Ellen Irene Diggs, early anthropologist and assistant to Du Bois

by Herb Boyd

Finding a female African American anthropologist born before World War l is a difficult task, but easier than finding one prominent Black woman “exoduster” (participant in the Black migration from the South to Kansas that came to be known as the “Great Exodus”) to cite after Pap Singleton last week. Ellen Irene Diggs fulfilled our mission in the former search. She was a remarkable scholar, sufficiently qualified to impress the fastidious W.E.B. Du Bois.

Born in 1906 in Monmouth, Ill., a small town near the Iowa border, Diggs was one of five children raised in a working-class family. Even so, she was very much aware of the poverty and economic inequality in her community. A voracious reader as a child, she soon converted her fascination with newspapers and magazines to textbooks as a student at Monmouth College, where she was a scholarship student as a result of achieving the highest scholastic average at a local high school. Later, she transferred to the University of Minnesota, which had a more extensive offering of courses.

At the university, Diggs majored in sociology with a minor in psychology, graduating in 1928 with a bachelor of science degree. She then enrolled in Atlanta University to pursue her master’s degree, and received the university’s first master’s degree in 1933. In 1944, she earned her doctorate in anthropology at the University of Havana.

During her stay at Atlanta University, Diggs registered for a class taught by Du Bois, who had returned to the university. She was such an outstanding student that Du Bois hired her as a research assistant that summer. This would begin more than a decade of working in close association with Du Bois. Not only was she indispensable as a researcher, particularly for such books as “Black Folk Then and Now,” she co-founded the journal “Phylon: A Review of Race and Culture” with him.

David Levering Lewis, in his second volume on the life of Du Bois, cites Diggs more than a dozen times, another indication of just how significant she was to the research and writing of her mentor. As Lewis noted, “She had been invaluable on the Reconstruction project. As the years passed, she was to be found…at his side in Atlanta and then in New York, until faculty responsibilities with Morgan State College’s sociology department confined her to Baltimore.”

Diggs also often functioned as Du Bois’s secretary, as she did in 1941 in a letter to Helena Jacobs, advising her via the words of Du Bois to use his autobiography “Dusk of Dawn” as a possible source for material for her paper.

Before taking a position at Morgan State, Diggs had traveled and studied extensively in Latin America, mainly putting her anthropological background and Spanish language studies to great use. In a profile by A. Lynn Bolles in Jessie Carney Smith’s “Notable Black American Women,” we learn of her expertise in Afro-Latin American culture, which made her a trailblazer in blending cultures.

Such an immersion resulted in the publication of numerous articles in“Phylon, the Journal of Negro History,” as well as newspaper articles in the Baltimore Sun newspaper. She was a member of several organizations and associations, and even with teaching as a full-time endeavor, found time to participate in countless seminars, conferences, and lecture series, especially as they pertained to Afro-Latin American topics. One of her most important books was “Black Chronology: From 4000 BC to the Abolition of the Slave Trade”(1983), a thoughtful and thorough analysis of diasporan ideas and contributions.

Diggs was 92 when she died in 1998 and Morgan State University received a grant of nearly $250,000 to support her research as a “pioneering Black anthropologist”—one of the many tributes she received during a lifetime of travel, research, and writing.