By Margot D. Weiss

John Gibbs St. Clair Drake was a pioneering black social anthropologist and activist, one of only nine black anthropologists before WWII. He dedicated his scholarship – ethnographic studies of race, class, and social structure – to the eradication of social inequalities and racial injustice.

Born in Suffolk, Virginia in 1911, Drake attended the black Hampton Institute, and then Pendle Hill, a Quaker graduate school outside Philadelphia. In 1935, Allison Davis, a teacher from Hampton, asked Drake to assist with anthropological research in Natchez, Mississippi on a project called Deep South. Drake began two years of fieldwork with the town’s lower class sharecroppers and factory workers. With the urging of Davis and W. Lloyd Warner, he applied for a Rosenwald Fellowship to attend the University of Chicago and began formal training in anthropology. His PhD was awarded in 1954.

Drake was an activist anthropologist. He was initially drawn to Anthropology because he believed it could “aid in dissipating stereotypes about black people and in eliminating errors based on confusion between biological and environmental factors in accounting for observed racial differences,” ^[1] as he explained in a 1988 interview with George Clement Bond. While at the U of C, he began pioneering fieldwork in Chicago on migration, race, class, and community. The work was published with sociologist Horace Cayton as Black Metropolis (1945) – a groundbreaking, landmark work in the anthropology of race and urban anthropology.

After dissertation fieldwork in Tiger Bay, Cardiff, Drake’s political and intellectual interests shifted to Pan-Africanism, and the potential of newly independent African nations. He moved to West Africa, where he taught at the University of Liberia and the University of Ghana, and did ethnographic research in Ghana until 1966. During this time (1946-1968), Drake also developed and administered one of the first African Studies programs, at Roosevelt College in Chicago. In 1969, he took a position at Stanford University as the head of Black Studies. Drake remained at Stanford until his retirement in 1976. He died in 1990.

For Drake, generalized social theory was useful for analysis, but his primary concern was with the applied, activist relev