Francis Cecil Sumner

Born: 1895 in Pine Bluff, Arkansas
Died: January 12, 1954 in Washington, DC

Education

1911 at the age of 15 he enrolled at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania
1915 at the age of 19 or 20, he graduated magna cum laude with special honors in English, Modern Languages, Greek, Latin, and Philosophy.
1916 he was awarded a second B.A. in English from Clark University in Worcester Massachusetts
1917 he received his M.A. degree from Lincoln University.
On June 14, 1920 when he received his Ph.D. from Clark University, Francis Cecil Sumner became the first African American to receive a Ph.D. degree in psychology.

1916 As a graduate student at Lincoln University he taught psychology of religion, mysticism, rationalism, experimental psychology, social psychology and intermediate and advanced German.
1920-1921 Took his first teaching position at Wilber force University in Ohio.
1921 (summer) Taught at Southern University in Louisiana.
1921 (fall) Accepted an appointment as instructor of psychology and philosophy in the college department at West Virginia Collegiate Institute (now Virginia State College).
1928 Resigned from West Virginia after becoming restless and assumed the acting chairmanship of the department of psychology at Howard University where he remained until his death in 1954.
1931 Had the opportunity to attend the First International Congress for Religious Psychology held at the University of Vienna. There he presented a paper entitled, “Mental Hygiene and Religion” and met many leaders among European psychologists of religion.

Sumner believed that in order to develop a strong program to train Black psychologists adequately, psychology departments needed to be autonomous units. With the help of then Howard University’s president, Mordecai Johnson, a separate department of psychology was permanently established and he was appointed full professor and head of the department in 1930.
Sumner did vast amounts of research concerning equality and justice between Blacks and Whites. For example, he studied the attitudes of Blacks and Whites towards the administration of justice with the goal of administering justice on a more democratic basis. Along with his graduate students more than two thousand college students were surveyed for the research.
Under Sumner’s tutelage many of his students went on to become leading psychologists in their own right. One such student was Kenneth Bancroft Clark whose psychological research on prejudice, discrimination and segregation in the developing child was used in the 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education.
At the West Virginia Collegiate Institute, Sumner created a prestigious award that was given to a psychology student with the most outstanding essay on a particular topic.
Sumner was an official abstractor for both the Journal of Social Psychology and the Psychological Bulletin, where he translated more than three thousand articles from German, French, and Spanish.

His Ph.D. dissertation “Psychoanalysis of Freud and Adler” was published in the Pedagogical Seminary later named The Journal of Genetic Psychology and it was called an outstanding interpretation of psychoanalytic theories.
“Core and Contest in the Drowsy State” contributed to the American Journal of Psychology.
“The Idea of Holiness”
“The Structure of Religion: A History of European Psychology of Religion”