William S. Willis facts for kids

William Shedrick Willis Jr. was an important American scholar. He was born on July 11, 1921, in Waco, Texas. He studied history and culture, especially of African Americans and Native Americans. He helped start the field of African American anthropology. Willis was the first Black professor at Southern Methodist University. He also helped create the African American Studies Program there.

Growing Up and Learning

Willis was an only child. His family moved to Dallas, Texas when he was very young. His parents were wealthy and had gone to college. His father, William S. Willis Sr., was a high school principal. He later started a construction company to build homes for poor Black people. The family moved to Dallas because of warnings from the Ku Klux Klan.

Willis spent his summers in Chicago, where his family owned a home. His father passed away when Willis was young. After his father's death, Willis and his mother traveled around the world.

Willis finished Booker T. Washington High School in Dallas in 1938. Then he went to Howard University in Washington, D.C. At Howard, he studied history. He also learned about Black history and culture. He graduated with honors in 1942. After college, Willis joined the United States Coast Guard. He left in 1944.

Willis's Career in Anthropology

In 1945, Willis began studying at Columbia University in New York City. He first studied political science. Later, he changed his focus to anthropology. Anthropology is the study of human societies and cultures. He earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1955.

At Columbia University, Willis researched Native American groups in the Southeast United States. His main project was about the Cherokee Indians. He also wrote about Black people in America. He studied how Native Americans, Black people, and White people interacted. Willis also researched the history of anthropology and racism within the field.

In 1949, Willis received a special scholarship. This helped him pay for his research on the Cherokee Indians. His work looked at how Cherokee society changed when Europeans arrived. He used a historical approach to understand their culture.

Many of Willis's classmates at Columbia University became famous anthropologists. These included Eric Wolf, Sidney Mintz, and Marvin Harris.

From 1955 to 1964, Willis could only find part-time teaching jobs. He taught at Columbia and City College of New York. He felt it was hard for Black scholars to get full-time jobs at white schools. During this time, he kept researching early colonial North America. He wrote articles about Native American cultures. He also wrote about the relationships between Black, Native American, and White people.

His articles were published in a journal called Ethnohistory. These writings showed his strong skills as an ethnohistorian. An ethnohistorian studies cultures using historical records. Willis looked at old documents written by officials and traders. He compared these facts with other authors' descriptions. He was very interested in the five groups he studied: Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creeks, and Seminoles.

In 1964, Willis moved back to Dallas, Texas. He took a teaching job at Bishop College. He also started teaching anthropology at Southern Methodist University (SMU). This made him the first Black scholar to teach at SMU. At SMU, Willis focused on African American history and culture.

In 1972, he left SMU. He resigned because he felt he was treated unfairly by some faculty members. After leaving SMU, Willis continued to teach summer classes at Columbia University until 1975.

In 1978, Willis and his wife, Georgine E. Upshur, moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In Philadelphia, Willis could use the large collections at the American Philosophical Society Library.

Throughout his career, Willis stayed in touch with many other anthropologists. His lifelong mentor was Rayford Logan.

Important Contributions

Many people recognized Willis's important work in anthropology. One professor, Morton Fried, called him "one of the country’s authorities on the Colonial period in the Southeastern United States." Fried also said that Willis understood the problems between Native Americans, Black people, and European settlers.

Willis found examples of how Native American groups passed down family names through the father's side. This was new because people thought these groups only used the mother's side. He found old documents from the 1700s that others had missed. He believed that both ways of passing down names could exist at the same time.

In his 1957 article, "The Nation of Bread," Willis combined history with the ideas of Franz Boas. He wrote that the Creek groups were made of different cultural units. This meant that each town had its own culture, not just the whole nation.

Publications

• 1955 - Colonial Conflict and the Cherokee Indians, 1710–1760. (His main research project).
• 1957 - The Nation of Bread, in Ethnohistory journal.
• 1963 - Divide and Rule: Red, White, and Black in the Southeast, in Journal of Negro History.
• 1972 - Skeletons in the Anthropological Closet.
• 1972 - Reinventing Anthropology (co-author).
• 1975 - Franz Boas and the study of Black folklore.
• 1975 - The New Ethnicity: Perspectives from Ethnology.
• 2008 - Franz Boas and W.E.B. Du Bois at Atlanta University (co-author).

Memberships

Willis was a member of several important groups for scholars:

• Fellow of the American Anthropological Association
• American Association for the Advancement of Science
• American Society for Ethnohistory
• The Society for American Archaeology
• The American Association of University Professors