Oliver Cromwell Cox was a Trinidad

Trinidad

Trinidad is the larger and more populous of the two major islands and numerous landforms which make up the island nation of Trinidad and Tobago. It is the southernmost island in the Caribbean and lies just off the northeastern coast of Venezuela. With an area of it is also the fifth largest in...

ian-America

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

n sociologist noted for his early Marxist viewpoint on Fascism

Fascism

Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...

. He is a member of the Chicago school of sociology

Chicago school (sociology)

In sociology and later criminology, the Chicago School was the first major body of works emerging during the 1920s and 1930s specialising in urban sociology, and the research into the urban environment by combining theory and ethnographic fieldwork in Chicago, now applied elsewhere...

Education

Cox was born in Port of Spain

Port of Spain

Port of Spain, also written as Port-of-Spain, is the capital of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago and the country's third-largest municipality, after San Fernando and Chaguanas. The city has a municipal population of 49,031 , a metropolitan population of 128,026 and a transient daily population...

, Trinidad and Tobago

Trinidad and Tobago

Trinidad and Tobago officially the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago is an archipelagic state in the southern Caribbean, lying just off the coast of northeastern Venezuela and south of Grenada in the Lesser Antilles...

 emigrated to the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 and earned a bachelor of science degree from Northwestern University

Northwestern University

Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston and Chicago, Illinois, USA. Northwestern has eleven undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools offering 124 undergraduate degrees and 145 graduate and professional degrees....

 in 1928. He soon developed Poliomyelitis

Poliomyelitis

Poliomyelitis, often called polio or infantile paralysis, is an acute viral infectious disease spread from person to person, primarily via the fecal-oral route...

 (Polio), causing both his legs to be permanently crippled. He then attended the University of Chicago

University of Chicago

The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...

 Economics department and graduated with a Master's degree in 1932. From there, he continued at Chicago in the Sociology department where he graduated from with a Ph.D in 1938.

Academia

Cox lectured at Lincoln University of Missouri from 1949 - 1970 where he then moved onto a position at Wayne State University

Wayne State University

Wayne State University is a public research university located in Detroit, Michigan, United States, in the city's Midtown Cultural Center Historic District. Founded in 1868, WSU consists of 13 schools and colleges offering more than 400 major subject areas to over 32,000 graduate and...

 until his death in 1974.

Writings

Cox was a Marxist that criticized capitalism and race in Foundations of Capitalism (1959), Capitalism and American Leadership (1962), Capitalism as a System (1964) and his last, Jewish Self-Interest and Black Pluralism (1974). Perhaps Cox's most profound and influential if also "understudied" book was his first, Race, Caste and Class, published in the same year E.Franklin Frazier became the first black president of the American Sociological Association, 1948. In a scathing "Introduction" to The Black Anglo Saxons by Nathan Hare, Cox ridiculed what he regarded as a misguided approach to the study of race relations he called "The Black Bourgeoisie School" headed by E. Franklin Frazier.

Sources

• Biography on the African-American Registry

• Oliver Cox, Race, Caste and Class, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1948. http://www.archive.org/details/casteclassracest00coxo

• Oliver Cox, "Introduction," The Black Anglo Saxons (by Nathan Hare), New York: Marzani and Munsell, 1965.

• The Sociology of Oliver C. Cox: New Perspectives (Research in Race and Ethnic Relations), H.M. Hunter (Editor),JAI Press,2000.