David Varel, "The Lost Black Scholar: Resurrecting Allison Davis in American Social Thought" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

New Books in African American Studies · Jul 12, 2019 · 1h 6m

Allison Davis (1902-1983) was a pioneering anthropologist who did ground-breaking fieldwork in the Jim Crow south, challenged the racial bias of IQ tests, and became the first African American to be tenured at the University of Chicago. And yet despite these contributions Davis's work is little read today. The Lost Black Scholar: Resurrecting Allison Davis in American Social Thought(University of Chicago Press, 2018) is the first full-length biography of Davis ever written. In it, historian David Varel documents Davis's remarkable life. In this episode in New Books in Anthropology we talk…