Abstract
In his later years, St. Clair Drake (1911–1990) the eminent scholar, activist, and member of the founding generation, first of US-based African Studies during the 1950s, later of Black Studies in US universities, found himself preoccupied with his past. Perhaps best known as coauthor (with Horace Cayton) of the classic study of African-Americans in Chicago, Black Metropolis (1945), Drake’s career as an anthropologist was synonymous with the liberation struggles of the Black world over the course of the twentieth century1 In his later reflections, Drake was intent on recovering the full international scope of his scholarly and activist pursuits, and indeed, the cosmopolitanism and diversity of the black experience. His associates included the Mississippi-born novelist Richard Wright, Trinidadian activist intellectuals George Padmore and C. L. R. James, and the future president of the West African nation of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah. A pragmatic leftist, Drake worked both within and outside the system to achieve change. During the early 1960s, Drake ran a teacher-training program for Peace Corps volunteers, to assist with the expansion of Ghana’s elementary education system. Back in the states after Nkrumah’s overthrow by a military coup in 1966, Drake advised activists in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), by then the most radical among US civil rights organizations through its embrace of Black Power, its support of third world revolutions, and its opposition to the war in Vietnam.
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Notes
St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1945).
St. Clair Drake, “Black Studies and Global Perspectives: An Essay,” Journal of Negro Education 53:3 (Summer 1984): 226–242.
St. Clair Drake, “Reflections on Anthropology and the Black Experience,” Anthropology and Education Quarterly 9:2 (Summer 1978), 86.
George Clement Bond, “A Social Portrait of John Gibbs St. Clair Drake: An American Anthropologist,” American Ethnologist, 15:4, (1988), 769.
Allison Davis, Burleigh B. Gardner, and Mary Gardner, Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941).
Henri Peretz, “The Making of Black Metropolis,” Annals of the Academy of Political and Social Science 595 (September 2004): 168–175.
“Britain Faces the Race Problem,” Ebony (November 1951), pp. 90–96. For a fuller account of Drake’s public advocacy on behalf of Ghanaian and Pan-African affairs, see Kevin Gaines, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), pp. 44–50.
St. Clair Drake, “Reflections on Anthropology and the Black Experience”; St. Clair Drake and Willie L. Baber, “Further Reflections on Anthropology and the Black Experience,” Transforming Anthropology 1:2 (July 1990): 1–14.
Willie L. Baber, “A Tribute to St. Clair Drake Activist and Scholar,” Transforming Anthropology 1:2 (1990): 19–20.
St. Clair Drake, “Value Systems, Social Structure and Race Relations in the British Isles,” Doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago (1954). I am indebted to Andrew Rosa for sharing a copy of Drake’s dissertation.
Sonya O. Rose, Which Peoples’ War: National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain, 1939–1945 (New York: Oxford, 2003), pp. 258–263.
Drake is quoted in David Brokensha, “St. Clair Drake: The African Years (1954– 1966),” December 1985, p. 1, unpublished paper, Drake Papers, Schomburg Center, 24. Brokensha, Ibid., p. 2.
St. Clair Drake, “Pan-Africanism: What Is It?” Africa Today 6:1 (January–February 1959): 6–10.
On Padmore’s redefinition of Pan-Africanism, see Gaines, American Africans in Ghana, p. 78, and George Padmore, Pan-Africanism or Communism? (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1972), p. 356.
Ludo de Witte, The Assassination of Lumumba (London: Verso, 2001).
St. Clair Drake, “Hide My Face: On Pan-Africanism and Negritude,” in Soon One Morning: New Writing By American Negroes, 1940–1962, ed. Herbert Hill (New York: Alfred A Knopf. 1963), pp. 78–105.
St. Clair Drake, The Redemption of Africa and Black Religion (Chicago: Third World Press, 1970). On IOBW, see Institute of the Black World, ed. Education and Black Struggle: Notes From the Colonized World, Harvard Educational Review, Monograph No. 2 (1974). On the argument of African-American’s appropriation of Western technologies and ideologies of social transformation, see Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990);
Michael Hanchard, “Afro-Modernity: Temporality, Politics, and the African Diaspora,” Public Culture 11:1 (Winter 1999): 245–268.
Derrick A. Bell, Jr., “Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma,” Harvard. Law Review 93 (1980): 518–533.
Bob Fitch and Mary Oppenheimer, Ghana: End of an Illusion (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966);
Henry Bretton, The Rise and Fall of Kwame Nkrumah: A Study of Personal Rule (New York: Praeger, 1967);
Peter Omari, Kwame Nkrumah: The Anatomy of an African Dictator (New York: African Publishing Company, 1970);
C. L. R. James, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (London: Allison and Busby, 1977).
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© 2015 Robin D. G. Kelley and Stephen Tuck
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Gaines, K. (2015). Scholar-Activist St. Clair Drake and the Transatlantic World of Black Radicalism. In: The Other Special Relationship. Contemporary Black History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137392701_4
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