Educational Media Reviews Online

This fascinating and informative documentary looks at the legacy of a man who the scholar Vincent Brown affectionately refers to as the Elvis Presley of African American studies. Melville J. Herskovits, whose wife Frances collaborated with him in his fieldwork, published his first book, The American Negro in 1927, but it was his 1941 groundbreaking and controversial book The Myth of the Negro Past that was a game changer. While its claim, that African Americans carry the rich culture of Africa within themselves, that it wasn’t wiped out during the Middle Passage, as many scholars had postulated, had been espoused before by W.E.B. Du Bois. But Herskovits had the data to back it up.

Melville J. Herskovits (1895-1963), born in Ohio, and raised in El Paso, Texas, was the son of Jewish immigrants. Aware of the rampant anti-Semitism and racism raging in the early 20th century, he cultivated a strong interest in social justice at a young age. After getting a philosophy degree, he pursued a doctorate in anthropology at Columbia University. There he met Franz Boas, another Jewish immigrant, who was at the forefront of ethnological race studies. Boas, notable for mentoring Zora Neale Hurston in her folklore fieldwork, went up against the prevailing racist pseudoscience, proving that there are no superior and inferior races.

Herskovits went to Africa, as well as Haiti, Trinidad, and Suriname, to film, tape, and photograph cultural practices. He found African culture to be dynamic and complex, and he found many parallels and antecedents to various American cultural practices, including seed planting dancing, Georgia shouters, and Haiti vodun drumming. At this time, in the 1920s and 30s, most people believed that Africa had no classical civilization, that it was without history, that it was a place where nothing ever changed, that before the colonizers brought Christianity, its people were savages. At the same time, the Harlem Renaissance was exploding with rapturous African American artistic expression.

Herskovits’ legacy is not without controversy. He butted heads with Du Bois, calling him a propagandist whose belief in social engineering and whose desire to change society was misguided. The African American sociologist,Franklin Frazier, publicly denounced Herskovits’ theories, saying they could be used to keep segregation alive. While Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale and other black militants were inspired by The Myth of the Negro Past, Herskovits is portrayed as somewhat of an academic opportunist who wasn’t always hospitable to black scholars. And some still feel that, like Elvis, he appropriated, popularized, and ultimately overshadowed the work of black scholars.

Although Herskovits had long disparaged working in the political arena, when in 1961, President John F. Kennedy recruited him to head up the newly formed Burean of African Affairs, he was ready to accept the position. However, The House of Un-American Activities claimed that he was a member of several organizations that had communist leanings, and he was ultimately rejected.

Historical archival film footage, still photographs and animation are edited beautifully to keep the visuals interesting, however, it would have been good to hear more of the referenced hundred hours of audio. Herskovits’ historian/professor daughter Joan Herskovits Corry, as well as a handful of eminent scholars, including Herskovits’ former student Johnnetta Cole, J.Anthony Appiah, and most pervasively Vincent Brown, narrate.

In 1927, Herskovits began the first African studies program anywhere at Northwestern University, his emphasis on cultural relativism and the evils of decolonization. When Nazism began to rear its very ugly head, Herskovits compared the Nazi agenda to that of white missionary colonists in Africa.

Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness is required viewing for anyone interested in African American culture, the sociopolitical history of race issues in America, the connection between the Jewish immigrant’s experience of belonging in America to that of the African American’s, and a white Jewish man who bridged the gap.

Awards

• Winner, 2009 John O'Connor Film Award of the American Historical Association
• Winner, Best Documentary, Hollywood Black Film Festival