Bio: (1911–1990) American sociologist and anthropologist. Drake received his doctorate in anthropology from the University of Chicago. He lectured at Roosevelt University, the University of Ghana, and Stanford University.

At the start of his carrer he participated in the team of anthropologists that researched racial caste and social class in a town in Mississippi, and the results of that project were published in the book  Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class (1941). He was the director of the African and Afro-American Studies Program at Stanford and was the founder of the American Society for African Culture and the American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa.

Drake, together with Horace R. Cayton Jr., coauthored Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1945), a landmark study of African American life in an urban Northern setting. In 1947, Drake carried out dissertation research in Cardiff, Wales, focusing on a community of African seamen and their Welsh families. This work,  published as Value Systems, Social Structure, and Race Relations in the British Isles (1954), analyzed forms of collective action that emerged in response to British racial and colonial hierarchies.

During his stay in Ghana, Drake studied the mass media and directed research on tensions between the postcolonial political elite and traditional authorities in Ghana. He also studied the development of Tema, a newly constructed port city populated by villagers resettled from ancestral lands. His analysis of this contested modernization process combined a critical perspective on government policy with an appreciation of its broader aims.

Later, Drake explored urban unrest and race relations in the United States, cultural continuity and transformation in the Caribbean, strategies of resistance and adaptation across diasporic communities, and the intellectual history of Black scholars within anthropology and Black studies.

Drake’s most ambitious work is the two-volume Black Folk Here and There: An Essay in History and Anthropology. In this sweeping study, he traced the cultural and intellectual history of anti-Black prejudice from the precolonial Old World diaspora to the plantation societies of the New World. Combining symbolic and textual analysis with intellectual history and the sociology of knowledge, Drake examined representations of sub-Saharan Africans in ancient Egypt and the Nile Valley, the Islamic and Judaic Middle East, Mediterranean Europe, and northern European Christendom. He also analyzed the profound transformations of the sixteenth century that contributed to the rise of racialized slavery.

Main works

1940. Churches and Voluntary Associations Among Negroes in Chicago

1945. Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City

1954. Value Systems, Social Structure, and Race Relations in the British Isles

1966. Race Relations in a Time of Rapid Social Change.

1987. Black Folks Here and There: An Essay in History and Anthropology. Vol. 1.

1990. Black Folk Here and There: An Essay in History and Anthropology. Vol. 2.