Arthur F. Raper

Arthur Franklin Raper was an American sociologist. He is best known for his research on lynching, sharecropping, and rural development.

Life and career

Raper grew up in Davidson County, North Carolina and attended the University of [North Carolina at Chapel Hill]. He received an M.A. in Sociology from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. In 1925, he started his PhD at Chapel Hill, under the direction of Howard W. Odum, and completed it in 1931.
In 1926, he worked for the Commission on Interracial Cooperation with Will W. Alexander in Atlanta, Georgia. He later taught at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia. In 1927 he produced a report on the conditions of African Americans in Tampa, Florida with Benjamin Elijah Mays.
In 1939, he resigned after a furor over taking his students to visit the Tuskegee Institute. He studied and wrote about sharecropping in Macon County and Greene County. He exposed sharecropping as exploitative. His papers are in the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Library; four of his books were reviewed by The New York Times.
A collection of Raper's materials are housed at the Special Collections Research Center at Fenwick Library at George Mason University.