Francis Cecil Sumner

What The Job Entailed/Entails

Madisen.Milburn

Bibliograyphy

Aug-30-15

Per-2

What He Contributed During His Time

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

www.apa.org

legacy.earlham.edu

Francis Cecil Sumner

Francis Cecil Sumner had gotten a Ph.D. degree in psychology. He also used his literate skills in writing during his career. After receiving his Ph.D., Sumner first taught at Wilberforce University in Ohio and then at Southern University in Louisiana. In 1921, Sumner went to West Virginia Collegiate Institute to fulfill the position of instructor of psychology and philosophy.

While working at West Virginia, Sumner was disheartened by the number of substandard black colleges and universities as well as the treatment of black people in the education world. Despite an offer to increase Sumner's pay from $2400 to $2700, Sumner decided to leave West Virginia and assume the acting chairmanship position of the department of psychology at Howard University instead.

Sumner began striving for a department of psychology separate from philosophy and education, and in 1930 with the help of the President of Howard, Mordecai W. Johnson, he achieved this goal, and was appointed full professor and head of the department.

Sumner was also part of several organizations including, the American Psychological Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Educational Research Association, Eastern Psychological Association, Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology, and the District of Columbia Psychological Association. Throughout his career, Sumner was interested in psychological topics dealing with race and religion and did research in these areas, including a study done to look at the "attitudes of Blacks and whites toward the administration of social justice"

During the mid-1920s Francis Cecil Sumner was the first African American to earn a PhD in psychology.Also in 1920 his dissertation titled "Psychoanalysis of Freud and Adler" was published and, it was called an outstanding interpretation of psychoanalytic theories.

Sumner became a professor at various universities and managed to publish several articles despite the refusal of research agencies to provide funding for him because of his color.

Sumner is also credited as one of the founders of the psychology department at Howard University, which he chaired from 1928 until his death in 1954.

Francis belonged to the school of thought, of the afrocentric perspective.Afrocentricity is a paradigm based on the idea that African people should re-assert a sense of agency in order to achieve sanity. During the l960s a group of African American intellectuals in the newly-formed Black Studies departments at universities began to formulate novel ways of analyzing information.