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Drake, St. Clair

St. Clair Drake

The son of a Barbadian father who organized for Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), St. Clair Drake (1911-1990) attended Hampton University and participated in its pitched student strike of 1927, the training ground for a surprising number of New Negro intellectuals.  An English minor and the editor of the Hampton student newspaper, Drake took his literary talent with him while studying anthropology and sociology at the University of Chicago, the home of the influential “Chicago School” of urban ethnography.  While still a Ph.D. candidate, he and Horace R. Cayton coauthored the classic Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1945), an 830-page survey of Bronzeville whose inspiration to imaginative writers was predicted by its introduction by Richard Wright.  Speaking as a fellow black Chicagoan, Wright praised the book as “a landmark of research and scientific achievement” and as an explanatory key to his novel Native Son (1940).  Drake’s significance was not confined to sociology and its effects on the realist fiction of the Chicago Renaissance.  He was also a dedicated Pan-Africanist who advised Kwame Nkrumah and other post-independence African leaders, and he built a model center for Black Studies at Stanford University starting in 1969.  Drake’s 335-page FBI file, constructed between 1961 and 1971, is especially concerned with his African contacts.     

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Drake Part 6

Drake Part 7

Title
Drake, St. Clair

Description
FBI documents studying St. Clair Drake.

Creator
FBI

Publisher
FBI

Date
1961-1971

Rights
Material is in the public domain.

Format
text, 332 PDFs, 400 ppi

Language
English

Type
text

Coverage
1961-1971