Person

Melville J. Herskovits

Melville J. Herskovits (10 September 1895 to 25 February 1963) was an American anthropologist, a student of Franz Boas, and a pioneer of African studies in the United States. At Northwestern University he established the Department of Anthropology in 1938 and the Program of African Studies in 1948, which Wikipedia describes as "the first of its kind at a United States academic institution." His best-known book, The Myth of the Negro Past (1941), argued against the belief that enslaved Africans in America lost their whole cultural inheritance. That put him in a long debate with the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, and the debate still frames the question of what slavery did to African religion.

Life and career

Herskovits was born in Bellefontaine, Ohio, and died in Evanston, Illinois. Wikipedia records a Bachelor of Philosophy from the University of Chicago (1920) and an M.A. and Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University under Franz Boas. He joined Northwestern as a full-time anthropologist in 1927. His other books include The Cattle Complex in East Africa and Man and His Works: The Science of Cultural Anthropology (1948). He also helped develop the concept of cultural relativism.

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The Myth of the Negro Past (1941)

Harper and Brothers published the book in 1941 as part of the Carnegie Corporation's study of the American Negro. Wikipedia summarizes its thesis: African Americans "had retained their heritage from Africa in music, art, social structure, family life, religion, and speech patterns." The "myth" of the title is the belief that the enslaved arrived with nothing worth keeping and kept nothing. The book traces continuities between African and African American cultures, which came to be called Africanisms.

Herskovits's motive was anti-racist: he believed that recovering the depth of African cultures was necessary to combat American racism. The book nonetheless raised a worry, which Wikipedia records, that segregationists might use it to argue that Black Americans could not assimilate.

The debate with Frazier

Frazier held that the African past was largely lost under American slavery; Herskovits held that a great deal survived. James E. Blackwell's summary in The Black Community (1985), reproduced by the New Jersey State Library, puts the two positions side by side. Herskovits and those who followed him held that "in spite of the harshness of slavery and its deliberate efforts to dispossess blacks of their cultural past, a black culture has survived in America." Frazier replied that Herskovits overstated the case and that the African past was gradually "sloughed off." Blackwell's key observation: "The disagreement between Frazier and Herskovits is not so much over kind as degree."

Albert J. Raboteau's Slave Religion (1978) took a middle position on the religious side of the debate: African religions died as whole systems in the United States, but their fragments survived and shaped a Christianity the enslaved built for themselves.

Apologetic relevance

Against "Africans were stripped of their religion." If Herskovits is right, the premise of the objection is false: African religious elements were not erased, and the faith of enslaved Black Christians carried African forms within it. The codex's account of Hush Harbors already notes that call-and-response, ecstatic prayer and embodied worship carried older African patterns into Black Christian worship.

But the objection fails if he is wrong, too. If Frazier is right instead, then the Christianity that replaced the lost religions was built by the enslaved, in secret, against the masters' wishes. The objection needs the enslaved to have been both stripped bare and passively filled, and neither scholar gives it both. See Christianity Spread Only by the Sword Objection Defeater.

A caution. Herskovits's survivals cut more than one way. Where African religious elements did survive, how they relate to Christian faith is a real question about syncretism for churches to address, not a point for either side to wave away. See African Traditional Deities (Demonic).

Common questions this page answers

Q: Who was Melville J. Herskovits?

An American anthropologist (1895 to 1963), trained under Franz Boas at Columbia, who founded the Program of African Studies at Northwestern University in 1948, the first of its kind at an American university. He is best known for The Myth of the Negro Past (1941).

Q: What is The Myth of the Negro Past about?

It argues that enslaved Africans and their descendants in America did not lose all of their African heritage, and that African elements survived in music, art, social structure, family life, religion and speech. These continuities came to be called Africanisms.

Q: What was the Frazier-Herskovits debate?

A long scholarly argument over how much African culture survived slavery in the United States. E. Franklin Frazier held that the African past was largely lost; Herskovits held that much of it survived. Sociologist James E. Blackwell observed that they disagreed more over degree than kind.

Q: Does Herskovits's work support the claim that slaves were stripped of their religion?

No. His whole thesis is that African traditions were not erased. And if Frazier is right instead, the Christianity that replaced those traditions was built by the enslaved in secret worship against their masters' wishes. Either way, the picture of a people stripped bare and passively handed the master's faith does not hold.