Born: October 14, 1902, Washington, DC

Education: Williams College, B.A. valedictorian, 1924; Harvard University, M.A. (Comparative Literature), 1925, M.A. (Anthropology), 1932; University of Chicago, Ph.D., 1942

Died: November 21, 1983, Chicago, IL

The first black person to be appointed a professor at the University of Chicago (1946) and to earn tenure in a research university, Davis was a distinguished scholar-educator.

His career mirrored liberalism and racism in higher education. Owing to the “Chicago School” of sociology, a partner of the American Council on Relations, the university enjoyed a liberal reputation. Yet the Rosenwald Fund leveraged Davis's faculty appointment by underwriting his salary. Still, he could not buy a house in university-owned Hyde Park. The color-caste system, which he analyzed in several seminal books, stalked him.

Davis's Intelligence and Cultural Differences (1951) was pathbreaking. It discredited using intelligence tests to assess the learning ability and personality development of lower-class black and other minority children. “This study had the most practical effect of any of my work,” he recalled years later. “It led to the abolition of the use of intelligence tests in New York, Chicago, Detroit, San Francisco, and other cities” (http://davis-center.williams.edu/daviscenter//allison-davis/). In 1953 he introduced the Davis-Ellis elementary school test to weigh children's abilities with respect to their racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic differences. Davis also advised NAACP counsel on child-centered arguments in briefs for Brown v. Board of Education.