Athens. His father and paternal grandfather had little formal education,
and illiteracy seems not to have been uncommon among Odums. Howard’s
mother, a daughter of a former slaveholder brought low by the war, was
better educated, and she was ambitious for her children. Scholastic oppor-
tunity brought a family move to nearby Oxford, Georgia, site of the first in-
carnation of Emory College, where all five Odum children went to school.
Howard earned a B.A. in , taught a while in rural Mississippi, then
entered the University of Mississippi, where he received an M.A. in classics
in . His major subject notwithstanding, Odum was decisively bent to-
ward social science at Mississippi by Professor Thomas Pearce Bailey, who
was already beginning to apply social (including economic) statistics to an
elaborate justification for the new age of Jim Crow. Under Bailey’s influ-
ence Howard traveled to Massachusetts and entered Clark University’s doc-
toral program in psychology. He defended a dissertation on African Ameri-
can folksongs and folkways in and took a second Ph.D., in sociology,
at Columbia the following year. The second dissertation, which Columbia
published as a book, concerned black ‘‘racial traits.’’ In decades to come,
Odum would become embarrassed by the racism of both dissertations, and
he forbade the reissue of the Columbia volume. Jim Crow, like pellagra
and erosion, became anathema to Odum’s deepening liberal sensibilities
and social-scientific practice.^41
After his stint in New York City, Howard returned to his native ground
and introduced an ambitious range of practical, socially engaged courses—
for example, on rural public health, the tenure system, and crime—for ap-
prentice teachers in the University of Georgia’s education school. He had
married Ann Louise Kranz of Tennessee, a fellow psychology graduate stu-
dent at Clark, and their first two children, Eugene and Mary, were born dur-
ing the Athens years. In Howard W. accepted the deanship of the new
(and relocated) Emory University college of arts and science in Atlanta. His
ambition to enlarge the faculty and school and engage in what is more re-
cently called outreach far exceeded the vision and patience of Emory’s con-
servative chancellor, however, and in the Odums moved on to their
destiny: Chapel Hill.
During the s the University of North Carolina miraculously, consid-
ering the times, emerged as the first post–Civil War southern institution of
higher learning to become great. ‘‘The Hill,’’ as it was affectionately called,
was blessed with courageous and imaginative leadership during the inter-
war decades, and among its distinguished faculty—who created excellent
science departments and a history department that professionalized and