This article analyzes the role of the Julius Rosenwald Fund in shaping the career of W. Allison Davis, a distinguished anthropologist who became the first African American appointed to the faculty of a mostly white university. From 1928 to 1948, the Rosenwald Fund ran an expansive fellowship program for African American intellectuals, which, despite its significance, remains largely unexamined in the scholarly literature. Davis tied his academic aspirations to Rosenwald Fund support, including for his early research and the terms of his faculty appointment. His experiences illustrate the dynamics inclusion and exclusion of African Americans in the academy; paternalistic promotion and strategic denial functioned as two sides of the same coin. Spotlighting Davis's negotiations, this article establishes how presumptions of racial inferiority guided Rosenwald patronage and demonstrates the extent to which the principles of meritocracy and expertise remained secondary concerns for those interested in cultivating African American intellectuals.

W. E. B. Du Bois once remarked that “It was in Germany that my first awakening to social reform began” (Aptheker 1982, p. 275). This essay examines the intellectual impact of Du Bois's voyage to Berlin from 1892 to 1894. His acquisition of empirical social research methods under the tutelage of German historical economists, particularly Gustav von Schmoller, armed him with the intellectual and methodological tools he needed in his effort to attack pervasive biological determinist theories in the United States. Using empirical techniques grounded in a “system of ethics” as his conceptual guideposts, Du Bois analyzed race as not a biological but a social phenomenon. To be sure, this was no easy task. He was also a “race man,” who, loyal to his moral commitment to building a program of racial uplift, sought legitimacy as a social scientist from his fellow American sociologists, who summarily ignored his work. Struggling to serve his roles as both scientist and race man, Du Bois functioned within an intellectual space of double consciousness, constantly vacillating between two communities and two voices. In the end, Du Bois would successfully bring the scientific method to the race question, using inductive methods in his sociological studies on the African American experience. This approach made possible his seminal work The Philadelphia Negro (1899) and, subsequently, his research at Atlanta University. In the final analysis, his empirical research stood its ground, successfully advancing a new paradigm for examining race based on the idea that the putative racial hierarchy, theoretically grounded in biological determinism, was nothing more than a social artifact buttressed by racism. He further demonstrated how the economic disparity between Whites and Blacks functioned as the prime catalyst for “a plexus of social problems” that plagued African American life (Du Bois 1898, p. 14). His conclusions were a radical departure from the work of many American sociologists, many of whom were sympathetic to social Darwinism—his most formidable challenge.This essay would not have been conceived without the steady support and constant pushing of my dear friends and colleagues, all of whom have read or heard this paper at various stages: Anne Harrington, Robert Brain, Stephen C. Ferguson, Fanon Che Wilkins, Craig Koslofsky, Matti Bunzl, Peter Fritzsche, Frederick Hoxie, Dianne Pinderhughes, Jason E. Glenn, Bernadette Atuahene, Adam Biggs, Charlton Copeland, and Bikila Ochoa.