Davis, Allison (14 Oct. 1902-21 Nov. 1983), educator and anthropologist, was born William Allison Davis in Washington, D.C., the son of John Abraham Davis, who worked in the U.S. Government Printing Office, and Gabrielle Dorothy Beale. He and his two siblings, Dorothy and John Aubrey Davis, grew up on a farm in Virginia and in Washington, D.C., where Davis graduated from the all-black Dunbar High School. The school was "quite well known and had a very good faculty," he later recalled. "This is important because it shows that not all segregated schools are poor schools" (Education at Chicago 2, no. 2 (autumn 1972): 22). Davis attended Williams College, where, as a person of color, he was unable to live on campus and instead stayed at a black-owned boarding house. In 1924 he nonetheless graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and class valedictorian, with a degree in English literature. The following year, he earned a master's degree at Harvard University, in English and comparative literature. Starting in 1925 Davis taught English at Hampton Institute for six years. In 1929 he married Elizabeth Stubbs.

In 1931 Davis, determined to explore the topic of race more directly, embarked on a new disciplinary track, studying anthropology at Harvard under the guidance of W. Lloyd Warner. From 1932 to 1933 a grant from the Julius Rosenwald Fund enabled Davis to broaden his knowledge of the human sciences by traveling to the London School of Economics (LSE), where he trained with the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski and the evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley. An early paper of Davis's, which looked at blood-group distribution in order to question the notion of race as a biological concept rather than a chiefly cultural one, arose from his time at the LSE.

From 1933 to 1935, with the sponsorship of the Rockefeller Foundation and Harvard University, the Davises and another couple, Burleigh and Mary Gardner, conducted extensive interviews with black and white residents of Natchez, Mississippi, investigating the social dynamics of caste (that is, descent-based status, which was the concept by which they theorized racial identity) and class. The Davises worked with black subjects; the Gardners collected data on white subjects. In the course of their fieldwork, the two couples had to conceal their meetings, to avoid arousing local hostility. Burleigh Gardner later recalled that they would "drive out to some sheltered country road" so they "could sit and talk unobserved." The result, published as Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class, in 1941, was soon regarded as a classic study, influential both for its methodology (it pioneered an ethnographic approach toward the study of race in America) and for the crosshatchings it revealed between class stratification and an unyielding color-caste system. Low-status members of the superordinate (white) caste, the authors noted, had a particular investment in their putative racial superiority. Deep South, for all its complexity, presented an unsparing vision of the communities it explored. In the South, the authors wrote, starkly,

The Negro is, from the very beginning, in a position subordinate to both the police and the courts . . .. The only role a Negro can take is that of defendant or witness, except in a few types of civil cases. Furthermore, the Negro has no part in making laws which the court system enforces. As a defendant, he faces the white man's court . . .. The law is white. (pp. 310-11)

In a review the sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois wrote of Deep South, "As a contribution to our knowledge of sociology and the interactions of a small, deeply divided human group, this book deserves a high place" (Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 220 (March 1942): 275).

In 1935 Davis joined the Anthropology Department at Dillard University, in New Orleans, and his next major course of fieldwork--conducted with the Yale psychologist John Dollard and supported by the American Youth Commission of the American Council on Education--involved black adolescents in both New Orleans and Natchez. After Davis spent a year at Yale, in 1939, as a fellow at the Institute of Human Relations, he and Dollard published the results of their research as Children of Bondage: The Personality Development of Negro Youth in the Urban South (1940), which brought, to the ethnographic approach of Davis's previous work, a stronger focus on social psychology. The study notably directed attention to the role of class-specific values in education and acculturation. Educational ambitions associated with middle-class norms and white-collar occupations are, Davis and Dollard wrote,

not made to appear valuable, near, or certain for the lower-class child. He learns from his family and teachers that the chances for a person in his lower-class position to finish high school and college, and to become socially mobile through education, are so slight in view of the economic position and classways of his family, that they scarcely exist. (p. 286)

In 1939 Davis enrolled at the University of Chicago, where his graduate advisor from Harvard, Warner, was now teaching. Davis was a Julius Rosenwald Fellow and earned a doctoral degree in anthropology in 1942. (His dissertation, "The Relation between Color Caste and Economic Stratification in Two 'Black' Plantation Counties," was drawn from his research from the Deep South project.) During this period he also served, briefly, as the head of the Education Department at Atlanta University and contributed to the Carnegie Foundation study that the social scientist Gunnar Myrdal published as An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944).

At the University of Chicago, Davis's champions included the education professors Ralph W. Tyler and Robert J. Havighurst. However, the "color-caste system" that Davis studied shadowed his own career. Only after the Julius Rosenwald Fund agreed to subsidize his position did the faculty of the University of Chicago agree, in 1942, to authorize his appointment to the Department of Education. In 1947 Davis became perhaps the first African American to be promoted to tenure at a major research university; even so, he was refused admission to the Quadrangle Club, a private faculty association at Chicago, until the following year.

Through the 1940s Davis became increasingly engaged by the subject of child development. He collaborated with Havighurst on a study of child-rearing practices among families from various racial and economic backgrounds, investigating how the role of color and class is entrenched by socialization. He also began to explore the limitations of standard approaches toward intelligence testing. When Harvard's Graduate School of Education invited him to give the 1948 Inglis Lecture, published that year as Social-Class Influences upon Learning, Davis drew on this research and argued that standardized tests tended to mismeasure the potential of lower-class students. Emerging as a prominent critic of conventional IQ tests, he collaborated on a later book on the topic, Intelligence and Cultural Differences: A Study of Cultural Learning and Problem-solving (1951). The research that he and his collaborators conducted on the reliability and validity of ten intelligence tests had, he recalled,

perhaps had the most practical effect of any of my work; it led to the abolition of the use of intelligence tests in New York, Chicago, Detroit, San Francisco and other cities. This was one time I got what I wanted: a direct effect on society from social science research. (Education at Chicago 2, no. 2 (autumn 1972): 24)

In the 1950s Davis and Robert D. Hess, a colleague at the University of Chicago, launched a seven-year study of high school seniors, following their progress into adulthood. Their findings, published in Achievement in Adolescence and Young Adulthood (1963), considered such topics as the adolescent identity crisis and the emergence of a stable ego in early adulthood. Working with Hess and another colleague, the psychologist Benjamin Bloom, Davis, determined to come up with specific recommendations for educating disadvantaged children, convened a 1964 conference on education and cultural deprivation. The result, published as Compensatory Education for Cultural Deprivation (1965) and coauthored by Bloom, Hess, and Susan B. Silverman, helped provide the intellectual underpinnings for the federal Head Start program. The following year, Davis was appointed to President Lyndon B. Johnson's Civil Rights Commission.

Davis and his wife, Elizabeth, had two children: Allison S. Davis, Jr. (b. 1939), founder of the Chicago law firm Davis, Miner, Barnhill and Galland and, later, principal of the real-estate development company Davis Group, and Gordon J. Davis (b. 1941), who has served as the New York City parks commissioner and was the founding chairman of Jazz at Lincoln Center; in 2007 he became a partner at the New York law firm Dewey and LeBoeuf LLP. Elizabeth died in 1966; Davis was married a second time, to Lois Mason, in 1969.

In 1970 the University of Chicago appointed Davis the first John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor; two years later, he became the first scholar of education to be inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He retired in 1978, although he continued to do research into such topics as black leadership; one result was his 1983 book, Leadership, Love, and Aggression. He died at the age of 81, in Chicago, following heart surgery.

Davis was honored with a postage stamp, in 1994, issued as part of the U.S. Postal Service's Black Heritage stamp series. In its announcement, the Postal Service stated,

He challenged the cultural bias of standardized intelligence tests and fought for the understanding of the human potential beyond racial class and caste. His work helped end legalized racial segregation and contributed to contemporary thought on valuing the capabilities of youth from diverse backgrounds.

In 2005 the Dr. Allison Davis Garden, a one-acre garden in Chicago's Washington Park, was established in his memory.

Davis's papers (1932-1984) are in the University of Chicago Archives. (An online guide to them has been posted here: http://ead.lib.uchicago.edu/view.xqy?id=ICU.SPCL.ADAVIS&c=d ). His principal books are Children of Bondage (1940, written with John Dollard); Deep South+ (1941, with Burleigh B. Gardner and Mary R. Gardner ); the Inglis Lecture Social-Class Influences upon Learning (1948); Compensatory Education for Cultural Deprivation (1965, with Benjamin Bloom, Robert D. Hess, and Susan B. Silverman); and Leadership, Love, and Aggression (1983). Biographical information can be found in W. Augustus Low and Virgil A. Clift, eds., Encyclopedia of Black America (1981); Joan Oleck, "Allison Davis: 1902-1983," Contemporary Black Biography 12 (1997); Dallas Browne, "Allison Davis," in Ira E. Harrison and Faye V. Harrison, eds., African-American Pioneers in Anthropology (1998); David Mobert, "Scholar's Life Bears Stamp of Greatness," Chicago Tribune, 16 Feb. 1994; and Morris Finder, Educating America: How Ralph W. Tyler Taught America to Teach (2004). Appraisals of Davis's scholarly career can be found in "Profile of Allison Davis: The Man and His Research," Education at Chicago 2, no. 2 (autumn 1972): 22-4; Michael R. Hillis, "Allison Davis and the Study of Race, Social Class, and Schooling," The Journal of Negro Education 64, no. 1 (winter 1995): pp. 33-41; and Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, An Elusive Science: The Troubling History of Educational Research (2000). Obituaries appear in the New York Times, 22 Nov. 1983; the Chicago Tribune, 24 Nov. 1983; and Newsweek, 5 Dec. 1983.