Stanley Diamond

Stanley Diamond (January 4, 1922 in New York City, NY – March 31, 1991 in New York City, NY) was an American poet and anthropologist. As a young man, he identified as a poet, and his disdain for the fascism of the 1930s greatly influenced his thinking. Diamond was a professor at several universities, spending most of his career at The New School. He wrote several books and founded Dialectical Anthropology, a Marxist anthropology journal, in 1975.

Diamond was born into a progressive and intellectual middle-class Jewish family in New York City. His family had strong ties to the city's Yiddish community, and his grandfather had founded a Yiddish theater. However, he rarely discussed secular or religious Judaism in his work, and a biographer characterized his tone when discussing Judaism as "dismissive, even bitter."

Diamond was interested in African-Americans' civil rights at a young age, writing about the topic as early as age fourteen. As a young man, he befriended an African-American artist whom he admired, and they remained close. While he was serving with the British army in North Africa, he met soldiers who had been sold by their tribal chiefs to the South African military. Diamond attributes his social justice values to his early experiences: "Being a Jew I always tie the two things together, that is, the persecution of Jews and the persecution of Africans and African-Americans were twin horrors of civilization. I suppose it goes back, then, to the question of social conscientiousness and social conscience."

Diamond attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and then New York University, graduating from the latter with a B.A. degree in English and philosophy. At the outbreak of World War II, Diamond joined the British Army Field Service and served in North Africa. Like many veterans of his generation, he went to graduate school on the G.I. Bill. And, in 1951, received a Ph.D. degree in anthropology from Columbia University, where he was greatly influenced by the anti-racism writing of Franz Boas. Supporting Diamond's Ph.D.-degree was his unpublished dissertation "Dahomey: A Proto-State in West Africa" (1951).

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