126 Culture, Identity, and Community: From Slavery to the PresentHerskovits took full aim at the myth that African Ameri-
cans essentially have no history. In addition, he addressed
the misconception that Africans were brought to America
from diverse cultures and were distributed in a manner that
destroyed their cultures. Another myth Herskovits sought
to dispel was the notion that African cultures were so savage
that European customs were actively preferred by enslaved
Africans. Th e lasting importance of his research is in high-
lighting numerous examples of Africanisms—or African
cultural retentions—in both the secular and sacred dimen-
sions of African American culture. Herskovits’s argument
was not that African Americans were Africans culturally,
but that they maintained key aspects of their African heri-
tage. Th is research helped put to rest various racist myths
and misperceptions while forwarding the notion that Af-
rican American culture was something worthy of serious
scholarly consideration.
Th e middle ground between the Annihilationist and
the Africanist schools, what has been referred to as the
Creolization school, is epitomized in the work of anthro-
pologists Sidney Mintz and Richard Price. When Mintz
and Price published Th e Birth of African-American Culture,
it was intended to critique Herskovits’s earlier fi ndings re-
garding the presence of Africanisms in African American
culture. Th ey argued that enslaved Africans shipped to the
Americas developed and created cultures and societies that
could not be characterized simply as “African.” Essentially,
the nature of the slave trade and enslavement made the
direct continuity of African culture impossible. Although
African culture may have been crucial in the creation of
African American culture, Mintz and Price contend that
it was neither central nor independent of European infl u-
ences or new cultural developments in the Americas.
Mintz and Price opposed several aspects of Herskovits’s
interpretations, from his claim of West African cultural
homogeneity to his argument that specifi c African cultural
groupings formed in the Americas. Mintz and Price con-
tend that West African culture was not monolithic and that
purposeful ethnic “randomization” actively was engaged in
by slave traders, ship captains, and plantation owners in the
Americas. Many of their conclusions are based on the prem-
ise that Atlantic Africa had vastly numerous and diverse
cultures. Although there is little doubt that cultural diff er-
ences existed in Atlantic Africa, what has been contested
by a number of scholars is the degree of this diversity. On
one end of the debate, the works of Herskovits and Josephwas from their African backgrounds. Th is approach was
later championed by E. Franklin Frazier—a former student
of Park and a fellow sociologist. As one of the fi rst black
scholars to contribute to this debate, Frazier contended in
the 1930s that slavery obliterated the black family and that
this facilitated the Americanization of slaves and the utter
annihilation of African culture in the United States. Given
the context in which his works were written, Frazier was
seeking to de-emphasize any African elements in African
American culture in order to promote such goals as in-
tegration, social equality, and voting rights. If it could be
proven that African American culture was infl uenced by
the African past, this would potentially support the claims
of white supremacists, who argued that African Americans
were inherently diff erent or inferior and should be sepa-
rated from whites as a result.
More recently, historian Jon Butler has made a contri-
bution to the Annihilationist school in his 1990 work titled
Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People.
In a chapter titled “Th e African Spiritual Holocaust,” But-
ler contends that African religious systems were completely
destroyed in North America and that this facilitated the
conversion of enslaved Africans to Christianity. Butler does
allow for certain African cultural continuities, particularly
in burial practices and conjuration. However, his focus is on
the destruction of African religious systems as opposed to
disjointed ritual acts and beliefs. Butler’s argument, in part,
rests on the fact that very few contemporary whites wrote
about the practice of African religion among slaves. Th is
invisibility of the practice of slave religion may have been a
result of purposeful acts on the part of the enslaved commu-
nity, which had good reason to prevent whites from know-
ing the inner workings of their spiritual worldview. Butler
does not account for this possibility, and his interpretation
has added additional fuel to an already heated debate.
Th e pioneering eff orts of anthropologist Melville J.
Herskovits eff ectively addressed the claims of the Anni-
hilationist school. In the 1940s, Herskovits published Th e
Myth of the Negro Past, which focused attention on the
topic of African cultural transmissions and continuities
in the Americas. He was among the fi rst in the Africanist
school, and his work sought to counter a number of myths
about Africa and the Africans residing throughout the
Western Hemisphere, in an attempt to undermine racial
prejudice in the United States. By demonstrating tangible
cultural links between Africa and diasporic communities,