WINNER OF THE JOHN FREDERICK LEWIS AWARD FOR 2008

The papers of William Shedrick Willis (1921–1983), housed at the American Philosophical Society, include his drafts of the manuscript Boas Goes to Atlanta. In typescript with handwritten editing and numerous versions, these pages contain the fascinating story of Franz Boas’s visit to Atlanta University in 1906, and more, because Willis intended the work to be a book on Boas’s work in black anthropology. Rosemary Zumwalt focuses on what was to have been Willis’s first chapter, “Boas Goes to Atlanta.” Drawing from archival correspondence and bibliographic research, she expands the sections on Boas’s trip to Atlanta, the time he spent on the campus of Atlanta University, the reaction to his talk by blacks and whites, and the conflict between W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington as this related to the trip to Atlanta.

Dr. Zumwalt came to know Willis well through his handwriting, his finely penned notes, and the piquancy of his thoughts. She came to know him better as she read through the correspondence on file at the APS and read of his encounters with racism on a painfully personal level and on enduringly institutional levels. The opening chapter, “Willis: An Introduction,” is precisely that—an introduction to a remarkable man who loved anthropology, and who suffered from the narrowness of those who held the keys of power.

Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt is the Vice President for Academic Affairs/Dean of the College, and Professor of Anthropology, at Agnes Scott College in Georgia. She is the author of Wealth and Rebellion: Elsie Clews Parsons, Anthropologist and Folklorist (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), and American Folklore Scholarship: A Dialogue of Dissent (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1988, reprinted 1995).