William Boyd Allison Davis (October 14, 1902 – November 21, 1983) was an American educator, anthropologist, writer, researcher, and scholar. He was considered one of the most promising black scholars of his generation, and he was the first African-American to hold a full faculty position at a major white university when he joined the staff of theUniversity of Chicago in 1942, where he would spend the balance of his academic life. Among his students during his tenure at the University of Chicago were anthropologist St. Clair Drake and sociologist Nathan Hare. Davis, who has been honored with a commemorative postage stamp by the United States Postal Service, is best remembered for his pioneering anthropology research on southern race and class during the 1930s, his research on intelligence quotient in the 1940s and 1950s, and his support of “compensatory education” that contributed to the intellectual genesis of the federal Head Start Program.
