a model scholar and the tragedy of race in America.
Willis's final volume is available on JSTOR.
