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C H A P T E R N I N E Political Scientists and the Activist-Technocrat Dichotomy The Case of John Aubrey Davis MARTIN KILSON Introduction BY THE 1930s a small cadre of African American professionals had emerged with full-fledged graduate school training in the social science professions, and in this chapter I want to discuss the fascinating career of one such African American who gained graduate school training in the field of political science. Just a handful of African Americans had attained professional degrees at the doctoral level in political science by the end of the 1940s; prominent among them were Ralph Bunche (PhD, Harvard University), Robert Martin (PhD, University of Chicago), Merze Tate (PhD, Radcliffe College), and Robert Brisbane (PhD, Harvard University). So when John Aubrey Davis—the younger brother of Allison Davis, the prominent African American anthropology and psychology scholar and author of the landmark study, Deep South (1940)—enrolled at the University of Wisconsin to study international politics and comparative politics after graduating from Williams College in June 1933, he was preparing to join a small subgroup within the evolving twentieth-century African American professional stratum. He was raised in Washington, DC, in a well-to-do, fair-skinned African American household that was oriented to activism in the civil rights movement. His sister, Dorothy, attended Wellesley College in the 1920s and 1930s; along with his attendance at Williams College, this college-attendance pattern was extremely rare for African Americans in that high-noon era of Jim Crow in American society, when over 95 percent of college-going African Americans attended Negro colleges. Davis completed requirements for the master’s degree by the summer of 1934 and returned to his hometown, Washington, DC. There the new head of the political science department at Howard University—the newly minted Harvard PhD, Ralph Bunche—hired Davis as an instructor in political science. However, it would be twelve years before Davis completed the graduate studies that led to his PhD degree in political science, studies that he began on a Rosenwald Foundation Fellowship at Columbia University in 1936. As Davis observed in a letter to me, he “majored in American Government and Constitutional Law, a standard combination at Columbia [in that era], and minored in labor economics, across department and against all advice about too tough a program.” At the same time, Davis married a young African American librarian and English scholar, Mavis Wormley , and embarked on a rather long academic association with Lincoln University (Pennsylvania), where he was appointed an assistant professor in political science in 1935 and where he continued to teach—except for several years during World War II—until 1953. Davis submitted his doctoral dissertation in 1946. It probed the administrative arrangements, rules, procedures, styles, and citizen impact of the New Deal’s Social Security policies embodied in the Social Security Acts of 1935 and 1939. Davis’s dissertation earned a high-distinction evaluation, which led to a special publication niche as Study Number 571 in Columbia University Press’s coveted series, Studies in History, Economics, and Public Law. The published version of Davis’s dissertation was titled Regional Organization of the Social Security Administration : A Case Study (1950). To my knowledge, before the publication of Davis’s dissertation by Columbia University Press, the only other Columbia dissertation by an African American scholar to be published in the same series was Ira de Augustine Reid’s Negro Immigrants, published in 1939. The foregoing constitutes the core features of the academic-groundwork background to Davis’s intellectual odyssey. One additional feature should be added to this background, however. In 1953, Davis was wooed away from Lincoln University to become one of several African American scholars to gain full professorships in the main colleges in New York City’s college system. He joined the faculty of City College, Hylan Lewis (a sociologist at Howard University) joined Queens College, and John Hope Franklin (an historian at Howard University) joined Brooklyn College. But we are now some 20 years ahead of the core story of John Aubrey Davis’s intellectual and professional odyssey as a member of that small cadre of firstgeneration African Americans in the political science field. So let us return to the time frame of our core story. Role of Civil Rights Activism in John Aubrey Davis’s Professional Odyssey Formation of the New Negro Alliance Movement, 1933 John Aubrey Davis was only a few months out of Williams College with his BA degree...

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