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Ira De Augustine Reid was born on July 2, 1901 in Clifton Forge, Virginia, the eldest son of Daniel Augustine Reid, a Baptist minister, and Willie Robertha James. Reid grew up in comfortable circumstances in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and Germantown, a Philadelphia suburb. The family moved to Savannah, Georgia, when his father accepted a pastorate there in 1915.
In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, he attended public schools.
Recruited in 1917 by President John Hope of Morehouse College in Atlanta, Reid completed the college preparatory course at Morehouse Academy in 1918 and received his B. A. from Morehouse College in 1922. From 1922 to 1923, Reid taught sociology and history and directed the high school at Texas College in Tyler, Tex. After graduate study in sociology at the University of Chicago during the 1923 summer session, he spent the following year as instructor of social science at Douglass High School in Huntington, W. Va. He was selected as a National Urban League Fellow for 1924-1925, and he earned an M. A. in social economics at the University of Pittsburgh in 1925.
He was appointed industrial secretary of the New York Urban League, a position he held until 1928.
From 1926 to 1928 he served as a first lieutenant in the New York National Guard. During Reid's tenure with the New York Urban League, he surveyed the living conditions of low-income black families in Harlem, conducted an ambitious study that was published as The Negro Population of Albany, New York (1928), and worked as Charles S. Johnson's research assistant in a National Urban League survey of blacks in the trade unions.
He also served as Johnson's research assistant in gathering data for the National Interracial Conference of 1928 in Washington, D. C. The conference yielded the landmark volume The Negro in American Civilization: A Study of Negro Life and Race Relations in the Light of Social Research (1930). In 1928, Reid succeeded Johnson as director of research and investigations for the National Urban League. As part of the league's efforts to establish local branches, he conducted surveys of seven black communities in the United States. The most important studies are Social Conditions of the Negro in the Hill District of Pittsburgh (1930) and The Negro Community of Baltimore: Its Social and Economic Conditions (1935).
Drawing on earlier league research, he also published one of the first reliable studies of blacks in the work force, Negro Membership in American Labor Unions (1930). From 1928 to 1934, he was enrolled as a graduate student in sociology at Columbia University, where he began research on West Indian immigration. In 1934, John Hope, the president of Atlanta University, encouraged W. E. B. Du Bois, the chairman of the Department of Sociology, to recruit Reid. Du Bois, who in 1937 described Reid as "the best-trained young Negro in sociology today, " worked closely with him until 1944.
In that year Du Bois was forced to retire, and Reid succeeded him as chairman of the department. Having also served under Du Bois as managing editor of Phylon: The Atlanta University Review of Race and Culture since its founding in 1940, Reid succeeded Du Bois as the journal's editor in chief.
In 1936, under the auspices of the Office of the Adviser on Negro Affairs of the Department of the Interior, Reid directed a survey published as the first volume of The Urban Negro Worker in the United States, 1925-1936 (1938), an undertaking financed by the Works Progress Administration.
In 1939 he published The Negro Immigrant: His Background, Characteristics and Social Adjustment, 1899-1937, which was based on his dissertation. He earned his Ph. D. from Columbia University in that year. In 1940, Reid prepared In a Minor Key: Negro Youth in Story and Fact, the first volume of the American Youth Commission's study of black youth. He also drafted "The Negro in the American Economic System, " a research memorandum used by Gunnar Myrdal in An American Dilemma (1944). He collaborated with the sociologist Arthur F. Raper on Sharecroppers All (1941), a study of the feudal political economy of the South.
After the death of Hope in 1936, Reid grew restless at Atlanta University.
From 1945 to 1947 he was visiting professor of sociology at the New York University School of Education, the first full-time black professor at the university. Sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee, he also was visiting professor of sociology at Haverford College in Pennsylvania from 1946 to 1947.
In 1948 he became professor of sociology and chairman of the Haverford Department of Sociology and Anthropology, a position he held until his retirement in 1966. On December 21, 1950, Reid and his wife joined the Society of Friends, and over the next fifteen years he was increasingly involved in the educational activities of the American Friends Service Committee. Although his scholarly output diminished during this period, his earlier professional contributions were fully acknowledged. He was assistant editor of the American Sociological Review from 1947 to 1950, vice-president and president of the Eastern Sociological Society from 1953 to 1955, and second vice-president of the American Sociological Society from 1954 to 1955.
Despite the approval of his peers, the State Department suspended Reid's passport from 1952 to 1953 for suspected Communist sympathies. When he challenged that action, his passport was returned. In the wake of the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, Reid was invited to edit "Racial Desegregation and Integration, " a special issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (March 1956).
Late in his career Reid appeared more frequently in the public eye. He served on the Pennsylvania Governor's Commission on Higher Education and was a participant in the 1960 White House Conference on Children and Youth. In 1962 he was visiting director of the Department of Extramural Studies at University College in Ibadan, Nigeria, and from 1962 to 1963 he was Danforth Foundation Distinguished Visiting Professor at the International Christian University in Tokyo.
He retired as professor of sociology at Haverford on June 30, 1966, and died in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.
He wrote extensively on the lives of black immigrants and communities in the United States. He was also influential in the field of educational sociology. He held faculty appointments at Atlanta University, New York University, and Haverford College, one of very few African American faculty members in the United States at white institutions during the era of "separate but equal. "
Reid married Gladys Russell Scott of Xenia, Ohio, on October 15, 1925; they had one adopted child. His first wife died a short time later, and on August 12, 1958, he married Anne M. Cooke of Gary, Indiana.
