Anthropology

"A short walk down the hill on campus, many of you have been to the St. Claire Drake Room in the Department of African American Studies, named to honor that brilliant anthropologist and student of Allison Davis, with whom Drake conducted field work featured in the germinal 1941 Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class. Eventually nationally recognized by having his visage grace a U.S. postal stamp, Davis became in 1942 one of the first African Americans appointed to a full faculty member at a major white university, the University of Chicago. Drake pursued his doctorate training there in Anthropology, co-writing the influential urban classic Black Metropolis (1945) before conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Cardiff, Wales among Black maritimers and in Ghana, where he taught university students and informally advised his friend President Kwame Nkrumah, advocating for African Socialism. Drake’s Pan-Africanist political engagements extending to Roosevelt University in Chicago where he taught for decades and helped shepherd to safety, through the Kikuyu Underground, anti-colonial Kenyans seeking sanctuary from British repression in the 1950s. After migrating from Roosevelt University to Stanford, CA in 1969, Drake helped fellow anthropologist James Lowell Gibbs and others to establish a transdisciplinary program in African American Studies, chairing it before publishing the germinal two-volume classic Black Folk Here and There (1987, 1991),dedicating it to the memory of Davis. Drake’s ongoing influence as an activist, anthropologist, and eminent scholar map to that room on the 6th floor of Barrows Hall..." [Read More]