ODUM, HOWARD W.

born May 24, 1884, near Bethlehem, Ga., U.S. died Nov. 8, 1954, Chapel Hill, N.C. in full Howard Washington Odum American sociologist, a specialist in the social problems of the southern United States and a pioneer of sociological education in the South. He worked to replace the sectionalism of that area with a sophisticated regionalism in social planning, race relations, and the arts, especially literature. A student of folk sociology, particularly that of Southern blacks, he was ahead of his time in urging equal opportunity for black Americans. Odum studied under the noted psychologist G. Stanley Hall at Clark University, Worcester, Mass., and the sociologist Franklin H. Giddings at Columbia University. After joining the University of North Carolina faculty in 1920, he established departments of sociology and public welfare, a social-science research institute, and the journal Social Forces at that university. One of Odum's books on black Americans, Rainbow Round My Shoulder: The Blue Trail of Black Ulysses (1928), was praised for its literary quality. Among his other works are Southern Regions of the United States (1936) and Understanding Society (1947). At President Herbert Hoover's request, Odum and William Fielding Ogburn edited the report Recent Social Trends in the United States, 2 vol. (1933), for the President's Research Committee on Social Trends.