St. Clair Drake

John Gibbs St. Clair Drake was born in Suffolk, Virginia, on the second of January 1911, the son of a Barbadian-immigrant Baptist minister. He took his undergraduate degree at the Hampton Institute (1931), his master's at the University of Chicago (1942), and his doctorate in anthropology at Chicago in 1954.

His 1945 book Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City — co-authored with Horace Cayton during their joint ethnographic fieldwork on Chicago's South Side in the 1930s under the Works Progress Administration — is the foundational urban ethnography of Black America. The book was the first comprehensive sociological study of a Black community in any American city. It received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 1945 and has remained continuously in print for nearly eighty years.

He taught at Roosevelt University in Chicago from 1946 to 1968 and chaired its African Studies Program from 1955. He served as the founding director of the African Studies Program at Stanford University from 1969 to 1976 — building one of the first African Studies programs at a historically white American university.

His political work paralleled his scholarship. He worked with the British anti-colonial movement in London in the late 1940s, advised Kwame Nkrumah on the founding of the University of Ghana at Legon (1958-1961), and consulted on multiple African independence-era state-building projects.

He died in Palo Alto, California, on the fourteenth of June 1990, age seventy-nine.

He is honored here as the anthropologist whose Black Metropolis is the foundational urban ethnography of Black America.