Bibliography
Roses, Lorraine Elena, and Ruth Elizabeth Randolph.
Harlem Renaissance and Beyond: Literary Biographies
of 100 Black Women Writers, 1900–1945.Boston: G.
K. Hall & Co., 1990.
Herskovits, Melville Jean (1895–1963)
The scholar credited as being the first Africanist in
the United States and the founder of the field of
African-American studies. Born in Ohio, he com-
pleted a tour with the medical corps during World
War I before turning to anthropological studies. He
graduated from the UNIVERSITY OFCHICAGOin
1920 with a degree in history. Like ZORANEALE
HURSTON, Herskovits studied anthropology at
COLUMBIAUNIVERSITYwith the renowned scholar
FRANZBOASduring the 1920s. He completed his
Ph.D. in 1923. One year later, he married Frances
Shapiro, a student at the New School for Social
Research in New York City, where he was pursuing
additional studies. In 1925, Herskovits joined the
anthropology department at HOWARD UNIVER-
SITY, where he worked alongside such scholars as
Ralph Bunche and E. FRANKLINFRAZIER. In 1927,
he joined the sociology department at Northwest-
ern University. It was there in 1948 that he estab-
lished the first African-American studies program
in the United States. He went on to become the
first president of the African Studies Association,
an organization that he helped to establish in the
1950s.
Herskovits is best known for his challenges to
claims that African culture was primitive. In addi-
tion to maintaining the fact that African culture
had an extremely influential impact on African-
American life and identity, Herskovits advanced
the notion that Africanisms had permeated white
culture too. His theses generated controversy
among those who believed that his ideas suggested
that people of African descent were unable to as-
similate fully into other cultures. Others embraced
his arguments, based on impressive and extensive
fieldwork here and throughout African countries
such as Benin, GHANA, and Nigeria, as well as
Suriname, Brazil, and HAITI.
Herskovits enjoyed a prominent role in and
connection to the Harlem Renaissance. OPPORTU-
NITYeditor CHARLESS. JOHNSONfeatured Her-
skovits’s work regularly in the Urban League
monthly periodical. His essay “The Dilemma of
Social Patterns” began the section entitled “Black
and White: Studies in Race Contacts” in the best-
selling March 1925 SURVEY GRAPHICissue that
was devoted to African-American issues and
edited by ALAINLOCKE. Herskovits used the arti-
cle to chronicle his travels through Harlem and his
conclusions about African-American acculturation
and the powerful universal dimensions of African-
American experience. Having surrendered to the
“the whirring cycle of life” in Harlem, he quickly
began to ask “Where, then, is the ‘peculiar’ com-
munity of which I had heard so much?” before
concluding that “the Negro has become accultur-
ated to the prevailing white culture and has devel-
oped the patterns of culture typical of American
life.” Alain Locke’s editorial preface to the article
assured readers that “what Mr. Herskovits calls
‘complete acculturation’... speaks well both for
the Negro and for American standards of living
that this is so.”
In 1927, Herskovits was a highly regarded par-
ticipant in the Fourth Pan-African Congress. The
meeting, held in New York City and led by W. E. B.
DUBOISand RAYFORD LOGAN, benefited much
from the organizational efforts of the NATIONAL
ASSOCIATION OF COLORED WOMEN and the
Women’s International Circle for Peace and For-
eign Relations, led by ADDIEHUNTONand Annie
Dingle. One of the last sessions of the four-day
meeting featured Herskovits and William Hans-
berry, the two contemporary American scholars
most knowledgeable about African anthropology.
Herskovits was an influential academic figure
for scholar-artists such as Zora Neale Hurston and
Katherine Dunham. Dunham, a University of
Chicago student, had the opportunity to study
with Herskovits at Northwestern before her impor-
tant anthropological field trips to the West Indies.
It was he who recommended that Dunham travel
to Jamaica to study the Maroons. Her trip coin-
cided with Hurston’s GUGGENHEIMFELLOWSHIP–
funded field research of that population.
One of Herskovits’s most well-documented
connections to the Harlem Renaissance resulted
from his association with fellow anthropologist Zora
Neale Hurston. She conducted her first anthropo-
logical research under the supervision of Boas and234 Herskovits, Melville Jean