- unitid
-
{"value"=>"20826", "type"=>"local_mss"}
{"value"=>"Sc MG 309", "type"=>"local_call"}
{"value"=>"b13786504", "type"=>"local_b"}
- unitdate
-
{"value"=>"1935-1990", "type"=>"inclusive", "normal"=>"1935/1990"}
- unittitle
-
{"value"=>"St. Clair Drake papers"}
- physdesc
-
{"format"=>"structured", "physdesc_components"=>[{"name"=>"extent", "value"=>"108 boxes", "unit"=>"containers"}, {"name"=>"extent", "value"=>"44.79 linear feet", "unit"=>"linear_feet"}]}
- repository
-
{"value"=>"<span class=\"corpname\">Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division</span>"}
- abstract
-
{"value"=>"The distinguished social scientist and activist St. Clair Drake only claimed the distinction of being one of the first eleven or twelve persons of color to secure graduate training in anthropology between 1900 and 1945. Divided into 18 series and spanning the years 1935 to 1990, the collection documents Drake's career as an educator and social anthropologist in the United States, Liberia, Great Britain and Ghana, and consists for the most part of correspondence, writings, office files and research materials."}
- langmaterial
-
{"value"=>"English"}
- origination
-
{"value"=>"Drake, St. Clair", "type"=>"persname"}
- bioghist
-
{"value"=>"<p>The distinguished social scientist and activist St. Clair Drake only claimed the distinction of being one of the first eleven or twelve persons of color to secure graduate training in anthropology between 1900 and 1945. His major contributions, he wrote in 1990, were \"in teaching, sociological research, and working with activist groups, including the Peace Corps\".</p> <p>Born in 1911 in Suffolk, Virginia, Drake graduated from Hampton Institute in 1931, and spent the next four years teaching English, history and civics in a segregated high school in rural Northern Virginia. In 1931-32, he attended a small Quaker graduate center, the Pendle Hill School, in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, and traveled throughout the South with a \"Peace Caravan\" campaigning for disarmament and world cooperation. Between 1935 and 1937, he worked as an instructor at Dillard University in New Orleans, and conducted field work in Natchez, Mississippi, for Allison Davis's book, Deep South.</p> <p>Traveling to Chicago in 1937 on a Rosenwald Fellowship for advanced studies in sociology and social anthropology at the University of Chicago, Drake served as assistant director of the Illinois State Commission on the Condition of the Urban Colored Population, and as director of a research project on churches and voluntary associations in Chicago's black community. He returned to Dillard as an assistant professor in 1940, but was dismissed the following year by the school's president for supporting a student strike. He married the sociologist Elizabeth Dewey Johns in 1942 and was the father of two children, Sandra and Karl.</p> <p>Drake was a conscientious objector to Jim Crow segregation in the military, and served during the second world war as statistician and X-ray technician in the U. S. Maritime Service, a civilian body. After the war, he joined the faculty of Roosevelt College in Chicago as an assistant professor in sociology and anthropology and helped organize an African studies program there. He conducted research on black communities in England's sea ports in 1947-48 for his Ph. D. degree, and while in England became acquainted with George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, T. Ras Makonnen and other leaders of the Pan-African movement. His dissertation, \"Value Systems, Social Structure and Race Relations in the British Isles\" was accepted in 1954. In 1969, after twenty-two years at Roosevelt, he accepted the chair of the Afro-American Studies Program at Stanford University, where he remained on the faculty until his retirement in 1976.</p> <p>As an educator and social anthropologist, Drake worked and conducted research in West Africa intermittently between 1954 and 1965. He was a visiting professor at the University of Liberia in 1954, and a Ford Foundation Fellow in Nigeria and Ghana in 1955. He served as the head of the Sociology Department at the University College of Ghana between 1958 and 1961, and was an adviser to the Nkrumah government on the development of Tema, a small fishing village, into a new town with a deep harbor and associated industries. He also assisted in the implementation of Peace Corps programs in Ghana and Sierra Leone. Among his research projects for that period are: \"Nudity as a Social Problem in Ghana\", a study of drought and rain-making among the Ghanean people, and a joint project with his wife on mass media and communications in tropical Africa. After the overthrow of the Nkrumah government in 1965, which began an era of military regimes in Africa, Drake refocused his energies on the Caribbean and the civil rights movement in the United States.</p> <p>St. Clair Drake was a prolific lecturer and author. Among his many publications are: Churches and Voluntary Associations Among Negroes in Chicago, prepared for the Works Projects Administration (1940) and later reworked as a research memorandum for the Carnegie Myrdal study, \"The Negro in America\"; Black Metropolis, in collaboration with Horace Cayton (1945); The American Dream and the Negro: A Hundred Years of Freedom? (1963); Social Work in West Africa in collaboration with Peter Omari (1963); Black Religion and the Redemption of Africa (1971), and Black Folk Here and There (1987, 1990). His many articles and essays appeared in books and in scholarly and non-scholarly journals in the United States and in Africa. At the time of his death in 1990, he had been working for several years on a voluminous manuscript entitled \"Africa and the Black Diaspora\", several chapters of which exist in final form.</p>"}
- scopecontent
-
{"value"=>"<p>Divided into 18 series and spanning the years 1935 to 1990, the collection documents Drake's career as an educator and social anthropologist in the United States, Liberia, Great Britain and Ghana, and consists for the most part of correspondence, writings, office files and research materials. Drake's Research Notes and his office files from Roosevelt and Stanford Universities have been grouped together but are otherwise unprocessed. Twenty-six additional record cartons of miscellaneous material and printed matter remain unprocessed and unavailable for research. A small group of student records and tenure files have also been restricted.</p>"}
{"value"=>"<p class='list-head'>The St. Clair Drake papers are arranged in twenty series:</p>\n<ul class='arrangement series-descriptions'>\n<li><div class='series-title'><a href='/scm/20826#c1115011'>Personal Papers</a></div>\n<div class='series-extent'>1.2 linear feet</div>\n</li><li><div class='series-title'><a href='/scm/20826#c1115050'>Correspondence</a></div>\n<div class='series-date'>1935-1990</div>\n<div class='series-extent'>7 linear feet</div>\n<div class='series-description'><p>The letters are related to Drake's tenure in the academy, his scholarly research and writings and on a few occasions his political views.</p> <p>In general the topics addressed in the correspondence share the same themes as Drake's writings. Note-worthy items in this series are: outgoing letters; the pre-conference package for the Sixth Annual Pan-African Conference; letters between Drake and Frank Untermeyer, his friend and colleague at Roosevelt University during his tenure there and after; correspondence with Lawrence Reddick, Claude Barnett, Julian Mayfield, Adelaide Cromwell, Horace Mann Bond, Horace Cayton and Robert Roberts; operational correspondence of the universities, organizations and groups that Drake worked with; and correspondence from Africa.</p></div></li><li><div class='series-title'><a href='/scm/20826#c1115274'>Writings</a></div>\n<div class='series-extent'>19.7 linear feet</div>\n</li><li><div class='series-title'><a href='/scm/20826#c1115613'>Foundations and Organizations</a></div>\n<div class='series-date'>1948-1980</div>\n<div class='series-extent'>1.4 linear feet</div>\n</li><li><div class='series-title'><a href='/scm/20826#c1115652'>Subject File</a></div>\n<div class='series-extent'>.8 linear feet</div>\n<div class='series-description'><p>Included are files on black banker Jesse Binga indicted for embezzlement in 1931, Stokely Carmichael, black-Jewish relations, the 1968 race riots, geneticist William Shockley, and miscellaneous racist propaganda. A separate section for Black Studies includes correspondence with directors and faculty of Black Studies programs across the United States.</p></div></li><li><div class='series-title'><a href='/scm/20826#c1115662'>Consultancy and Research Projects</a></div>\n<div class='series-date'>1948-1990</div>\n<div class='series-extent'>0.4 linear feet</div>\n<div class='series-description'><p>Mostly research proposals submitted by others, in partnership with Drake, including a proposal for a Drake Research Institute at Stanford University. There is also material for a 1976 multicultural project to evaluate high school textbooks and other educational materials in the public schools of Palo Alto, California, for which Drake served as a consultant.</p></div></li><li><div class='series-title'><a href='/scm/20826#c1115677'>Untermeyer Files</a></div>\n<div class='series-date'>1958-1987</div>\n<div class='series-extent'>0.4 linear feet</div>\n<div class='series-description'><p>Although from a different provenance, copies of Drake's correspondence with Frank Untermeyer, his colleague and friend at Roosevelt University, have been included here. Ranging from 1958 to 1965 during Drake's frequent trips to Africa, and from 1968 after his departure from Roosevelt University, the correspondence is often personal, discusses events at Roosevelt University and on the African continent, and includes letters to and from third parties on matters of common interest. Also included are biographical material, and several articles and essays written by and about Drake.</p></div></li><li><div class='series-title'><a href='/scm/20826#c1115689'>Dillard University</a></div>\n<div class='series-date'>1937</div>\n<div class='series-extent'>1 linear foot</div>\n<div class='series-description'><p>This series includes a prospectus and some guidelines from Allison Davis, but consists for the most part of interviews and records of participants-observers in a survey of churches and voluntary associations in New Orleans, gathered by students and research assistants at Dillard University under the direction of Davis and Drake. Also included are interviews and other materials on churches and voluntary associations in Natchez, Mississippi. These materials were part of the data used by Davis for his study of urban life in the Black Belt.</p></div></li><li><div class='series-title'><a href='/scm/20826#c1115694'>Chicago</a></div>\n<div class='series-date'>1937-1970</div>\n<div class='series-extent'>3.8 linear feet</div>\n<div class='series-description'><p>The Chicago series consists of interview material, participant-observer records and printed matter on race relations and community life in Chicago. These materials were collected for the most part for a study of race relations in Chicago in the 1940s and for the 1961 revision of Black Metropolis. Of particular interest are the files on social clubs and churches, segregation in housing, community organizing, and violence against blacks. Drake was a member of the Southwest Hyde Park Association throughout the 1950s and was active in the fight against the University of Chicago's urban renewal program which, critics said, was aimed at tearing down houses occupied by blacks. There is a wealth of data here for any study of black communities and race relations in Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s. This material is unprocessed.</p></div></li><li><div class='series-title'><a href='/scm/20826#c1115779'>Blacks in The British Isles</a></div>\n<div class='series-date'>1934-1960</div>\n<div class='series-extent'>2 linear feet</div>\n<div class='series-description'><p>Drake's initial 1945 proposal to the Rosenwald Fund, an interim report and summary of activities and a later proposal for additional research are to be found here. Also filed here is Drake's correspondence with T. Ras Makonnen, and a group of letters around a controversial article, \"Tiger Bay\", published in the London magazine Leader (1949). Included are letters from John Actie, a St. Lucia-born seaman and member of the League of Coloured Peoples. Diaries, field notes, interviews and early drafts of chapters for Drake's Ph. D. thesis form an important part of this group of material. Drake paid special attention to the mixed ethnic settlements of Tiger Bay (Bute Town) in Cardiff, Wales, to the so-called \"Brown Babies problem\", and to black associational activities in Cardiff, London, Manchester and Liverpool. A photocopy of his dissertation is also included. Other important components of this series are original documents culled from the files of the League of Coloured Peoples and the Pan-African Federation. Much of the League's files consists of correspondence with its first president, Harold Moody, including letters to and from Hugh Springer, Colina Kessie, A. Creech Jones, Arthur Lewis, Wallace Johnson and George Padmore. Moody, founder of the League in 1931, was a practicing physician and influential churchman, and was reputedly the most prominent figure in race relations activities in Britain in the 1930s. He was succeeded as president of the League by Learie Constantine, the famed Trinidadian cricket player. The League was still in existence in 1952. The files of the Pan-African Federation include a \"Proposed Constitution\", letters to and from Makonnen and miscellaneous documents. There is also a small body of printed matter and periodical articles about blacks in Britain.</p></div></li><li><div class='series-title'><a href='/scm/20826#c1115868'>Ghana</a></div>\n<div class='series-date'>1954-1965</div>\n<div class='series-extent'>5.4 linear feet</div>\n<div class='series-description'><p>Much of Drake's scholarship and involvement in Africa centered on Ghana under the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah. Drake first went to Ghana, then the Gold Coast, in 1954 on a Ford Foundation grant. He returned in 1958 to lecture in the Sociology Department at the University College of Ghana in Achimota, and was subsequently appointed acting head of that department.</p></div></li><li><div class='series-title'><a href='/scm/20826#c1115981'>Kenya</a></div>\n<div class='series-date'>1948-1963</div>\n<div class='series-extent'>0.8 linear feet</div>\n<div class='series-description'><p>Drake's Kenya files consist mostly of correspondence and other material related to Peter Mbiyu Koinange, a Kikuyu educator and fellow Hampton Institute alumnus who, in 1948, was denied reentry in the U. S. presumably because his presence would be \"prejudicial to the public interest\", and to R. Mugo Gatheru, author of Child of Two Worlds, a graduate of Lincoln and New York Universities who came to this country in 1950 with Drake's help. Also included are clipping files on Kenyan politics in the 1950s, and Drake's notes and miscellaneous material on Kenya's independence. Drake was a guest of the new government during the 1963 celebrations of Kenya's independence.</p></div></li><li><div class='series-title'><a href='/scm/20826#c1115989'>Liberia</a></div>\n<div class='series-date'>1954</div>\n<div class='series-extent'>0.4 linear feet</div>\n<div class='series-description'><p>Proposals and other documents related to the University of Liberia, where he was a visiting professor, including student papers and curriculum material for an introductory course in social anthropology. Also copies of letters from Drake to his family discussing his activities and events in Liberia, in addition to field notes and printed matter.</p></div></li><li><div class='series-title'><a href='/scm/20826#c1115997'>Nigeria and Other African Material, India, U. S. Peace Corps</a></div>\n<div class='series-extent'>1.8 linear feet</div>\n<div class='series-description'><p>Other Africa-related material in the collection include three radioscripts written by Drake in the 1970s for the Nigeria Broadcasting Corporation; research notes and miscellaneous writings on South Africa; correspondence and a report written by Drake on the Somali Crisis of 1948; and miscellaneous printed matter on Mali and the Congo in 1961. Drake's Peace Corps materials related to Sierra Leone are also located here.</p></div></li><li><div class='series-title'><a href='/scm/20826#c1116020'>Mass Communications in Tropical Africa</a></div>\n<div class='series-date'>1953-1960</div>\n<div class='series-extent'>1.4 linear feet</div>\n<div class='series-description'><p>A large volume of manuscripts and research notes by Elizabeth and St. Clair Drake, and data on mass communications in English-speaking West Africa, the French and Portuguese territories, Ethiopia, Madagascar and the Sudan form this series. Media surveyed include newspapers, radio stations and motion picture theaters. Also included are correspondence and administrative files from the University College of Ghana, 1958-59, where Drake had a survey staff to assist with the project. The study was initially sponsored by the Twentieth Century Fund. The files are broadly arranged into Correspondence, Writings, Interviews, University of Ghana Materials, Printed Matter, and one box of unsorted documents.</p></div></li><li><div class='series-title'><a href='/scm/20826#c1116046'>Research Notes</a></div>\n</li><li><div class='series-title'><a href='/scm/20826#c1523027'>Roosevelt University</a></div>\n</li><li><div class='series-title'><a href='/scm/20826#c1116048'>Stanford University</a></div>\n</li><li><div class='series-title'><a href='/scm/20826#c1116049'>Oversized</a></div>\n</li><li><div class='series-title'><a href='/scm/20826#c1116050'>Restricted</a></div>\n</li></ul>\n", "type"=>"arrangement"}
- arrangement
-
{"value"=>"<p>I. Personal Papers; II. Correspondence, 1935-1990; III. Writings; IV. Foundations and organizations; V. Subject files; VI. Consultancy and research projects, 1948-1990; VII. Untermeyer files, 1958-1987; VIII. Dillard University, 1937; IX. Chicago, 1937-1970; X. Blacks in the British Isles, 1934-1960; XI. Ghana, 1954-1965; XII. Kenya, 1948-1963; XIII. Liberia, 1954; XIV.Other Africa material, India, U.S. Peace Corps; XV. Mass communications in tropical Africa, 1953-1960; XVI. Research notes; XVII. Roosevelt University, 1948-1969; XVIII. Stanford University, 1969-1976</p>", "supress_display"=>true}
- acqinfo
-
{"value"=>"<p>Gift of St. Clair Drake, SCM 89-80; SCM 90-93; SCM 91-11; SCM 92-27; SCM 93-3; SCM 93-39; SCM 97-6</p>"}
- separatedmaterial
-
{"value"=>"<p>The following items were removed from the St. Clair Drake Papers:</p> <p>Schomburg Library: 7 record cartons of printed matter 18 maps</p> <p>Schomburg Art and Artifacts Division: 3 calendars and 7 posters (mostly Ghana)</p> <p>Schomburg Moving Image and Recorded Sound Division: 18 reel-to-reel tapes (Interviews with Drake and students at Roosevelt University. Also interviews about the film \"Something of Value\" and two unidentified tapes.)</p> <p>Schomburg Photographs and Print Division: One box of photographs</p> <p>Other: 23 record cartons of unprocessed material (miscellaneous and printed matter) in outside storage.</p>"}
- processinfo
-
{"value"=>"<p>Partially processed by Andre Elizee, with assistance from Nurah Jeter and Olivia Inman, 1998</p>"}
- userestrict
-
{"value"=>"<p>All requests subject to limitations noted in divisional policies on reproduction.</p> <p>Information on copyright (literary rights) available from repository.</p>"}
- date_start
-
1935
- keydate
-
1935
- date_end
-
1990
- date_inclusive_start
-
1935
- date_inclusive_end
-
1990
- prefercite
-
{"value"=>"[Item], St. Clair Drake papers, Sc MG 309, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library"}