Davis, Allison

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Davis, Allison

October 14, 1902
November 21, 1983

The educator William Allison Davis was born in Washington, D.C., and attended Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, graduating in 1924. The following year he received an M.A. in English from Harvard University. Soon after, he switched his focus to anthropology; he received an M.A. in anthropology from Harvard in 1932. From 1933 to 1935 he was a field researcher for social anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner, studying class/caste relations in a southern town. The project ultimately resulted in the well-known study Deep South (1941). In 1935 Davis was hired as professor of anthropology at Dillard University in New Orleans, and in 1939, after a brief period at Yale University, he moved on to the University of Chicago, where he was named an assistant professor by the university's Center for Child Development. Soon after, Davis and his colleague John Dollard collaborated on The Children of Bondage: The Personality Development of Negro Youth in the Urban South (1940), a study of the destructive psychological effects of segregation on southern black children. In 1942 Davis received his Ph.D. in education from the University of Chicago and was named an assistant professor of education. Over the following years he did exhaustive research on racial bias in intelligence testing, and in 1948 he published his most notable book, Social-Class Influences upon Learning, in which he argued that black children's lower scores on IQ tests were not based on their lower intelligence, but resulted from middle-class cultural bias in the questions posed.

In 1948 Davis was granted tenure and promoted to full professor at the University of Chicago, the first African American to hold such a position at a major integrated university. During the next twenty years, he continued his work in psychology and education. He devised the Davis-Ellis intelligence test, a relatively bias-free measure of mental development, and wrote several important studies of the influence of social and class factors in the education of children, including Psychology of the Child in the Middle Class (1960) and Compensatory Education for Cultural Development (1964), as well as numerous articles in professional journals.

Davis received many tributes for his work. He was the first scholar from the field of education elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1965 he was elected a Distinguished Professor at the University of Illinois. In 1966 he was appointed the President's Commission on Civil Rights, and in 1968 served as vice-chair of the U.S. Labor Department's Commission on Manpower Retraining. In 1970 he became the University of Chicago's first John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor.

Davis retired from teaching in 1978 and was named professor emeritus. He devoted his last years to writing Leadership, Love, and Aggression (1983), a study of the psychological forces governing four African Americans—Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Richard Wright—and the role of anger and love in their leadership efforts. In November 1983, shortly after the book was published, Davis died following heart surgery. In 1993 the U.S. Postal Service honored him with a postage stamp.