Isabel Wilkerson

Isabel Wilkerson Instagram – On this day in 1902, one of the most courageous scholars of the 20th Century was born. It was in autumn 1933 that Allison Davis and his wife Elizabeth made their way to Jim Crow Mississippi, embarking on a perilous study of the hierarchy of the South. They would have to learn to sublimate their upright bearing and submit to the social order, knowing that any slip up could cost them their lives.
Davis was a black anthropologist who had degrees from Harvard and had lived abroad, but once in Natchez, he could not in any way act like it. The couple could not reveal the true nature of a mission that would render them undercover agents. Urbane and bespectacled though he was, Davis kept a gun in the car to protect himself and his wife if it came to it.
They joined the other half of their team, a white couple, Burleigh and Mary Gardner. Led by Davis, the mission was a revolutionary experiment in interracial scholarship. Together, they infiltrated a closed and isolated southern town from opposite sides of the caste divide.
Under constant surveillance, they had to meet in secret and keep to their caste roles at all times, with the Davises required to show deference to their white peers and never give the appearance that they were, in fact, colleagues in the trenches together.
The Davises rented a room from a black doctor and connected with the town’s black leaders. To reach the working classes, Davis recruited another black researcher, St. Clair Drake, to embed with sharecroppers and domestics. Davis had to convince Drake to join them in the Jim Crow South. “You can’t really smash the system if you don’t understand how it works,” Davis said.
They endured many setbacks before publishing their findings in 1941, but their landmark book, Deep South, nearly fell into obscurity. I remember the joy of securing a used copy years ago. I came to see Allison Davis as a spiritual father in the quest to understand caste in America and felt compelled to bring his story to a larger audience in Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. This blessedly sparked the long-overdue re-issue of Deep South. It was my honor to be asked to write the Foreword. | Posted on 14/Oct/2024 22:47:19