Cox, Oliver Cromwell

August 24, 1901
September 4, 1974

Sociologist Oliver Cox was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, the son of Virginia Blake and William Raphael Cox. His father, a customs officer and the captain of a revenue schooner, was too busy to supervise the education of Cox and his eight siblings, and so it was entrusted to his uncle, Reginald W. Vidale, a teacher and headmaster of Saint Thomas Boys' School in Port of Spain.

Cox came to the United States in 1919 to work and be educated. In 1925 he entered Lewis Institute in Chicago, where he majored in history and economics. He received an associate degree in the spring of 1927 and that fall entered Northwestern University, where he graduated with a bachelor of science in law in 1929. Shortly thereafter he was stricken with polio. He spent eighteen months recovering and thereafter always walked with crutches.

After abandoning the idea of practicing law in Trinidad, Cox decided to go into academic work, which would, he said, "not require too much legwork." In the fall of 1930 he entered the University of Chicago as a graduate student in economics, earning an M.A. in 1932. Soon after, however, he switched to sociology, claiming that economists had not explained the causes of the Great Depression. His dissertation, "Factors Affecting the Marital Status of Negroes in Chicago," was based on the study of a massive quantity of statistical data. Cox received his Ph.D. in August 1938.

Despite his degrees in both economics and sociology, Cox was unable, then as later, to find a job at a white institution. He took a position in the economics department at Wiley College in Marshall, Texas. After five years he accepted a more lucrative post at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Tuskegee's vocational approach to education frustrated him, however, and he joined the faculty of Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri, in 1949. He stayed at Lincoln until 1970, when he joined the faculty at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, where for a short time he was a distinguished visiting professor.

Cox is best known for his attack on the caste school of race relations, of which W. Lloyd Warner was the most articulate member. Cox argued, first in his article "The Modern Caste School of Race Relations" (1942) and at greater length in his major work, Caste, Race, and Class (1948) that to view race relations in America as analogous to caste systems such as that of Hindu India ignored historical differences in the development of the two systems and discounted the political and economic basis of American race relations. Cox insisted that racism in America was a product of class conflict. In later years, Cox elaborated his Marxist view of capitalism and race relations in three books: Foundations of Capitalism (1959), Capitalism and American Leadership (1962), and Capitalism as a System (1964). He underlined the importance of international trade and uneven global development in the history of European capitalism. Cox's final work, "Jewish Self-Interest and 'Black Pluralism'" (1974), dealt with the problem of black nationalism. His assertion that ethnic pluralism was promoted by Jews for their own benefit caused a storm of criticism.

Only at the end of his life did Cox achieve limited professional recognition. His work, despite its originality, remains curiously overlooked.

See also Tuskegee University

Bibliography

Blackwell, James, and Morris Janowitz, eds. Black Sociologists: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974.

Hunter, Herbert M., and Sameer Y. Abraham, eds. Race, Class, and the World System: The Sociology of Oliver C. Cox. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987.

McAuley, Christopher. The Mind of Oliver C. Cox. Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 2004.

greg robinson (1996)
Updated bibliography