St. Clair Drake Lectures
Drake as Scholar
Remarks Delivered at the "St. Clair Drake: Scholar, Mentor, Friend" Panel
Black Community Services Center
Stanford Humanities Center
October 21, 2005
by Professor Lawrence D. Bobo
On behalf of the Program in African and African American Studies and the larger Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE) with which the program is affiliated let me also welcome you this afternoon and especially our alumni: it is a great pleasure to have you back home here at Stanford. The Program in African and African American Studies (AAAS) is very pleased to co-sponsor this event with the Black Community Services Center. I congratulate Jan Barker Alexander and the Black House on convening us here today.
It is fitting indeed that we take this opportunity to recognize St. Clair Drake, the founding leader of the AAAS program here at Stanford and a figure who played such an influential role in how African American Studies programs took shape around the country. As a number of the remarks here have underscored, Drake was a committed and engaged citizen, an eminent, prolific and influential social scientist, and a mentor and inspiration to many generations of students. Although Drake passed away some 15 years ago, his legacy as scholar and institution-builder only grows deeper and bears ever more fruit.
In the few minutes that I have here this afternoon I want to reflect a bit on Drake the scholar, especially as a figure who conducted absolutely foundational research on the African American experience, especially the urban black experience. There are a small handful of works that changed the social science landscape with regard to understanding the black experience. W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro in 1899, Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma in 1944, and of, course, St. Clair Drake’s and Horace Cayton’s Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City published initially in 1945. When the University of Chicago Press re-issued the book in 1993 with a special new forward by distinguished sociologist William Julius Wilson, noted author and journalist Nicholas Lehmann declared it “The best comprehensive description of black life in an American city ever written.” The book remains in print though over 800 pages long. And it still gets use, obviously, in African American Studies courses, anthropology courses, especially urban anthropology courses, in urban studies, and in sociology. Anyone who knows anything about academic publishing knows this sort of track record marks a signal success.
There are numerous ways to trace the profound intellectual influence of Drake’s work. Let me quickly take three slices on it by considering, first, the works role in the research of the most eminent sociologist of our time William Julius Wilson; second, how Drake’s work is still shaping the research of an upcoming generation of leading scholars; and third, albeit more briefly, how Drake’s work has influenced my own research.
William Julius Wilson’s most recent major book, When Work Disappears, published in 1996 focuses on many of the same “Bronzeville” communities at the heart of Drake and Cayton’s work in Black Metropolis. While Drake’s work spoke to demographic changes, economic conditions, community institutions, and the complex fabric of social life, Wilson focused on a specific type of contrast. In particular, he noted that while Drake and Cayton described communities that were economically disadvantaged and segregated, to be sure, these were at the time of their writing still economically viable spaces. That is, most people had work, even if it paid poorly and they confronted what Drake and Cayton called a “job ceiling” that typically restricted blacks to very marginal positions in the emerging Chicago economy. Wilson traces out how those poor, racially segregated but largely working communities became increasingly jobless and desperately poor spaces, marginalized and abandoned by policy makers and the larger society. Wilson of course is advancing his own highly original arguments and analyses, but at the same time he is very directly building upon and acknowledging an important debt to that pioneering work of Drake and Cayton. Indeed, it is because of the clarity and completeness of the portrait they painted that he is able to put the severe hardship and disadvantage of segments of the urban black population today in proper context. Thus, Drake’s legacy as urban social analyst and student of the black community in Chicago continues right down to the present day in the impact his work has had on the leading sociological student of poverty and social policy writing today.
But even more so than Wilson, younger scholars today are treating Drake’s work as direct inspiration and theoretical guide. I think this is true for young urban anthropologists and sociologists. Consider just two examples. In 2001 the University of Chicago Press published a major new ethnography on Harlem by John L. Jackson, his first book, and based on his Ph.D. research at Columbia University. Drake and Black Metropolis figure prominently in Jackson’s attempt to depict the new dynamics of race and class in modern day Harlem. In particular, he draws explicitly on Drake in his effort to capture both the rich extent of internal diversity in the black community and the ways that class resources, styles, aspirations and dynamics figure in social interaction. In this way, Jackson carries on Drake’s tradition of resisting the tendency to view the black community as some sort of monolithic, simplistic whole, and to bring finely nuanced detail to an even more profoundly heterogeneous class structure that exists in black America today. Nor is Jackson the only young urban anthropologist to draw on Drake’s model (see also Gregory 1998).
In 2003 the University of Chicago published another important ethnographic work, this time by a young sociologist, Omar McRoberts, entitled Streets of Glory: Church and Community in a Black Urban Neighborhood. Although focusing on a particular neighborhood in the black communities of Boston the book owes an important and explicitly acknowledged debt to Drake. McRoberts focuses on an area called “Four Corners,” and examines the make-up, functioning, congregations, and theology of a set of black churches located there. The book opens with a direct engagement with Drake’s sort of community ecological approach to church and religion, and McRoberts spells out how he wishes to extend and build upon the sort of model of studying urban black church life that Drake pioneered. Indeed, the book ends with a lengthy author’s methodological note, which is, in effect, an extended dialogue or conversation with Drake over how to understand the church in a changing black urban space. And, of course, McRoberts is not the only young sociologist to draw on Drake’s work. Fairly recent books by Venkatesh (2000) on public housing in Chicago and of Pattillo-McCoy (1999) on the challenges facing black middle class communities in Chicago are also influential books with clear debts to the work of St. Clair Drake.
My own research has often drawn upon Black Metropolis. Much of my research focuses on the racial attitudes, beliefs, and inter-group behaviors of black and white Americans. Drake wrote extensively and insightfully about the functioning of the “color- line.” Indeed, I think of much my own work is inspired by a line from Black Metropolis which reads “The color-line is not static; it bends, and buckles, and sometimes breaks.” And that complex dynamic of the modern color line lies at the core of my own research and intellectual agenda.
Many books are written, and many, many articles and essays are published. But few works and intellectual contributions rise to the status of truly durable and important contributions to ideas. St. Clair Drake, the scholar made such a deep and lasting contribution. In both the work of the most influential sociological works of our time by Wilson, and in that of a coming generation of leading scholars in Anthropology, Sociology, and African American Studies, the voice, the lenses, the ideas, and lessons of St. Clair Drake remain very much alive. He is not just cited, but read and used; not merely quoted, but is the key theoretical and empirical touchstone for important work and new directions in scholarship. Thus it is very fitting that we celebrate his scholarship and contributions here today.
But let us actually aim for even more as I’m sure Drake would. As Program Director of African and African American Studies I am committing to bringing you next year a major scholarly conference to mark the 60th anniversary of Black Metropolis which we will call “Building the New Black Metropolis.” It will be an occasion to bring together scholars and researchers following in Drake’s tradition; to assemble again alumni and students; and raise the serious questions and challenges confronting the African American community today.
Thank you all so much.
Selected Bibliography
Bobo, Lawrence D. 2001. “Racial Attitudes and Relations at the Close of the Twentieth Century.” Pp. 264-301 in America Becoming: Racial Trends and Their Consequences, Volume 1, edited by N. J. Smelser, W. J. Wilson, and F. Mitchell. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
Bobo, Lawrence D. 2004. “Inequalities that Endure?: Racial Ideology, American Politics, and the Peculiar Role of the Social Sciences.” Pp. 13-42 in The Changing Terrain of Race and Ethnicity, edited by M. Krysan and A. Lewis. New York: Russell .Sage Foundation.
Drake, St. Clair. 1940. Churches and Voluntary Associations in the Chicago Negro
Community. Chicago: Works Project Administration District 3.
Drake, St. Clair and Horace R. Cayton. 1993[1945]. Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in A Northern City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gregory, Stephen. 1998. Black Corona: Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Jackson, John L. 2001. Harlem World: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
McRoberts, Omar M. 2003. Streets of Glory: Church and Community in a Black Urban Neighborhood. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Pattillo-McCoy, Mary. 1999. Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril Among the Black Middle Class. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ventkatesh, Sudhir Alladi. 2000. American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto. Cambridge; Harvard University Press.
Wilson, William Julius. 1996. When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. New York: Knopf.
About the Author
Lawrence D. Bobo was the Director for the Program in African and African American Studies from 2005-2007. He is the current W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University. His research concerns race, ethnicity, politics, and social inequality. His research has appeared in top journals across the social science disciplines including the American Political Science Review, the American Sociological Review, Social Forces, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and Public Opinion Quarterly. He is a founding editor for the Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race published by Cambridge University Press. He is co-author of the Racial Attitudes in America: Trends and Interpretations (1997, Harvard University Press), senior editor for Prismatic Metropolis: Inequality in Los Angeles (2000, Russell Sage Foundation), and co-editor of Racialized Politics: The Debate On Racism in America (2000, University of Chicago Press). Other publications include Prejudice in Politics: Public Opinion, Group Position, and the Wisconsin Treaty Rights Dispute (March 2006, Harvard University Press).
