William Henry Dean was born on July 6, 1910 in Lynchburg, Virginia. He was the son of William Henry and Ella C. Greene Dean. His father was a Methodist minister who was pastor of such well-known churches as the Sharpe Street Church of Baltimore, Maryland, and the Ebenezer Methodist Church of Washington, District of Columbia.
Dean attended Douglass High School in Baltimore, where he was valedictorian of his class. He was awarded the Bachelor of Arts degree from Bowdoin College in 1930 and then continued his studies at Harvard University, receiving the MAster of Arts degree in 1932 and the Ph. D. in economics in 1938. His dissertation was published as The Theory of Geographic Location of Economic Activities, With Special Reference to Historical Change in 1938.
Having earned his doctorate in the 1930s, Dean was one of a select category of approximately 225 blacks in the United States who had secured that degree by 1938.
By 1943 only sixteen black Americans had earned Ph. D. s in economics. But even this degree, from so prestigious an institution as Harvard University, did not assure Dean of completely satisfactory employment. One interviewer reportedly stated that Dean's "ability and record of scholarship are so unusual that we would gladly retain him on the economics staff here at if he were not colored. "
Dean had been on the faculty of Atlanta University since 1933 and continued to teach there after receiving his doctorate. He was a rigorous and demanding instructor who enjoyed both the classroom and the research obligations of his profession as well as academic life generally, but apparently he disliked the racial climate in and around the city of Atlanta.
In 1940, while retaining his position at Atlanta University, Dean became a part-time consultant to the National Resources Planning Board on the location of industries. In 1942 he left both posts to join the Office of Price Administration and was sent to Haiti and eventually to the Virgin Islands, where he served as price executive and chief economist. After contracting a serious illness in the West Indies, he decided in 1944 to resign from the OPA. Dean's work for the government placed him at the forefront of black civil servants, earned him the friendship of prominent leaders, including Ralph J. Bunche, and demonstrated his intellectual ability. During this time and later he also taught at the City College of New York.
In 1944 Dean became director of the Community Relations Project for Interracial Social Planning, which was sponsored and coordinated by the National Urban League; in this position he served as assistant to Warren M. Banner. Disenchanted with the post, in 1946 Dean joined the staff of the United Nations, where he remained until his death. At the United Nations, Dean, who was especially concerned with the economic conditions and exploitation of blacks in Africa, worked with the African Unit of the Division of Economic Stability and Development. From 1946 to 1949 he served as acting chief of that unit, and in 1949 he received permanent appointment as chief. In 1948-1949 he was also secretary for a technical-assistance mission to Haiti, and in 1950 he was sent on a similar assignment to Libya.
His last efforts for the UN began in the fall of 1951, when he headed a technical-assistance team dispatched to Italian Somaliland. The purpose of the mission was to guide the government in establishing economic self-support, but the group's efforts were stymied by the deplorable living and economic conditions for blacks in Somaliland and by the intense resistance from whites in that country to any change.
Dean was gravely affected by his experience there, and when he returned to the United States three months later, he was physically exhausted, nervous, ill, suffering from weight loss, and depressed over his inability to solve the problems of that African nation. Dean was found dead in a gas-filled room in New York City; near his body was an opened bottle of sleeping pills. He was forty-two years old. Dean considered his last mission a personal failure, and his suicide was apparently prompted by despair at his inability to determine a way to meet the tragic situation in Italian Somaliland.
William Henry Dean is remembered as a prominent African American ecomonist, who overcame racial discrimination and hardships to excel academically at some of the most prestigious universities in the United States. In Haiti and Somaliland he used his expertise in economics to improve the quality of life for local people. Dean was also one of the first African Americans to receive a Ph. D. in economics.
Colleagues referred to Dean as a tireless worker, a person of exacting standards, a perfectionist, and a brilliant economic theorist.
According to W. M. Brewer, Dean left a legacy of "warm friendships, genuine loyalties, and gracious modesty. "
Quotes from others about the person
Dean's friend and associate Ralph J. Bunche noted: "It is enough to recall that to maintain the high standards he set for himself, he demanded too much of his body and mind. "
Dean's father-in-law wrote: "Bill was a victim of his own conscientiousness. "
On Thanksgiving Day, 1936, Dean married Mary Pritchard Tobias in New York City. She was from Savannah, Georgia, the daughter of Channing H. Tobias, who, as a leader in the Young Men's Christian Association and the Phelps-Stokes Foundation and a member of various federal commissions, was identified in 1948 by Roi Ottley as one of "the big ten who rule Negro America. " The Deans had two children - a son, Channing, and daughter, Joyce.
