Trailblazers in Black History: St. Clair Drake

 

John Gibbs St. Clair Drake’s groundbreaking scholarship continues to be highly influential in the theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches used in research on African Americans, urban poverty, community transformation and development, social organization, and social justice. Although St. Clair Drake was educated and trained as an anthropologist, contemporary discussions of Drake’s research most often align him with sociology. The work hailed as St. Clair Drake’s greatest achievement, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1945), written with Horace R. Cayton, emerged from, while expanding upon, the quantitative and ethnographic tradition of The Chicago School of Sociology. 

Source: Oxford Bibliographies