Davis' father was later demoted under the segregation policies of President Woodrow Wilson's administration, losing nearly two-thirds of his salary and the family's affluent status.
Thus, he was a leader in his community, and Davis would describe him as a "brave man" who was "already marked in a town of 236 citizens" as a large landowner who "further angered whites by registering and voting.
"[4] This contrasted sharply with the elitism of many upper-class African Americans, whom Davis would criticize throughout his life for their lack of leadership in the struggle for racial equality and attempts to distance themselves from lower-class blacks.
Bucking national trends, the school had settled firmly in the Du Bois camp regarding black education and offered a rigorous college preparatory curriculum that included Greek and Latin.
Williams College had a singular arrangement with Dunbar that allotted one full merit-based scholarship called the Horace F. Clark Prize Fellowship per year to the valedictorian.
He also became close friends with Sterling Brown, a fellow Dunbar alumnus, who later recalled the instances of prejudice and social isolation he and other black students endured while at Williams in his essay "Oh Didn't He Ramble.
"[8] In spite of an excellent academic performance and amicable relationships with peers and faculty, Davis was rejected for a teaching assistant position upon graduation in 1924 under the pretext that the school had too many Southern students to permit his appointment.
[7] On June 23, 1929, Davis married Alice Elizabeth Stubbs, a Mount Holyoke College graduate, who played an instrumental role in the research and publication of both his works Children of Bondage and Deep South.
Davis realized that a cultural barrier separated him from his students, many of whom came from the most acutely segregated regions of the Deep South and lacked the rigorous academic training and privileged upbringing that he had enjoyed.
This division, along with the paternalistic attitude of the Institute which manifested in the form of a strictly regimented campus life and an adherence to segregationist policies, frustrated him and eventually would drive him to change his academic focus from the arts to social sciences in a bid to make a greater impact on society.
This piece displayed his unique literary voice based on respect for the resilience of ordinary blacks who endured injustices every day, while at the same time it avoided an excessively romanticized depiction of African-American life or a reliance on realism as a way to scandalize the reader.
Davis's approach, which David Varel identifies in the tradition of "Negro Stoicism," combined elements of Babbitt's New Humanism as well as his own belief that literature should focus on uplifting ordinary blacks.
He corresponded with Bronisław Malinowski at the London School of Economics and Dietrich Westermann of the University of Berlin regarding funding to study in Europe, but eventually he decided to return first to Harvard for his M.A.
° David A. Varel, "Bending the Academic Color Line: Allison Davis, the University of Chicago, and American Race Relations, 1941-1948," Journal of Negro Education 84 (November 2015): 534–546.