Arthur F. Raper

Arthur Franklin Raper (8 November 1899 – 10 August 1979) was an American sociologist.

Raper grew up in Davidson County, North Carolina and attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He received an M.A. in Sociology from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. In 1925, he started a PhD at Chapel Hill, under the direction of Howard W. Odum, and completed it in 1931. He is best known for his research on lynching, sharecropping, and rural development.

In 1926, he worked for the Commission on Interracial Cooperation with Will W. Alexander in Atlanta, Georgia. He later taught at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia. In 1939, he resigned after a furor over taking his students to visit the Tuskegee Institute. He studied and wrote about sharecropping in Macon County and Greene County. He exposed sharecropping as exploitative. His papers are in the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Library; four of his books were reviewed by the New York Times (the reviews can be found in their archives).