As a child, Watts was influenced by his father who was an avid reader and supported the family through farming or maintenance work, and his mother, who stayed home to raise their five children.
After teaching for a year at Kittrell College in North Carolina, he returned to Washington, D.C. to accept a faculty position at Howard.
Before he returned, Beckham left, leaving Watts and Francis Sumner to form the two-person department until Max Meenes joined them in 1930.
[1] While at Howard with Sumner, Watts produced two important texts for the emerging literature on Black psychology.
Together, they published “Rivalry Between Uniocular Negative After Images and the Vision of the Other Eye” and he independently researched and wrote A Comparative and clinical Study of Delinquent and Non-Delinquent Negro Boys.
Using the Otis Self-Administering Test of Mental Ability, the Detroit Manual Ability Task, the Healy Pictorial Completion II, the Minnesota Paper Form Board Test, the Woodworth-Matthews Personal Data Sheet, the Personal Index, The Vineland Social Maturity Scale, An Adaptation of the C.E.I.
Watts concluded that when general intelligence and age remain constant, there is no significant difference between delinquent and non-delinquent boys in their competency to respond to concrete situations.
Indicating that “further investigation in regard to parental or home control of the groups might lead to establishing useful and significant differences between delinquent and non-delinquent Negro boys.
[4] Along with James Stanfiel, Watts published a study on Freshman Expectations and Perceptions of the Howard University Environment.
In this two-part study, Watts and Stanfiel observe incoming freshmen’s initial perception of the school and how they change over time.
The authors argue that the college educator should become more familiar with the students' perception of the school as it relates to their personal development.
They found that Howard students expected to be in an environment that focuses on stellar academic performance and fosters and supports social and individual personal well-being.
The researchers concluded that a sense of disappointment was evident and while it was temporary and mild in some cases, it could also be more enduring and detrimental in others.