M.M Tumin was a professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Princeton University whose work examined race relations. He studied at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Northwestern University. In the early 1940s, Tumin completed field work for his doctoral thesis in Guatemala. This research was later published as a book, Caste in a Peasant Society. After finishing his doctorate, Tumin worked at Wayne State University and served on the Mayor’s Commission on Race Relations in Detroit. In 1947, he moved to Princeton, where he stayed until his retirement in 1989. In 1966-67, Tumin assumed the role of President of The Society for the Study of Social Problems, and in 1969, he was named a Guggenheim fellow. He also directed a task force of the U.S. National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence and was an author of three volumes of its 1970 report Crimes of Violence. He was the author of Desegregation: Resistance and Readiness (1958), Social Class and Social Change in Puerto Rico (1961), and Social Stratification: The Forms and Functions of Inequality (1967).
Tumin’s lecture was held in November 1967.