Biographical Note

William Allison Davis was born on October 14, 1902 to Gabrielle and John Davis, and was raised, along with his brother, John, and his sister, Dorothy, in Washington, D. C. Allison's father worked as an official in the Government Printing Office, and the family owned farmland in Virginia.

After attending segregated Dunbar High School, Allison Davis received his A.B. in 1924 from Williams College, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated summa cum laude as class valedictorian. Davis enrolled at Harvard University in English and Comparative Literature and earned his A.M. in 1925.

From 1925 to 1931, Davis served as Instructor in English at Hampton Institute in Virginia, where he developed some of his first insights into cultural and social class differences and educational efficacy. Davis concluded that what he needed most was an understanding of the "southern environment and black communities from which my students came." In 1931, Davis returned to Harvard to study social anthropology and its application to contemporary society under W. Lloyd Warner.

During his graduate career, Davis earned a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship for Foreign Study at the London School of Economics. From 1932 to 1933, Davis took part in the seminars of Bronislaw Malinowski and Launcelot Hogben in anthropology and Julian Huxley in evolutionary biology. It was during this period that Davis drafted his first significant article, "The Distribution of the Blood Groups and Its Bearing on the Concept of Race," which saw the notion of race as a predominantly cultural construct and which further undermined the biological legitimacy of the concept as applied to human beings.

Upon his return to the U.S., Davis began research in the deep South. From 1933 to 1935, through the auspices of the Rockefeller Fellowships for Field Work and the Committee of Industrial Physiology of Harvard University, Davis, along with Burleigh and Mary Gardner, conducted a multi-layered study of caste and class in Natchez, Mississippi.

Davis was joined in the field by his wife, Elizabeth Stubbs Davis, and, later, by St. Clair Drake. Elizabeth's strength as an interviewer proved especially helpful among the women of the African-American community, and, in fact, Davis would enlist her skills on several other projects in the years to come.

Field work on the project lasted two years, and another five were required to analyze the data and produce the final text. Deep South was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1941 and is today considered a classic. It argued that southern society, exemplified by the Natchez community, comprised a highly stratified class system, marked by discrete and meaningful social cliques which defined an individual's relative position in the socio-economic hierarchy. Further, Deep South argued that a color-caste system overlaid this pattern of class stratification.

In 1935, having completed the fieldwork for Deep South, Davis accepted a position in the anthropology department at Dillard University in New Orleans where he would become Head of the Division of Social Studies. During his tenure there, Davis also served as Director of Research (1938-1939) for a project sponsored by the American Youth Commission of the American Council on Education. This project concerned the psychological and personality development of urban black adolescents in New Orleans and Natchez. Davis, along with Yale psychologist John Dollard, sought to combine an anthropological approach with the expanding theoretical techniques of social psychology.

In 1939, Davis returned with Dollard to Yale as a guest of the Institute of Human Relations, where the research was put into final form. Their acclaimed Children of Bondage was published in 1940.

By this time, Davis's mentor, Lloyd Warner, had left Harvard and taken a post at the University of Chicago. In 1939, Davis decided to follow him in order to complete his doctoral degree. He did so on his second Julius Rosenwald Fellowship and as a Research Associate in the Center on Child Development. In 1942, Davis received his Ph.D. in anthropology. His dissertation, entitled "The Relation Between Color Caste and Economic Stratification in Two 'Black' Plantation Counties," was directed by Warner, Fred Eggan, and Fay-Cooper Cole and derived from his half of the Deep South data.

In 1937, Gunnar Myrdal had been invited by the Carnegie Corporation to direct a comprehensive, sociological study of African-American life in the United States. The outcome of that research was the authoritative work, The American Dilemma. Davis was consulted on the project and agreed to undertake a specific assignment, the production of a research memorandum on "The Negro Church and Associations in the Lower South." At the same time, he would direct the investigations of St. Clair Drake into similar institutions in Chicago. The findings documented in his 1940 memorandum were incorporated into Myrdal's final product.

During this period, Davis renewed his association with the American Council on Education, serving as a staff member of the Division on Child Development and Teacher Personnel from 1940 to 1942. Davis also briefly became the Head of the Department of Education at Atlanta University.

Davis earned the admiration and respect of several key figures at the University of Chicago, Warner, Ralph Tyler, and Robert J. Havighurst among them. Yet, because of his color, Davis's appointment to the Department of Education was not easily won and ultimately required the financial intervention of the Julius Rosenwald Fund. Davis was furthermore denied faculty membership at the private Quadrangle Club until 1948. Nevertheless, in 1942 Allison Davis became the first African American to hold full faculty status with teaching duties in an American university which was not traditionally all black. He would remain at the University of Chicago through the rest of his career, achieving tenure in 1947 and full professorship in 1948, again firsts.

In 1942, Davis, along with Havighurst, launched a study of child-rearing among black and white families from middle and lower class backgrounds in Chicago. This research eventually led Davis and his colleagues to investigate the ways in which color and class differences are reinforced in the processes of socialization and education, and it helped to inaugurate precedent-setting studies on the reliability and validity of standardized intelligence tests. In 1948, Davis delivered the Inglis lecture to the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University. In it, he utilized his research to demonstrate the inabilities of such standardized intelligence tests to accurately assess the potential of lower class children.

Davis' efforts in these areas resulted in several major publications including Father of the Man (1947), co-authored with Havighurst, the Inglis lecture Social-Class Influences Upon Learning (1948), and Intelligence and Cultural Differences (1951), written with Kenneth Eells, Havighurst, Virgil Herrick, and Ralph Tyler. Davis, likewise, worked closely with his colleagues in an effort to develop their own non-biased tests. The efforts of the Davis group led many major cities and educational districts to discard their use of traditional intelligence tests.

In the early 1950s, Davis and Robert Hess embarked on longitudinal study of adolescence and young adulthood. Working with a team of interviewers, Davis and Hess began with a cross-section of the senior class of a Chicago-area high school and re-investigated those same individuals about seven years later in 1961. Their results, published in 1963 as Achievement in Adolescence and Young Adulthood, contradicted much received knowledge about personality and ego development. Davis and Hess concluded that, while the "identity crisis" begins during adolescence, the resolution of that crisis is not achieved until early adulthood and depends upon the emergence of a strong, self-supporting ego.

In 1964, Davis, along with Hess and Benjamin Bloom, organized the Research Conference on Education and Cultural Deprivation at the University of Chicago. The conference was convened not only to assess and analyze the problems of education and cultural deprivation, but to conceive practical recommendations for the alleviation of those problems in educational settings.

Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, Davis delivered notable lectures at educational institutions around the nation, including the Billings Memorial Lecture at Smith College, the Horace Mann Lecture at the University of Pittsburgh, and the Frederick Douglas Lecture at the University of Rochester. In 1970 he was appointed the John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Education at the University of Chicago. And in 1971 Davis was chosen one of the "Gold Medal Educators of the 1960s" by the journal Education.

In 1972, Davis was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, becoming the first member chosen from the field of education. He was an active participant in the life of the academy, serving on the Committee on Memberships through 1974.

In 1978, after thirty-six years on the faculty, and nearly forty years of continuous association, Allison Davis retired from the University of Chicago, becoming Professor Emeritus. Despite retirement he received grants from the Spencer Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for his work on black leadership and the socially constructive use of aggression. In 1983, this work was published as Leadership, Love, and Aggression, a psycho-social study of the lives of four prominent black leaders and intellectuals: Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. DuBois, Richard Wright, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Shortly before his death Davis was honored by a symposium at the University of Chicago, supported by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, "Race, Class, Socialization and the Life Cycle." Davis was honored by the participation of many colleagues and friends, including Robert Hess, Ralph Tyler, Robert Havighurst, John Hope Franklin, Bernice Neugarten, and Edgar Epps.

Allison Davis died on November 21, 1983 at the age of eighty-one.