1911-1990
John Gibbs St. Clair Drake was a University of Chicago—trained social anthropologist. He was born on January 2, 1911, in Suffolk, Virginia, to an African American schoolteacher mother and a Barbadian-born father who was a Baptist preacher and an international organizer for Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association.
After spending much of his youth in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Staunton, Virginia, Drake attended Hampton Institute (now Hampton University), graduating with a BS in biology in 1931. After graduation he spent a year in an experimental, nondegree program at Pendle Hill Quaker Graduate Center in Wallingford, Pennyslvania. The next three years he taught biology and English at Christiansburg Normal and Industrial Institute, a Quaker boarding school for blacks in western Virginia. In 1935 his former mentor at Hampton, Allison Davis, invited him to join his interracial team of anthropologists investigating racial caste and social class in Natchez, Mississippi. That project resulted in Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class (Davis, Gardner, and Gardner 1941).
In 1937 Drake began graduate studies at the University of Chicago, where he worked with Lloyd Warner, Robert Redfield, and Fred Eggan. Drake’s participation in a Works Projects Administration project in Chicago led to his collaboration with Horace Cayton, a sociology graduate student. Together they wrote the classic Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1945). The Chicago research project was also the basis for "Churches and Voluntary Associations Among Negroes in Chicago" (1940), a memorandum prepared for Gunnar Myrdal, commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation to produce An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944).
In 1947 he conducted his dissertation research in Cardiff, Wales, where he studied a community made up of African seamen and their Welsh families. Drake examined the forms of social action that arose in response to British racial and colonial domination (Drake 1954). While in Britain he befriended Kwame Nkrumah (1909-1972) and other leaders of the African independence movement.
In 1946 Drake began a twenty-three-year tenure at Roosevelt University. Between 1954 and 1965 he pursued applied research interests during summers and two leaves. In 1954 and 1955 he collaborated with his wife, the sociologist Elizabeth Johns Drake (1915-1996), in a Ford Foundation-funded study of mass media in Ghana. From 1958 to 1961 he served as head of the Department of Sociology at the University of Ghana. He also directed research on the tensions between the postcolonial elite and traditional authorities, and on Tema, a modern port city built to stimulate Ghana’s economic development. The new city was populated by resettling villagers from traditional lands, and Drake’s analysis of that contested process was both critical and understanding of the government’s policy. During his Africa years, he advised Nkrumah and helped train Peace Corps volunteers, sensitizing them to the cultural and political factors likely to affect their work.
After Ghana’s 1966 military coup, Drake’s scholarly focus shifted to problems in the African diaspora: urban unrest and race relations in the United States; cultural retention, reinterpretation, and syncretism in the Caribbean; patterns of coping and resistance in the African diaspora; and the intellectual history of blacks in anthropology and in black studies. In 1969 he moved to Stanford University to direct its African and Afro-American Studies Program. After retiring in 1976, he produced the two-volume Black Folk Here and There: An Essay in History and Anthropologyy (1987, 1990), in the tradition of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Folk Then and Now (1939). In this his last major work, Drake examined the cultural and intellectual history of antiblack prejudice in the precolonial Old World diaspora and the colonial diaspora that formed within the plantation societies of the New World. He presented a symbolic and textual analysis along with an intellectual history and sociology of the knowledge on the status of sub-Saharan Africans in ancient Egypt and the wider Nile River Valley, the Islamic and Judaic Middle East, Mediterranean Europe, and northern European Christendom. He explained the major shifts during the sixteenth century that led to the emergence of racial slavery. In this topic, along with a series of seminal essays, he presented a paradigm for studying the African diaspora.
Influenced by black vindicationism, pan-Africanism, the Quakers, and Depression-era socialists and communists, Drake was an activist intellectual. He organized sharecroppers and tenant farmers in Mississippi and unemployed workers in Chicago. He campaigned against the University of Chicago’s urban renewal policy in the 1950s, and advised members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s. He was also a founder of the American Society for African Culture and the American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa. He died on June 14, 1990.
