About Dr. Samuel DuBois Cook

Early Life and Youth

Dr. Samuel DuBois Cook was born on November 21, 1928 in the small town of Griffin, Georgia, 40 miles south of Atlanta. The fifth of the six children born to Reverend Marcus Emmanuel Cook and Mary Cook (née Daniels), the young man’s earliest memories were of the twin challenges of Jim Crow and the Great Depression. As a child, Dr. Cook’s family was unable to afford the $7.50 tuition for the local public school, and he had to walk five miles to the (free) county school, where he learned in a one-room schoolhouse. Born thirteen years after a boll weevil infestation began to wreak havoc on Griffin’s farming and textile economy, Dr. Cook grew up surrounded by reminders of the area’s past (including, notably, the Stonewall Confederate Cemetery for almost exclusively dead Confederate soldiers from the Civil War).

However, a contemporary war would have a similarly sizable effect, albeit more fortuitous, on Dr. Cook’s youth. As the U.S. declared its entrance in World War II and mobilized for the battlefield, college campuses became decimated with its students now enlisted in the European and Pacific Theater. At age 15, Dr. Cook--along with another son of a Georgia preacher, Martin Luther King, Jr.--went North to Connecticut’s tobacco fields for the summer to earn money for college tuition. In the fall of 1948, as part of an early-admissions program begun in the war’s wake, both Cook and King entered Morehouse College, then in the midst of Benjamin Mays’ transformative period as the university’s president.

Undergraduate Studies at Morehouse

Morehouse was formative for Dr. Cook since the day he was born: In fact, his middle name, DuBois, was given in honor of former Morehouse president Charles DuBois Hubert. He was always on a path to higher education, a fact that in a 2005 interview he attributed to his father’s persistence:

My dad talked so much about education and talked about the, the bottom floor is always crowded, room on the top. You've gotta strive for higher things. He influenced me so much, I remember one of my teachers saying to me that when I was in middle school in Griffin, Georgia that I once wrote my name Samuel DuBois Cook, A.B., A.M., Ph.D., and before I was twenty-five I had my Ph.D. But I was influenced on a large part by my parents, primarily my father, who didn't have a college degree, but had that passion.

It was at Morehouse where Dr. Cook met his first mentor, Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, whose academic and spiritual guidance were integral to his professional development and political outlook. (Dr. Mays would later go on to perform the wedding ceremony for Dr. Cook and Sylvia F. Cook.) Although he would later go on to teach political science, given Morehouse’s lack of a department at the time, Cook was only sparingly able to take classes in the subject in his undergraduate years, instead majoring in history. In 1946 and 1947, he served as student body president.

Graduate Research at OSU

Having graduated from Morehouse in 1948, Dr. Cook began working in steel mills in Youngstown, Ohio, where he met a number of students of the state university. Initially planning to get his master’s degree and maybe go to law school--with intentions of getting a job to help his younger brother through college in the wake of their father’s passing--Dr. Cook recalled that at The Ohio State University “a whole new world was open to me.” He enthusiastically decided to study political science under David Spitz, eventually earning a university scholarship for his passionate embrace of the subject. In his dissertation, "An Inquiry into the Ethical Foundations of Democracy." he recognized the problem of political science and the lack of democracy’s moral foundation.

Political Activism and Teaching Career

After briefly serving in the U.S. Army and earning his Ph.D. in 1954, Dr. Cook began his teaching career at Southern University in Baton Rouge in 1955 before leaving for Atlanta University in 1956. (Given the racial discrimination present in academia at the time, particularly among the faculty ranks, Dr. Cook only applied for jobs at historically black schools.) He quickly became department chair at Atlanta the following year due to the death of Professor William Boyd.

While in Atlanta, Dr. Cook became deeply involved in the Civil Rights Movement, particularly in both the NAACP, where he was the youth director in Georgia, and in the Atlanta Negro Voters League. At the university, Dr. Cook would teach many students who would go on to play significant roles in the Civil Rights Movement, including Julian Bond (who would help establish both the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Poverty Law Center).

Duke's First Black Professor

In 1965, John Hallowell, a Duke political scientist who was at the forefront of invoking Christianity in political thought, convinced the department to hire Dr. Cook. Initially brought on as an assistant professor in 1966, Dr. Cook was offered a regular position with tenure in his second semester.

As the first Black professor in Duke’s history, Dr. Cook taught about both the history of political thought and contemporary political thought. He was well-liked and welcomed by most students, who helped make his classes “always full and overflowing,” and faculty, who he recalls inviting Sylvia and him to so many parties upon his arrival that they had to cut back. The family did face some issues with housing in Durham, however: They would integrate the Forest Hills neighborhood, a 1920s locale south of Duke’s campus that, at its founding, prohibited blacks who weren’t domestic workers from residing in or owning the properties.

Dr. Cook was at Duke when his close friend Dr. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, a moment that he would later say “brought me closer to bitterness than anything that ever happened in my life.” The political scientist would play a major role in the resulting response at the university: THe Silent Vigil, a social protest that highlighted racial discrimination at the school and advocated for collective bargaining for the non-faculty, predominantly-black workers at the school. Below, we have included an excerpt from his speech to the Silent Vigil protestors during that tumultuous week.

Supporting HBCUs at Scale

In 1969, Dr. Cook took a leave of absence to work for the Ford Foundation, where he was a program officer in higher education and research. Much of his time there was spent researching contemporary segregation and racism. While there, he helped direct money earmarked for Black Studies programs to HBCUs. He also helped found and fund doctoral programs in political science at various HBCUs, in particular developing the program at Atlanta University and expanding the existing department at Howard University.

In 1974, Dr. Cook was offered the position of president of Dillard, an HBCU in New Orleans. Initially reticent, he became inspired by a memory of Benjamin Mays dashing around the Morehouse campus, and accepted in 1975. Together with his wife, he moved to New Orleans, and took charge of Dillard. Within a few years, the school was thriving socially, academically, and economically. He also developed numerous programs and worked closely with local activist groups. Dr. Cook would serve as president at the university for 22 years.

Dr. Cook's Legacy

Dr. Cook joined the Duke Board of Trustees in 1981, serving until 1993 and helping shape Duke’s diversity programs throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In 1997, Duke created the Samuel DuBois Cook Society to honor Dr. Cook and “recognize, celebrate, and affirm” the activities, presence, and contributions of black students, faculty, and staff at the university. (The following year, The Ohio State University named its Young Scholars Summer Conference after Dr. Cook; in 2000, the school also instituted Samuel DuBois Cook Fellowships.) In June 2015, the Duke Consortium on Social Equity was officially renamed and recognized as the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity.

Among his many other accomplishments, Dr. Cook was the first black president of the Southern Political Science Association and also served as the vice-president of the American Political Science Association. Additionally, he was president of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Inc., and chair of the Presidents of the United Negro College Fund. President Jimmy Carter appointed Dr. Cook to the prestigious National Council on the Humanities and President Bill Clinton appointed him to the historic United States Holocaust Memorial Council.

Dr. Cook was the author or editor of numerous scholarly publications, including Black-Jewish Relations: Dillard University National Conference Papers, 1989-1997. His final publication was Benjamin E. Mays: His Life, Contributions, and Legacy, written about the inspirational and pioneering former president of Morehouse College.

On May 29, 2017, Dr. Cook died at his home in Atlanta. He is survived by his wife of over 50 years, Mrs. Sylvia F. Cook, their children Samuel DuBois Cook Jr. and Karen J. Cook, and Samuel DuBois Cook Jr.’s two children with his wife Nicole Peoples Cook, Alexandra Renee Cook and Samuel DuBois Cook III.