Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class

By Allison Davis, Burleigh B. Gardner, Mary R. Gardner and Isabel Wilkerson

A classic examination of the lived realities of American racism, now with a new foreword from Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson.
 
First published in 1941, Deep South is a landmark work of anthropology, documenting in startling and nuanced detail the everyday realities of American racism. Living undercover in Depression-era Mississippi—not revealing their scholarly project or even their association with one another—groundbreaking Black scholar Allison Davis and his White co-authors, Burleigh and Mary Gardner, delivered an unprecedented examination of how race shaped nearly every aspect of twentieth-century life in the United States. Their analysis notably revealed the importance of caste and class to Black and White worldviews, and they anatomized the many ways those views are constructed, solidified, and reinforced.
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This reissue of the 1965 abridged edition, with a new foreword from Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson—who acknowledges the book’s profound importance to her own work—proves that Deep South remains as relevant as ever, a crucial work on the concept of caste and how it continues to inform the myriad varieties of American inequality.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Aug 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9780226817996

Book preview

Cover Page for Deep South

Deep South

Deep South

A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class

Allison Davis

Burleigh B. Gardner

Mary R. Gardner

Enlarged Second Edition, with a New Foreword by Isabel Wilkerson

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 1941, 1965 by The University of Chicago

Foreword © 2022 by Isabel Wilkerson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2022

Printed in the United States of America

31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22     1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81798-9 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81799-6 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226817996.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Davis, Allison, 1902–1983, author. | Gardner, Burleigh B. (Burleigh Bradford), 1902– author. | Gardner, Mary R., author. | Wilkerson, Isabel, writer of foreword. | Warner, W. Lloyd (William Lloyd), 1898–1970, writer of introduction.

Title: Deep south : a social anthropological study of caste and class / Allison Davis, Burleigh B. Gardner, Mary R. Gardner.

Description: Enlarged second edition / with a new foreword by Isabel Wilkerson. | Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021057700 | ISBN 9780226817989 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226817996 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: African Americans—Southern States. | Social classes—Southern States. | Southern States—Social conditions. | Southern States—Economic conditions.

Classification: LCC HN79.A2 D3 2022 | DDC 305.5/12208996073075—dc23/eng/20211217

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021057700

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To Edwin R. Embree

SOCIAL ENGINEER WITH A FAITH

IN THE SCIENCES OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR

1941

We thank the University of Chicago—particularly Walter Massey, emeritus trustee and special advisor to the president, and Professor Amanda Woodward, dean of the Division of Social Sciences—for the university’s deep commitment to honoring the life and work of W. Allison Davis. We express our profound thanks to David Varel for tirelessly documenting in his elegant work The Lost Black Scholar so much we did not know about the lives and legacies of Elizabeth Stubbs Davis and W. Allison Davis. And lastly, we thank Isabel Wilkerson for her magnificent foreword to this new edition of Deep South, for championing Deep South as one of the most important works on race in America, and for extolling the brilliance and courage of our remarkable parents.

Allison S. Davis

Gordon J. Davis

2022

Contents

List of Illustrations

List of Tables

Foreword by Isabel Wilkerson

Preface

Part I

1  Introduction: Deep South—A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class W. Lloyd Warner

2  The System of Color-Castes

3  The Class System of the White Caste

4  The White Upper-Class Family

5  The White Middle-Class Family

6  The White Lower-Class Family

7  Social Cliques in the White Society

8  Social Mobility within the White Caste

9  The Class System of the Colored Caste

Part II

10  Intimidation of Labor

11  The Plantation in Its Social Setting

12  Relation between the Caste System and the Economic System

13  Caste, Class, and Local Government: White Power

14  Retrospect, 1965: Power and Caste

Afterword, 1986 Burleigh B. Gardner

Index

Footnotes

Illustrations

1  Relation between the Caste System and the Class System in the Deep South

2  The Social Perspectives of the Social Classes

3  Frequency of Interparticipation of a Group of Women in Old City: 1936—Group I

4  Frequency of Interparticipation of a Group of Women in Old City: 1936—Group II

5  Types of Members of, and Relationships between, Two Overlapping Cliques

6  Distribution of 443 White Clique Members by Social Class

7  Interparticipation of Clique Groups I and II in an Age-Class Configuration

8  The Participation Line in an Age-Class Configuration

9  Scope of Possible Participations of an Upper-Middle-Class Woman

10  Social Participation through an Indirect Relation: Up and Older

11  Circulation of Money on a Plantation through a Manager-Patriarch-Treasurer

12  Relative Status of Negroes and Whites in Non-economic Structures of the Society

13  Relative Status of Negroes and Whites in Economic Structures of the Society

Tables

1A  Social Characteristics of a Sample of 43 White Participation Groups in Old City: Clique Group I

1B  Social Characteristics of a Sample of 43 White Participation Groups in Old City: Clique Group II

2  Analysis of the Social Participation of the Female Members of 8 White Cliques: Ages 20–39

3  Distribution of 443 Individuals in Clique Groups I and II by Age Group and Social Class

4  Age Distribution of the Upper-Middle-Class and Lower-Middle-Class Members of Clique Groups I and II

Foreword

Isabel Wilkerson

I have been walking in the shadow of Allison Davis for much of my life, often beyond the level of conscious awareness, growing up in the same city as he (Washington, D.C.), establishing my writing career where he had built his academic one (Chicago), ultimately drawn, in our respective eras, to the lives and traumas of the survivors of Jim Crow, both of us having been born to survivors who suffered setbacks that would define the course of our lives and instill a near-singular focus on methodical, countervailing achievement.

There I was in the 1990s, working on what would become The Warmth of Other Suns, tracking down the graying pensioners who had fled the Jim Crow South during the Great Migration, the rural and small-town folk who had whispered dread of southern pogroms, heard of uncles or neighbors lost to lynchings, who themselves had been cheated of wages at settlement, condemned to forced subservience in what scholars who studied the South in that nadir would come to call a caste system.

There I was in the final laps of the twentieth century doing participant observation with the same cohort of people he had lived among as he did his ethnographic fieldwork for Deep South exactly sixty years before. He had captured them on the cusp of life; I had reached them at the close. Might we have talked to the same people? Were we, a lifetime apart, plowing the same karmic field? How is it that I would come to see him as a spiritual father, a man with the same stoic and upright bearing, the perseverance overlain with the dejection of denied opportunity that I saw in my own father? How was it that I would see so much of myself in him and take up a calling to continue his mission?

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It was in the fall of 1933, as dust winds choked the central plains and the country sank deeper into the Great Depression, that two Ivy League–trained couples—one black, one white—undertook a perilous, essentially undercover mission to study the social order of the American South. They were entering hostile and alien territory where they would have to adhere to the restrictions and protocols of the feudal world they would be researching and where they could not let on to anyone the true nature of their intentions.

Allison Davis was an impeccably tailored academic with the sculpted, square-jawed face of a movie star. His wife, Elizabeth Stubbs Davis, was a doctor’s daughter who had graduated from Mount Holyoke. The two of them were fresh from their additional studies at Harvard and Radcliffe. He was a young anthropologist with two master’s degrees and had a wealth of experience abroad but, once in Mississippi, could not in any way act like it. They had to conceal their inner selves to survive.

The couple had chosen to make the personal sacrifice and to risk their lives for the greater good of documenting the structure of human division, a mission that would practically render them double agents. Urbane and bespectacled though he was, Allison Davis decided it best to keep a gun in the glove compartment to protect himself and his wife if it came to it.

They would settle in Natchez, Mississippi, with the other half of their team, the Harvard-trained anthropologists Burleigh and Mary Gardner, and embark on an operation that was quietly revolutionary. Together they would embed themselves in a closed and isolated southern town from both sides of the caste divide. Coming directly from the North, neither couple could fully know what they were getting themselves into. This was in the depths of the Jim Crow caste system, and they would find their every move dictated by the very phenomenon that they were studying.

This would be among the first studies of its kind and a groundbreaking experiment in interracial scholarship. Together, they would produce a landmark study that would come to be called Deep South. To complete it safely, they would have to plan every detail of every interaction with the local people and come up with plausible reasons for the four of them to be together in this remote landscape. Given the dangers, they would not be able to tell the local people the full intention of their project—that they were seeking to infiltrate the white and black worlds to accurately render how caste, class, and race operated in the region.

The project was the brainchild of the pioneering social anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner, who had led a study of social stratification in a northern town, Newburyport, Massachusetts, a few years before, and who had been so impressed with Allison Davis’s mastery and intellect that Warner went against convention and named Davis the lead researcher of the Natchez study. The team would end up defying caste even as they studied it by having this brilliant man from the subordinate caste leading the way.

Warner anticipated the dangers the team would face and went to Natchez ahead of the two couples to scout out the area and meet with the mayor and other leading figures before leaving the team on their own. The couples managed to embed themselves in their respective and separate castes, but that restricted them in other ways. The team needed to study the layers within each caste—the elite and the lowly. But the social hierarchy drew such stark lines that even within one caste, fraternizing with those not seen as on one’s level invited scrutiny and potential ostracism.

So Allison Davis recruited a fifth researcher, St. Clair Drake, a former student of his from Hampton Institute, who, decades later, would become a renowned scholar himself. Drake, being a young black man, was not keen on moving to the deep South, where, only a few years before, nine young black men, known as the Scottsboro Boys, had been imprisoned in neighboring Alabama, accused of attacking two white women, who later recanted their stories. Davis convinced him of the transcendent purpose of the mission. You can’t really smash the system, Davis told him, if you don’t understand how it works.

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Allison Davis got an early exposure to the injustice of that system from the time he was a young boy growing up in pre–World War I Washington. He was born on October 14, 1902, and before he had reached adolescence, his father, a government supervisor overseeing a staff of mostly white men, was summarily demoted to the servile role of laborer when President Woodrow Wilson segregated the federal government, a move that reduced black workers to the lowly positions seen as preordained for them.

The family’s fortunes sank in an instant, a humbling fall from grace that gave Allison a lifelong wariness of elitism. His father never recovered from the humiliation and, in a way, neither did Allison. He was eleven when he had to take odd jobs to help support the family, bearing the weight of their caste and of his father’s bitterness. Despite the setback, or perhaps fueled by it, he excelled in school, becoming valedictorian of all-black Dunbar High School, considered foremost in the country, and then gained admittance to Williams College in Massachusetts. There, he encountered a northern strain of exclusion—prohibited from the dormitories on campus, forced to live in a black boardinghouse, barred from college tennis despite his trophies from the Negro leagues, shunned by classmates who refused to sit next to him, having to serve them in the cafeteria to earn meals for himself—as he worked his way to valedictorian yet again.

He graduated from Williams at the head of his class in 1924 and got a master’s degree in English from Harvard the following year. But despite his impeccable record, Williams denied him a teaching position, as the college did not hire blacks to its faculty. The rejection, combined with his outcast status during his time on campus, left him embittered for decades.

His dream was to become a writer, and he took a position at historically black Hampton Institute in southern Virginia, teaching English while writing fiction that he hoped to publish. But his exposure to poor, rural black students at Hampton inspired him to change direction, to use his talents to uncover the origins of the societal inequities that had beclouded his life since childhood.

He returned to Harvard, now newly married, for a second degree in the emerging discipline of anthropology, completing his master’s in 1932. It was there that he met and studied under Lloyd Warner and signed on to the Mississippi project.

Once on the ground in Natchez, the researchers had to plot their every move with consideration of caste protocol. Out in public, the Davises had to show deference to the Gardners and never give the appearance that they were, in fact, friends and colleagues in the trenches. Allison and Burleigh had difficulty finding a place to safely meet to go over their work and resorted to carefully orchestrated clandestine meetings in which Burleigh would pick up Allison, and they would drive out to some sheltered country road where we could sit and talk unobserved, Burleigh recalled in the afterword to the 1986 reissue of Deep South. They later learned that the sheriff was aware of their meetings all along. They were being surveilled the entire time.

Allison was the leader of the team, but they could not let the locals know that. They had to keep to their caste performance and act as if Burleigh was the one in charge. There were times when Burleigh had to request the bathroom key if Allison was to be allowed to use the facilities. It was a revolutionary concept, this idea of an educated black man working with a white man in this way, a spectacle the likes of which the townspeople would never have seen before. The whole Negro-white research, Warner once said, was delicate and filled with dynamite.

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*

In 1941, as the United States prepared to enter the Second World War, the Davis and Gardner team emerged with the most comprehensive field study to date of the American caste system. It is a brilliant, sober, compassionate, and rigorous work, not only of social science but of history, a singular document of the Jim Crow South, a testimony of a long ago era, and thus can never be duplicated. With each passing year, it becomes an even more valuable gift to those who seek to understand the foundation of our current divisions.

The original volume was 538 pages and titled Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class. It described the structure of the southern hierarchy and the layers of social classes within the two manufactured poles of caste in America—white and black people. Davis and the Gardners determined that caste was the fundamental division in the Jim Crow town they studied, built on economic interdependence, in which the caste system and the economic system reinforce each other. The team described the terror campaign against the subordinate caste, the daily menace to the sharecroppers who were subject to ambush by the planters’ whipping parties, and the risks to the Davises themselves as they documented the assaults on other African Americans.

It had taken them eight years to publish their findings, and even then, the researchers were bedeviled with setbacks and the disadvantages of both caste and timing in getting it out to the world. They had begun the work in the midst of the Great Depression and thus faced the ongoing challenge of financing a project that seemed tenuous from the start.

Two years in, with the depression worsening and the project taking longer than expected, the Davises took on teaching duties at Dillard University, an underfunded, historically black institution in New Orleans. There, Allison Davis was weighed down with a teaching load of five courses each semester while trying to complete the larger caste study. The couple made the heartbreaking decision to delay starting a family until they had safely made their way out. They would tell their sons years later that, based on what they saw and knew from their fieldwork, they did not want to bring children into the world while they were in the Jim Crow South. Worn down by the isolation and indignities, having to perform in character over the course of several years, Allison Davis fell into a depression over their circumstances.

At the same time, they were facing competition. The Mississippi Delta had become crowded with young social scientists investigating this feudal country-within-a-country, as the depression had raised interest in rural and southern poverty. And while the interracial Davis and Gardner team had spent far longer—years, in fact—immersed in the phenomenon they were studying, two Yale anthropologists, both white and working in the same area in two separate studies, spent several months in Mississippi and, with their shorter timelines and narrower parameters, were able to beat the Davises’ and the Gardners’ more comprehensive study to publication.

John Dollard of Yale spent five months in Indianola. Hortense Powdermaker, also of Yale, spent nine months there in the 1932–33 school year and another three months in 1934. Dollard’s 1937 book, Caste and Class in a Southern Town, was the first of the three major works to be published. It received wide acclaim and defined the emerging field. Dollard was hailed as a pioneer while the Davises and the Gardners were still analyzing their volumes of data. Powdermaker’s After Freedom: A Cultural Study in the Deep South was published next, in 1939. Both Dollard’s and Powdermaker’s books were met with spirited reviews and came to dominate the field of southern caste scholarship.

Deep South has long been overshadowed by the two earlier works and faced the marginalization of the subordinate, to the detriment of our collective understanding of our country’s divisions. The white researchers, who managed to be published before Deep South and had the chance to seize on the novelty of the idea, were more readily embraced by the mainstream and accorded the authority granted to those in the dominant caste. It had to be dispiriting to Allison Davis to see review after review of these excellent, though less expansive, works and the dismissal of his own. Even decades later, the journal American Anthropologist, in 2004, described the two earlier books as canonical and landmark studies, consigning the Davis and Gardner book to the footnotes.

The Deep South researchers, despite their immersion in and mastery of the subject, fell under greater scrutiny and faced more obstacles just to complete their book. Publication was delayed in part because a leading black sociologist, Charles Johnson, trained in a different discipline, raised lengthy questions about the manuscript, which required Davis and Gardner to embark upon a significant revision. As one of the few African Americans given the chance to conduct this kind of research, Davis walked a narrower path, had put his life on the line in a way others had not, and was in line for more criticism than dominant-caste researchers might receive.

The credit ultimately accorded to the five researchers was a study in caste itself. Three of the five researchers were black, but Elizabeth Davis and St. Clair Drake, despite their contribution and risk, were excluded as authors, perhaps due to hesitance over the perception of a black-dominated study. As it was, Allison Davis, throughout his career beyond the Natchez study, had to bend to societal pressure and publish with white coauthors to lend credibility to his work in a system where blacks were generally seen as subordinate. The practice of white coauthorship sublimated his role, denied him the credit he was due, and, combined with the prominence accruing to some other disciplines, diminished his public profile and legacy.

Then, for a range of complex reasons, some leading African American social scientists of the early to mid-twentieth century objected to applying the notion of caste to the plight of African Americans, even as they were living under one of the purest forms of it in American history. Restricted as they were, locked behind the walls of caste with no end in sight, they understandably did not want to give credence to the possibility that the system might indeed be closed for longer than any of them might hope. They were deep in a caste wilderness, before the civil rights legislation of the 1960s that would formally prohibit the caste restrictions they were then living under.

The concept of caste as applied to the United States grew only more contentious after World War II, when Americans were more inclined to see the country as a limitless place of upward mobility rather than a fixed hierarchy. A leading sociologist, Oliver Cromwell Cox, who had been born to privilege in Trinidad and had not conducted on-the-ground fieldwork as had Davis, assembled a disparaging critique of the caste school of thought in his influential 1948 book, Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics. He attacked the very idea that caste had any relevance to the United States. He saw the caste system in India as singular because it was considered stable and unquestioned. In India, caste barriers in the caste system are never challenged, Cox declared. From his perspective, up and down the Indian caste system, regardless of his position in the society, a man’s caste is sacred to him; and one caste does not dominate the other. This mystifying assertion disregarded both the injustices inflicted upon Dalits by castes that most certainly dominated them and overlooked the fiery resistance of Bhimrao Ambedkar and other Dalit leaders who were challenging the caste system at the very moment of Cox’s writing.

The New York Times, reviewing the Cox book (the newspaper did not review Deep South), found Cox’s feuding rhetoric a disqualifying distraction. The good is obscured by combat dust, wrote the Times’s reviewer, G. Louis Joughin. When Professor Cox brings belligerency and the animus of the academic feud into his book, he is fundamentally unscientific, and he leaves the reader in a more confused state than when he found him.

Davis rose in defense of the empirical work his team had risked their lives to complete, work that his critics had themselves not attempted. "Under its pretentious, pedantic front, it is the Alice in Wonderland of sociology, Davis wrote of Cox’s critique of the caste theory. Dr. Cox has made no recognized first hand studies of society, done no sustained empirical research on human communities, completed no scientific studies of group behavior as have Johnson, Frazier, Warner, Dollard, Drake, Walker, Hill, Rose and many other students of Negro society, each of whom has defined the nature of either social class or color caste in American communities. Perhaps the chief question Dr. Cox’s book raises is this: How can a sociologist, who has not made an intensive study of any human society, expect to understand the complexity of that system of Negro-white social relationships in this country?"

By the time Deep South was finally published, the Davises had returned north, to Chicago, where Allison Davis earned a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Chicago. He joined the faculty there after a campaign by the Rosenwald Foundation to find an exceptional scholar to integrate a white university, for which Davis fit the bill. He became the first black tenured professor at a major white American university, the Jackie Robinson of the academy. As he had his whole life, he would suffer additional anguish for it. He had found himself in a demoralizing cycle of working to prove his brilliance and worthiness only to suffer for having defied the boundaries of caste, which only led to his working ever harder, excelling most everywhere he went, triggering further resentment and insult. This would be no exception. At the University of Chicago, despite his degrees, his major publications, and his dignified bearing, faculty colleagues openly debated whether he should be allowed to teach white students, and he was prohibited from eating in the faculty dining room for years. It was a flashback to Williams all over again, and he developed a bleeding ulcer during this time in his life, his son Allison Stubbs Davis would later recall.

The family—Allison Sr., Elizabeth, Allison Jr., and younger son Gordon—lived in a red brick two-story in the Woodlawn neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, surrounded by dentists and postal workers and policy kings. Their home was three blocks from the house that Lorraine Hansberry’s family had sued to live in the decade before the Davises arrived and whose fight loosely inspired her canonical play, A Raisin in the Sun.

Every surface of Allison Davis’s office was piled high with books and papers for the next research project, but he would break away to take his young sons to see the White Sox, teach them how to throw a curve ball, drive a car, ride a bike, and not to be afraid of bullies and fools, Gordon remembered. He took them to hear Paul Robeson speak and to see Josephine Baker perform, and on warm Sunday afternoons, he would pile them into the family Oldsmobile for a drive along Lake Michigan.

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Neither Allison nor Elizabeth spoke much with their sons about their time in Mississippi, and their children grew up not realizing the perilous mission their parents had undertaken years before. At mid-career, Allison moved on to investigating disparities in education and the effect of intelligence testing, work that would be consulted in the landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education. But with his reserved nature and the fading interest in the caste theories of his earlier career, he remained behind the scenes and underrecognized.

One day, in the mid-1950s, his elder son Allison’s high school English teacher happened to remark to the son that he shared a name with a very famous person. Young Allison went home and told his father. His father seemed stumped by the comment. Who might that be? the senior Allison said. The two of them pulled out the Encyclopaedia Britannica to look it up and found nothing. When the younger Allison returned to school, the teacher said she was referring to a famous professor at the University of Chicago, meaning Allison Davis himself. Neither the father nor the son had been conditioned to see him in the light of fame.

Of the major scholars of the American South in the first half of the twentieth century, he and his wife were among the few field researchers of the Jim Crow era who labored under the cloud of caste subordination themselves. Their work would end up inspiring Stokely Carmichael and Martin Luther King Jr., among others who read Davis’s work as undergraduates and saw themselves in his analysis.

The Davises, the Gardners, and the Warners would remain lifelong friends, all settling in the Midwest, their children virtually growing up together. Their work fell out of favor in the 1950s and ’60s, and by the time of Warner’s death in 1970, his role in Deep South did not even merit a mention in the New York Times obituary of him.

A few years earlier, in 1966, Elizabeth Davis passed away, and Allison Sr. was grieving and bereft, his lifelong depression resurfacing, the humiliation and erasure despite his hard work and intellect, the losses and indignities mounting in his mind. He sat on the edge of the bed, his head in his hands. My whole life has been a misery, his son Allison remembers his father saying in a tragic self-assessment.

He would later remarry and set about working on a book about black leadership. He would be granted an honorary degree at his alma mater, Williams College, in 1975. He was pissed off the whole weekend, his son Gordon recalled, and was still carrying the wounds of his undergraduate exclusions. His attitude was, what took you so long?

Seven years later, Gordon himself was granted an honorary degree at Williams, and Allison Sr. went with him. There he saw black professors and a young black woman leading the processional. Allison Sr. asked who she was. Told that she was the class marshal, Allison Sr. said, This place really has changed.

He overcame sixty years of resentment and anger at Williams, Gordon said, and was able to embrace forgiveness and joy, seeing how profoundly it—and America—was changing in part because of his work, and he was able to write one last book after years of meager output that in a sense was a last testament and affirmation of his hopes and beliefs. In that last book, Leadership, Love and Aggression, published in 1983, he examined the ways that black leaders channel their anger as they fight injustice.

Obviously this system in the past, and still today, arouses that feeling of humiliation and anger, which is a natural response to being abused and subordinated, Allison Davis told Studs Terkel in a 1983 interview. But a leader has to avoid showing his anger, or even acting on it, because his job is to conciliate, to win for the Negro people every victory he can gain. In that interview, he made only the briefest passing reference to Mississippi, where I made a study, before returning to the theme of his later life. Hatred and anger and defiance, he said, are turned into love of mankind.

He died a month after that interview, on November 21, 1983, at age eighty-one. St. Clair Drake, the protégé who had grown apart from Davis over the years, came in from Stanford, and Burleigh Gardner spoke of his remembrances, during which the chapel fell silent, awaiting word from the man who had risked his life with the Davises back in Mississippi precisely fifty years before.

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Allison Davis had slipped into near obscurity by the time I began researching The Warmth of Other Suns in the mid-1990s, but I was destined to discover him. Toward the end of my research of Warmth, I began noticing Deep South in the footnotes of other books I was reading, and then set about trying to get my hands on a copy. That opened up a world of understanding, which helped lead to my second book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, which I’ve drawn upon in writing this foreword.

The more I read about Allison Davis, the greater my admiration and awe. After the years I spent immersed in the world of the survivors of Jim Crow, having researched the lynchings during the Davises’ time in Mississippi, I knew full well the perils they faced and the miracle of their having made it through safely. My own father, who had been a Tuskegee airman in Jim Crow Alabama and suffered the indignities that went with it, feared for me when I had to go to Mississippi myself in the late 1990s for Warmth. He would not rest until I was back in Chicago. How much worse must it have been for the Davises in the depth of Jim Crow?

I came to see Allison Davis as a spiritual father in the quest to understanding the role of caste in America. Eighty years after the Davises completed their fieldwork in Mississippi, I happened to be attending a gala at the New York Public Library. There, that night, I first mentioned to my editor and my agent my plans to write a second book. It would be about caste, the concept the Davises devoted years of their lives to studying.

Minutes later, I was mingling among the thousand or so guests packed together in tuxedoes and sequins and found myself standing near a man I had never met but who had been a fan of The Warmth of Other Suns. He came up to me and told a bit of his background and his name, Gordon Davis. I realized, from what I knew of the late anthropologist’s life, that the man I was talking to was all but certainly the son of my scholarly hero, Allison Davis. I asked if that, in fact, was true. A prominent attorney in New York, he was heartened that I knew of his father and held him in such deep admiration. Coming just minutes after committing to a major project related to his father’s life’s work, I took this to be a sign that I was meant to write the book that would become Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents and carry forth the mission he had begun nearly ninety years ago to train a light on past and current upheavals.

As I wrote chapter after chapter, Allison Davis and what he endured haunted me, hovered in my mind to such a degree that I felt compelled not only to cite him but to include his story. He had lived, studied, and defied the very phenomenon I was writing about, as I, too, was living it in my own era. This was a chance to remind the world of the brave pioneers who had stepped into an unspoken war and explored caste on every level in a project that was beautifully conceived and carried out at great danger, something few people would ever volunteer for. I felt honored to bring his story to a general audience after the injustices done to him and when he deserved so much more than what he got when he was alive. I owe a debt to the brilliance and quiet courage of Allison Davis, and, as Americans, we all do. And I am overjoyed at the potential offered by this reissue to resurrect him and his legacy for future generations.

Preface

This research was carried out under the direction of Professor W. Lloyd Warner, formerly of Harvard University and now of the University of Chicago; it was made possible by a grant from the Committee on Industrial Physiology of Harvard University.

The authors wish to express their deep appreciation to Professor Warner both for his teaching and for his organization of the research. Their indebtedness to him began with the conception of the study; it extends to all the benefits of his friendship and inspiration.

The field work was performed by the three authors, together with Mrs. Elizabeth Stubbs Davis and J. G. St. Clair Drake. To Mrs. Davis, our colleague during the whole period of the field work, we are indebted in countless ways, but especially for her skillful interviewing of the colored women in Old City and its plantation environment. The data concerning the Negro class system and miscegenation, as well as their interpretation, are in large part her contribution.

To J. G. St. Clair Drake we are indebted for much of the material on the clique structure of the Negro society, for the final cutting of the typescript by one-third, and for seeing the work through the press. The authors wish to express their sincere appreciation to him for his long-continued co-operation in this research.

Professor Earnest A. Hooton very kindly made available to us the services of the statistical laboratory of the Department of Anthropology of Harvard University for sortings of the agricultural data. To Dr. John Dollard, of the Institute of Human Relations of Yale University, we are grateful for stimulating discussions during the progress of the field work.

We also wish to thank the Julius Rosenwald Fund for having made possible the participation of Mr. Drake in this work. Without the help of this foundation and of Dillard University it would not have been possible to complete the study at this time.

We are also indebted to the Works Progress Administration for assistance in the preparation of the manuscript.

With regard to techniques, it is necessary to state here only the kinds of data which were gathered and the field methods employed. The operations themselves, by which the data were analyzed, will be illustrated or defined in the relevant sections of the book. As stated in an earlier report on the research:

A white fieldworker and his wife, and a Negro fieldworker and his wife lived in the society for a little over one and one-half years. All of the fieldworkers except the white woman had been born and reared in the South or in the border states, living there continuously except during their college or university training. In Old City they conformed to the behavioral modes of their respective castes; they participated chiefly with the upper and upper-middle classes. After about six months of residence, they appeared to be accepted as full-fledged members of their caste and class groups, and dropped their initial roles of researchers. Their observations of group behavior were therefore made in the actual societal context, in situations where they participated as members of the community, within the limits of their caste and class roles. The interviews also were obtained in this normal context, and except where matters of fact, such as factory or plantation management were concerned, few questions were asked. Every effort was made to adapt the principles of free associative interviewing to intimate social situations, so that the talk of the individual or group would not be guided by the fieldworker, but would follow the normal course of talk in that part of the society.

In this manner, both overt behavior and verbalization with regard to all the societal institutions were recorded for all color, class, age, and sex groups, down to the small, intimate cliques. The white and colored fieldworkers continually checked with each other all of their observations and interviews pertaining to Negro-white relations, so as to bring into the field of discussion their own initial caste dogmas, and to learn to see both sides of this behavioral relation. The methodological aim from the beginning was to see every Negro-white relationship from both sides of the society, so as to avoid a limited white view or a limited Negro view. The same type of objective approach was sought to the study of class behavior; all interviewers participated in both formal and informal affairs, with all classes in their caste.

In addition to records of overt behavior and verbalizations, which cover more than five thousand pages, statistical data on both the rural and urban societies, as well as newspaper records of social gatherings, were collected.¹

Part I

1

Introduction: Deep South—A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class

W. Lloyd Warner

This book describes the life of the Negroes and whites in a community of that area of the United States known as the deep South. In order to study the area, a Negro man and a Negro woman, and a white man and a white woman, lived with the natives of Old City and Old County in Deep South for two years. In this book they have presented the results of their research on the culture of the community and the social life of its people. These four social anthropologists, all of whom received their training in anthropology at Harvard, have attempted to