At a recent Committee to Eliminate Media Offensive to African People (CEMOTAP) panel discussion about the legacy and contributions of the late Dr. S. Allen Counter, considerable attention was given to his explorations to Greenland and Surinam. On the venture to Surinam, the polymath doctor was accompanied by David L. Evans, an electrical engineer, but other than noting this, little else was said about Evans.
This is an attempt to bring Evans out of the immense shadow of his companion, although there is no absolute certainty that the man profiled is actually who we think he is—that is, in several articles about him, none of them note anything about his travel with Counter. Still, there is, as they say, enough circumstantial information to suggest he is, and if it isn’t who we think he is, this Evans will suffice.
Most of the evidence compiled here comes from his trip with Counter, who in the introduction of his book I Sought My Brother explains how Evans took the journey with him. More accurately, the account here was taken from the book’s introduction by Alex Haley, who studied their trip as a way to chart his own course of research for his book, Roots.
“When I first heard about a pair of black scholars from Harvard University—S. Allen Counter, a neuro-biologist, and David L. Evans, an electrical engineer—who had traveled deep into a jungle expanse of Surinam, South America, where few other outsiders had ever been, I heard with a thrill that they had visited the villages of a black bush people representing some three centuries of unmixed African descent—a bush people who had retained their ancestral African culture to such a dramatic degree that an equal could not easily be found today even in Africa itself,” Haley wrote.
After failing to convince any of his colleagues to join him, Counter heard from an old friend, Evans, then a senior admissions officer at Harvard. “For many years I’d known David as a veritable storehouse of knowledge on U.S. black history and culture, and his developing interest in my project was related to his general interest in Afro-American culture,” Counter said. “We found ourselves discussing the lives and stories of our grandparents and thought it interesting that neither my great-grandmother, who lived to be close to 100[,] nor his grandmother, who had died a few years later at 103, had to our knowledge retained any African language or culture. Yet they had known ex-slaves who had been brought directly from Africa during their lifetimes.
“David began reading material about the early Afro-Americans and their struggles against slavery,” Counter continued. “One night he announced that he would join me on the expedition but could only stay for two months. I was delighted to have found a person with such a profound sensitivity for the plight of Afro-American people, one who understood our desperate need for positive identities.”
According to an interview at HistoryMakers, Evans said he was born on December 27, 1939, in Wabash, Arkansas, to Letha Canada and William Evans. In 1962, he received a B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Tennessee Agricultural & Industrial State College and M.S.E degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 1966—among the first African Americans to earn such a degree.
His first stop with his new degree was the Boeing Company in Seattle and later, he worked for several months as an engineer at Lockheed Missiles and Space in Huntsville, Alabama. From 1967 to 1968, he was part of a team assigned to work on the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) at Grumman Aircraft Engineering. While helping to launch Apollo 11, Evans was also starting a college recruiting and placement service for young African Americans that gained national attention, including administrators at Harvard.
As a volunteer tutor, Evans quickly recognized that the students needed much more than his counseling. “I wrote to 60 or 70 colleges with my background and said, ‘I think some of these people may qualify for your institution,’” Evans told HistoryMakers. That outlet said, “The first two he counseled got into Princeton’s Class of 1973. Others were accepted at Smith, Brandeis, Columbia, Stanford, Dartmouth, Morehouse, Amherst, Chicago, and more. MIT and the College Board reached out to talk to Evans about working for them.”
In 1971, at Princeton, Evans helped found the Association of Black Admissions and Financial Aid Officers of Ivy League and Sister Schools. “It was a Black group that said ‘we will not only do our regular job but also serve as emissaries to keep inclusion and diversity in the minds of our colleagues,’” he said, noting that Harvard allowed him to improvise, so he was able to secure even more minority students for the colleges.
From this commitment and innovative thinking, Evans accumulated numerous honors and awards. In 1990, he was named the 311th of President George H.W. Bush’s “Thousand Points of Light” for his community service work in Boston. Evans also received Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ top prize for administrative service in 2002. A year later, the Harvard Black alumni endowed the David L. Evans Scholarship Fund, which has raised more than $1 million to date. Evans was inducted into the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame in 2005.
All of these amazing achievements are often discussed without mentioning the dangers he and Counter faced during their adventure into the heart of the rainforest of South America.