Arthur F. Raper

Arthur Franklin Raper (8 November 1899 – 10 August 1979) was an American sociologist.

Life and career

Raper grew up in Davidson County, North Carolina and attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He received an M.A. in Sociology from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. In 1925, he started a PhD at Chapel Hill, under the direction of Howard W. Odum, and completed it in 1931. 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. He later taught at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia. In 1939, he resigned after a furor over taking his students to visit the Tuskegee Institute. He studied and wrote about sharecropping in Macon County and Greene County. He exposed sharecropping as exploitative. 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 A. 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)

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)