Tumin, Melvin Marvin
TUMIN, MELVIN MARVIN
TUMIN, MELVIN MARVIN (1919–1994), U.S. sociologist. Born in Newark, New Jersey, Tumin first taught at Wayne State University, Detroit, and from 1947 was professor of sociology and anthropology at Princeton. Tumin specialized in race and intercultural relations. His book Desegregation: Resistance and Readiness (1958), based on survey data from Guilford County, North Carolina, is a careful account of a white population's attitude toward the American black.
Among his other works are Social Class and Social Change in Puerto Rico (1961), Education, Social Class and Intergroup Attitudes in England, France and Germany (1964), Social Stratification: The Forms and Functions of Inequity (1967), Patterns of Society (1973), and Caste in a Peasant Society (1975). In all these investigations, Tumin emphasized the correlation between social structure and intergroup attitudes. He was a consultant on race and intergroup relations to the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, for which he wrote An Inventory and an Appraisal of Research on American Anti-Semitism (1961) and edited Race and Intelligence: An Evaluation (1963). Tumin also edited The Research Annual on Intergroup Relations of the a.d.l.
[Werner J. Cahnman]