William Allison Davis

1902-1983
Allison Davis led a long thoughtful life trying to help many others along on his journey. It all started on October 14, 1902, when William Allison Davis was born to John and Gabrielle Davis. They raised him on a farm in Virginia with his two siblings, Dorothy and John Jr. By the time he was a teenager the family moved to Washington DC. As a young child Allison Davis felt that he had to do something about the discrimination towards African Americans, so he devoted his life to trying to make a difference among the equal treatment children of different races.

Allison Davis worked really hard at everything that he did and that could explain why he was valedictorian of his high school class, at an all segregated Dunbar High School.  Shortly after high school, Allison decided he wanted to fight the racial caste system. He first went to Williams College in Massachusetts, where he graduated as valedictorian in 1924 and also got his bachelor of arts. After Allison Davis got his Masters in English from Harvard in 1925, he taught students English at Hampton Institute. After teaching he realized that there were many young African Americans being under schooled and he wanted that to change. So he went back to Harvard and got his Masters in Anthropology in 1932.

Allison didn't want to stop there so he continued his anthropological studies in England. First he went to the London School of Economics, but decided to go back to the United States after only one year. When he returned to Harvard, his mentor, W. Lloyd Warner, was working on some studies, so Allison helped him. Davis became known as an anthropologist while conducting studies in Mississippi with Warner

For four years (1935-1939) Allison Davis taught social anthropology at Dillard University; his last year he was the director of the American Youth Commission of the American Council on Education. For the next three years he stayed involved in education, being on the staff at the Center for Child Development, while also head of the department of education at Atlanta University. After the study in Mississippi, Allison Davis was inspired to write, so in 1941 he wrote Deep South: a Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class. This book was later used in reference in the Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. the Topeka Board of Education in 1954, which goes to show that Allison Davis's work was recognized nationally.

Throughout the next few years Allison Davis made many observations and did many studies about education. One study, with Jon Dollard, was on intelligence and African American students, which was named Children of Bondage. Another was about class and education that was named Social Class Influences upon Learning. Davis came to a conclusion that children shouldn't have to take IQ tests in school because there were many biases in them, so he came up with the Davis-Ellis Intelligence Test that was not bias. In doing this he motivated many people to create programs that help underprivileged children, like the Head Start program.

Allison Davis has had many amazing accomplishment in his life. In 1965 became a member of the Conference to Insure Civil Rights and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1967, as the first person in the field of education. A year later, Davis was on the White House Task Force for the Gifted.

Retiring in 1978, at age 76, Davis started to write Leadership, Love, and Aggression. He had this book published in November of 1983, at age 81. A month later Allison Davis went in for heart surgery that unfortunately failed, causing William Allison Davis to die on November 21, 1983. Even though he is gone his memory still lives on with many people to this day.

 References:

Harrison, Ira and Faye. African American Pioneers in Anthropology. University of Illinois Press: Urbana and Chicago, 1999.

 "Allison Davis." Afro-American Heritage and History - First Day Cover Collection.  20 http://multirace.org/firstday/stamp18.htm  <http://multirace.org/firstday/stamp18.htm>  Feb. 2004.

Written by Lynsie Nicol, 2004