Francis Sumner, a scientist, professor, and Sergeant in the United States Army, 808th Pioneers in World War I, was the first Black American to earn a Ph.D. in psychology in 1920, graduating from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. By 1928, Sumner had joined the faculty and served as chair of the psychology department at Howard University in Washington, DC, where he remained for 26 years. While at Howard, Sumner was the first professor to establish courses for studying religion, equity in the education of Black students, psychoanalysis, race psychology, and social justice.
In 1918, Sumner was drafted into the United States Army Pioneer Infantry Unit, a non-combat unit. Due to rampant racial segregation in the U.S. military, Sumner was forced to build and repair railroads, although he was fluent in German, French, and Spanish. In 1922, he published his dissertation, “The Psychoanalysis of Freud and Adler or Sex-determination and Character Formation,” and conducted extensive research on the psychology of American and European religions. Sumner was the official abstractor for Psychological Bulletin and the Journal of Social Psychology, where he wrote abstracts for over 3,000 articles from German, French, and Spanish authors.
Born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, on December 7, 1895, Sumner was the youngest of two sons born to David Alexander and Ellen Lillian Sumner. Sumner attended elementary school in Norfolk, Virginia, and Plainfield, New Jersey. His father homeschooled him, and by age 15, he was accepted and enrolled at Lincoln University in 1911. Four years later, he graduated magna cum laude, earning his bachelor’s degree and later another bachelor’s degree in English from Clark University.
In 1920, Sumner taught psychology and philosophy at Wilberforce University in Wilberforce, Ohio. A year later, he joined the faculty at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He then moved to Institute, West Virginia after accepting a faculty position at West Virginia Collegiate Institute where he remained for seven years. During this time, he published numerous articles about the glaring disparity of Black students’ acceptance rates to state colleges.
In his research, Sumner highlighted the environmental conditions of Black and white intellectuals in higher education. He argued that structural racism worked against original scholarship production among Black scholars at HBCUs. Black intellectuals were forced to teach in segregated colleges which minimized research and paid poverty wages. The geographical locations of Black colleges across the South isolated Black intellectuals from the epicenter of American scholarship while race prejudice generated an “oppression psychosis,” limiting Blacks’ mental energies to mainly combating racism.
The 1954 landmark desegregation case of Brown v. Board of Education in Topeka, Kansas, was regarded as another capstone of Sumner’s career. Although he didn’t live to see it come to pass, Sumner’s work in psychology and the study of racism in the lives of Black people is viewed as the building blocks for the landmark court decision.
On January 11, 1954, Sumner suffered a massive heart attack while shoveling snow at his home in Washington, DC and died the following day at the age of 58. He was buried with honors at the Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia.
