Drake, St. Clair (1911–1990)

His Early Years

Born John Gibbs St. Clair Drake in 1911 in Suffolk, Virginia, Drake attended Hampton Institute (graduating with a biology degree) and later Pendle Hill, a Quaker graduate school near Philadelphia. Drake worked for the Society of Friends (i.e., Quakers) on a project called “Peace Caravan” that solicited signatures and support for the 1932 World Disarmament Conference in Geneva and, following graduation, taught high school at a Quaker boarding school for Blacks in Virginia.

Drake later returned to Hampton in 1935 at the behest of his mentor, the well-known anthropologist William Allison Davis, where Drake became involved in an anthropological study in Natchez, Mississippi, that was later published as Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class (1941).

With the help of the Rosenwald Foundation, which contributed generously to developing a cadre of scholars from disadvantaged backgrounds, Drake worked as an instructor of anthropology at Dillard University in New Orleans, splitting his time between Natchez and Dillard. Given his success as an amateur ethnographer, Drake was drawn to anthropology for its potential to eliminate and refute pseudo-scientific claims about Black people.

His Academic Career

After taking summer classes at Columbia University, Drake enrolled at the University of Chicago in 1937 to formally undertake a degree in anthropology, studying under the tutelage of the eminent sociologist W. Lloyd Warner. Drake's first book, Churches and Voluntary Associations Among Negroes in Chicago (1940), enjoyed considerable success.

In 1945, Drake began to make a name for himself when he and fellow student Horace R. Cayton undertook fieldwork in Black Chicago and produced the groundbreaking work, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City. This seminal text closely examined Black life within the Southside of Chicago and prefigured other works that purported an “internal colonialism” thesis. Black Metropolis has influenced numerous scholars, especially those working within urban anthropology and within the anthropology and sociology of race. In 1946, Drake became a professor at Roosevelt College (now University), an experimental school at the time, in Chicago. At Roosevelt, Drake developed one of the first African Studies programs in the United States.

Again funded by the Rosenwald Foundation, Drake embarked on fieldwork in Cardiff (Wales) in 1947 to study the multiethnic community of Tigers Bay. The work, originally intended to be another case study directed by Warner, instead became Drake's doctoral dissertation, Value Systems, Social Structure, and Race Relations in the British Isles. Within the Cardiff study, he explored the interconnections [Page 416]between race, nation, and capitalism. Drake was awarded his PhD in anthropology in 1954.

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