Arthur F. Raper

Arthur Franklin Raper (8 November 1899 – 10 August 1979) was an American sociologist.^[1][2]

Life and career

Raper grew up in Davidson County, North Carolina and attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.^[1] He received an M.A. in Sociology from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.^[1] In 1925, he started a PhD at Chapel Hill, under the direction of Howard W. Odum, and completed it in 1931.^[1][3] He is best known for his research on lynching, sharecropping, and rural development.

In 1926, he worked for the Commission on Interracial Cooperation with Will W. Alexander in Atlanta, Georgia.^[1] He later taught at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia.^[1] In 1939, he resigned after a furor over taking his students to visit the Tuskegee Institute.^[1] He studied and wrote about sharecropping in Macon County and Greene County.^[1][4] He exposed sharecropping as exploitative.^[1][2] His papers are in the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Library; four of his books were reviewed by the New York Times (the reviews can be found in their archives).

Bibliography

• Preface to Peasantry (University of North Carolina Press, 1936)
• The Tragedy of Lynching (University of North Carolina Press, 1933)
• Sharecroppers All (University of North Carolina Press, 1941, co-authored with Ira De Augustine Reid)
• Tenants of the Almighty (University of North Carolina Press, 1943)
• Rural Development in Action (Cornell University Press, 1970)
• "Some Effects of Land Reform in 13 Japanese Villages," Journal of Farm Economics (Vol. 33, No. 2, May 1951)

References

Further reading

• Southern Modernist: Arthur Raper from the New Deal to the Cold War, by Louis Mazzari (Louisiana State University Press, 2006)
• The War Within: From Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South, 1919-1945, by Daniel Joseph Singal (University of North Carolina Press, 1982)
• Rural Worlds Lost: The American South, 1920-1960, by Jack Temple Kirby (Louisiana State University Press, 1987)
• Speak Now Against The Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South by John Egerton (University of North Carolina Press, 1994)
• "Arthur Raper," by Clifford M. Kuhn, in Encyclopedia of the Great Depression, edited by Robert S. Mcllvaine (Thomson-Gale, 2004)

External links

• Arthur Franklin Raper Papers, Southern Historical Collection, UNC-Chapel Hill Library
• Arthur F. Raper, The New Georgia Encyclopedia
• "Wanted: The Nation's Future of the South," by Rupert B. Vance: Virginia Quarterly Review, Autumn 1943 (contains review of Raper's Tenants of the Almighty)