In 1927, when Melville Jean Herskovits became Northwestern University’s first anthropologist, there wasn’t much scholarly interest in the African roots of black American culture. The few people thinking about it assumed those roots had been lost when Africans were ripped from their homelands and sold into slavery. As W.E.B. DuBois noted, the prevailing opinion early in this century held that “the Negro has no history.”
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Born in Ohio in 1895 (to a woman who had just read Moby-Dick), Herskovits was a rabbinical school dropout who began studying history when he was stranded in France after serving in World War I. He got an undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago, then went to Columbia University, where he fell under the spell of Boas, the nation’s preeminent anthropologist. While Herskovits was at Columbia he also met Frances Shapiro, who would be his lifelong collaborator; they married in 1924.
Over the next 15 years he and Frances traveled, conducted field research, and wrote together, producing a body of work that traced the survival of African culture in Suriname, Haiti, Trinidad, Brazil, and the United States. Their collaborative efforts also produced a daughter, Jean Frances, born in 1935 and promptly integrated into their fieldwork team. Now a professor of history at the State University of New York at Purchase, Jean remembers her parents’ persistence in the field, citing as an example a trip to Brazil. “We got there in September ’41, and of course Pearl Harbor was in December. In Rio, before we ever got to Bahia, my father had his first heart attack. He was only 46. They went ahead anyway. Those were not days when you could get grants so easily that you just threw it all over and went home.”
–Deanna Isaacs
