William Montague Cobb

Dr. William Montague Cobb was a pioneering 20th-century physical anthropologist. As the first African American to earn a Ph.D in anthropology, and the only one until after the Korean War, his main focus in the anthropological discipline was studying the concept of race and the negative impact it has on communities of color. Cobb prolifically wrote both popular and scholarly articles during the course of his career and trained an untold number of students.

Cobb was born on October 12, 1904 in Washington DC. His mother, Alexizne Montague Cobb grew up in Massachusetts and is partly of Native American descent. His father, William Elmer Cobb grew up in Selma, Alabama. They met in Washington DC when W. Montague’s father started his own printing business for the Black community. He married Hilda B. Smith, Ruth Smith Lloyd's sister.

The tipping point for Cobb’s initial interest in Anthropology came from a book of the animal kingdom that his grandfather owned. In this book, there were illustrations of human beings separated by race, but were illustrated with what Cobb called “equal dignity.” This instigated a pondering on the concept of race, as the same type of “equal dignity” was not granted in the society that surrounded Cobb’s life.

Cobb graduated from Dunbar High School, which was considered to be of the best of African American high schools and continued to earn his Bachelor of Arts from Amherst College in 1925. He continued his research in embryology at Woods Hole Marine Biology Laboratory, where he earned the Blodgett Scholarship for proficiency in Biology. He would later earn his MD (Doctor of Medicine) from the Howard University Medical School in 1929. Numan PG Adams, who was the Dean of Howard University at the time, was assigned the task of organizing a new faculty of African American physicians to help advance the school in the medical field. Cobb, in turn had the aspirations of creating a laboratory of anatomy and physical anthropology at Howard University that would have the resources for African American scholars to contribute instead of just defend debates in racial biology. He would then spend a few years at Case Western Reserve University, studying under T. Wingate Todd, where he would contribute to the Hamann-Todd Skeletal Collection, and eventually earn his Ph. D in Anthropology.

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