C. Sylvester Whitaker, Jr., passed away on November 29, 2008, in Waterville, Maine, after a long battle with cancer. He was 73 years old.
Syl Whitaker will be remembered as a good friend, thoughtful scholar, engaged teacher, and creative university administrator. A path-breaking political scientist, throughout his life Whitaker was a true pioneer who opened many doors for others who were to follow after him. His early scholarship on Africa was important and impeccable, and has remained essential reading for nearly 50 years. Throughout his lifetime, he influenced many generations of younger scholars, and set the standard for serious consideration of the endurance of indigenous political values and institutional structures in non-Western societies. His work on the emirates of northern Nigeria is the starting point for scholarship on Nigeria, and remains essential reading for those who study political development, political change, and issues of democratization.
Born in 1935 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (where his parents owned a funeral home), Whitaker was the first African American male to graduate from Swarthmore College (in 1956) and the first African American to earn a Ph.D. in political science from Princeton University (in 1962). In the mid 1960s, he was the sole African American on the faculty at UCLA. In 1970, he became the first African American tenured at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, and in 1976 the first African American to receive tenure in political science at Rutgers University.
During his long and distinguished career, he held tenured appointments at UCLA, Princeton University, The City University of New York (where he held the Martin Luther King Chair), Rutgers University, and the University of Southern California. He held Fulbright Professorships at the University of Lagos and Bayero University Kano (in Nigeria), At UCLA he served as associate dean of the Graduate School, at Princeton University he founded the Africana Studies Program, at Rutgers he served as chair of the University College Department of Political Science and as director of International Programs, and at USC, until his retirement in 1996, he served as dean of the Social Sciences and director of the Center for Multiethnic and Transnational Studies. He was a Distinguished University Professor emeritus at USC
Whitaker's first book, The Politics of Tradition, published in 1970, challenged the dichotomies defining tradition and modernity in early development and modernization studies and set a new paradigm for the study of political change in non-Western societies. Subsequent books included Perspectives on the Second Republic of Nigeria (1981); The Unfinished State of Nigeria (1990); Agenda for Action: African-U.S. Cooperation with Anatoly Gromyko (1990); African Politics and Problems of Development with Richard Sklar (1991); Nigeria: Rivers of Oil, Trails of Blood with Richard Sklar (1995); and Second Beginnings: New Political Frameworks in Nigeria also with Richard Sklar (2001). In all his work, Whitaker combined meticulous scholarship with trenchant observation to both challenge prevailing orthodoxies and to provide new understandings and insights.
For most of his life, Syl Whitaker was also a committed Quaker, a journey begun during his high school years in Pittsburgh. He publicly embraced non-violence as a way of life the summer of his junior year in high school while attending the famed Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. He thereafter became a leader in the causes of non-violence and sustaining fundamental human dignity.
In later life, Whitaker served on the Boards of the Friends Service and Unitarian Universalist Service Committees. He was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and served on its Africa related committees, and was a member of the Board of the United Nations Association. A friend of Bill W's, at the time of his death still served on the Board of Alina Lodge in Blairstown, N.J.
C. Sylvester Whitaker was a man with a big mind, a large heart, and a deep soul. He will be remembered for his prodigious scholarship, fundamental commitment to human dignity and human rights, and his love of all things beautiful from the Nigerian savannah to the serenity of the Emir's Palace in Kazaure, and from his beloved Pacific Ocean to his cottage on a remote lake in Maine.
He is survived by his wife, Shirley Chow Whitaker; his sons Mark and Paul Whitaker; his grandchildren, Rachel and Matthew Whitaker; his stepsons James and Jason Chow; his sister Cleo McCray; and by his adopted Nigerian family in Kazaure.
