Dr. Melville J. Herskovits

Melville Jean Herskovits was born to Jewish immigrants in Bellefontaine, Ohio in 1895. After serving in the United States Army Medical Corps in France during World War I, he went to college, earning a Bachelor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago in 1923. Herskovits went on to New York City for graduate work, earning his masters and Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia University. Anthropology was still in its early years of being developed as a formal field of study. Dr. Herskovits had a passion in exploring the African culture. His dissertation, “The Cattle Complex in East Africa”, investigated theories of power and authority in Africa as expressed in the ownership and raising of cattle. In East Africa, cattle ownership represented wealth.

In 1927, Dr. Herskovits moved to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois as a full-time anthropologist. There he began to study how some aspects of African culture and traditions were expressed in African American culture. In 1928 and 1929 he and his wife Frances Herskovits did field work in Suriname, among the Saramaka (then called Bush Negroes) and wrote a book about the people.

The ancestors of the Saramaka were among those Africans sold as slaves to the Dutch in Suriname. They came from a variety of West and Central African countries, speaking many different languages. They fought for nearly 100 years for their independence. In 1762, a 100 years before the official emancipation of slaves in Suriname, the Saramaka won their freedom and signed a treaty with the Dutch Crown to acknowledge their territorial rights and trading privileges. Until the mid-20th century, the Saramaka lived like a state within Suriname.

In 1934, Dr. Herskovits and his wife Frances spent more than three months in the Haitian village of Mirebalais, the findings of which research he published in his 1937 book “Life in a Haitian Valley”. In its time, this work was considered one of the most accurate depictions of the Haitian practice of Vodou. He meticulously detailed the lives and Vodou practices of Mirebalais residents. They then conducted field work in Benin, Brazil, Ghana, Nigeria, and Trinidad.

In 1938, Dr. Herskovits established the new Department of Anthropology at Northwestern and in 1948, he founded the first major interdisciplinary American program in African studies at Northwestern University, with aid of a three-year, $30,000 grant from the Carnegie Foundation, followed by a five-year $100,000 grant from the Ford Foundation in 1951. The Program of African Studies was the first at a United States academic institution. The goals of the program were to “produce scholars of competence in their respective subjects, who will focus the resources of their special fields on the study of aspects of African life relevant to their disciplines.”

Dr. Herskovits wrote the book “The Myth of the Negro Past” in 1941. It is about African cultural influences on African Americans. In the book, he rejects the notion that African Americans lost all traces of their past when they were taken from Africa and enslaved in America. He traced numerous elements expressed in the contemporary African American culture that could be traced to African cultures. Dr. Herskovits emphasized race as a sociological concept, not a biological one and helped forge the concept of cultural relativism, the principle of regarding the beliefs, values, and practices of a culture from the viewpoint of that culture itself.

After World War II, Dr. Herskovits publicly advocated independence of African nations from the colonial powers. At the time, 58 countries were controlled by colonial powers. He strongly criticized American politicians for viewing African nations as objects of Cold War strategy. During this time, Dr. Herksovits served on the Mayor's Committee on Race Relations in Chicago. His job was to evaluate race relations and devise ways of addressing civic concerns. Then from 1959 – 1960, he served on the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

In 1954, The Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies at Northwestern University was established in his honor. It is the largest separate Africana collection in the world. To date, it contains more than 260,000 bound volumes, including 5,000 rare books, more than 3,000 periodicals, journals and newspapers, archival and manuscript collections, 15,000 books in 300 different African languages, extensive collections of maps, posters, videos and photographs, as well as electronic resources.

Dr. Melville Herskovits died in Evanston, Il in 1963. Six years before his passing, he founded the African Studies Association and was the organization's first president. The ASA is currently the leading organization of African Studies in North America with scholars and professionals in the United States and Canada. Annually the ASA gives the Herskovits Award for the best scholarly work on Africa.