William Boyd Allison Davis

Bro. William Boyd Allison Davis (October 14, 1902 – November 21, 1983) was an American educator, anthropologist, writer, researcher, and scholar who became the second 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, after only Dr. Julian H. Lewis, where he served for the balance of his academic life. He was considered one of the most promising black scholars of his generation.

Bro. William Allison Davis 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. 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.  He also became an active member of Rho Phi Chapter. 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. Bro. Davis spent a year as a research fellow at the Institute of Human Relations at Yale, after which he and Dollard published their joint research results in a book entitled, Children of Bondage: The Personality Development of Negro Youth in the Urban South (1940). His research on intelligence quotient tests in the 1940s and 1950s, and his support of “compensatory education,” an area in which he contributed to the intellectual genesis of the federal Head Start Program.

 On February 1, 1994, the late University of Chicago social anthropologist Allison Davis joined the prestigious ranks of such outstanding African Americans as Martin Luther King, Jr., A. Philip Randolph, Harriet Tubman, W.E.B. DuBois, and Jackie Robinson. The occasion was the issuance of a new United States postage stamp in Davis’s honor-the 17th in the Postal Service’s Black Heritage stamp series.