Francis Cecil Sumner
Francis Cecil Sumner
(1895-1954)
Francis Cecil Sumner was born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas on December 7, 1895. He was the second son of David Alexander and Ellen Lillian Sumner and younger brother to Eugene Sumner.
Sumner received his elementary education in Norfolk, Virginia, and Plainfield, New Jersey. After elementary school, he was self-educated with the help of his parents. Sumner's early education consisted of intense reading and writing assignments given to him by his father, who too had been self-educated. Sumner's parents played a huge role in the education of their son. In 1915, Sumner graduated with magna cum laude with honors from Lincoln University at the age of twenty. He later enrolled at Clark University to pursue a bachelor of arts in English in 1916. After graduation he returned to Lincoln as a graduate student and was mentored by Stanley Hall. Although he was approved as a PhD candidate, he could not begin his doctoral dissertation because he was drafted into the army during World War I.
Francis Cecil Sumner's first teaching job was at Wilberforce University as a professor of philosophy and psychology in the fall of 1920. In the summer of 1921, he taught at Southern University in Louisiana which is a historically Black university. In the fall of 1921, Sumner accepted a position at West Virginia Collegiate Institute where initially he was happy with the environment and the college. After seven years of being on the staff and writing many controversial articles involving the criticisms of colleges and universities and their treatment of African Americans and endorsing views of W.E.B. Dubois and Booker T. Washington, Sumner resigned on August 31, 1928. Sumner left West Virginia and went on to Howard University and became the acting chairman of the department of psychology. Sumner was married twice, his first wife was Francees H. Hughston in 1922 and his second wife was Nettie M. Broker in 1946; Sumner had no children from his two marriages. On January 12, 1954, Dr. Francis Cecil Sumner died of a heart attack outside his home in Washington D.C. Many students described Dr. Sumner as "low keyed and very dedicated"; as a very quiet and very unassuming individual who was brilliant with tremendous capacity to make an analysis of an individual's gestalt"; and as "Howard's most stimulating scholar"
Source: http://www.apa.org/pi/oema/resources/ethnicity-health/psychologists/sumner-prosser.aspx