Allison Davis
| Allison Davis | |
|---|---|
| Born | William Boyd Allison Davis October 14, 1902 Washington, D.C., U.S. |
| Died | November 21, 1983 (aged 81) Chicago, Illinois, U.S. |
| Occupation | Academic, Anthropologist, Educator |
| Spouse | Elizabeth Stubbs Davis |
William Boyd Allison Davis (October 14, 1902 – November 21, 1983) was an American educator, anthropologist, writer, researcher, and scholar. He was considered one of the most promising black scholars of his generation, and he was the first African-American to hold a full faculty position at a major white university when he joined the staff of the University of Chicago in 1942, where he would spend the balance of his academic life. Among his students during his tenure at the University of Chicago were anthropologist St. Clair Drake and sociologist Nathan Hare. Davis, who has been honored with a commemorative postage stamp by the United States Postal Service, is best remembered for his pioneering anthropology research on southern race and class during the 1930s, his research on intelligence quotient in the 1940s and 1950s, and his support of "compensatory education" that contributed to the intellectual genesis of the federal Head Start Program.
Born in 1902 to John Abraham and Gabrielle Davis, William Boyd Allison Davis, who would later be known only as Allison Davis, was raised in a family well-acquainted with both achievement and activism. He was the oldest of three children with a younger sister, Dorothy, and a younger brother, John Aubrey Davis, Sr. Davis’s grandfather had been an abolitionist lawyer. His father led a group of 17 white clerks as the head of a government printing office before his demotion under the policies of the Wilson administration, and chaired the anti-lynching committee of Washington D.C.'s chapter of the NAACP. Davis would describe him as a “brave man” who was “already marked in a town of 236 citizens” as a large landowner who “further angered whites by registering and voting.”
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