This Day in Jewish History | 1963: The White Jewish Father of African Studies Dies

Melville Herskovits didn’t buy the anthropomorphic theories that blacks were inferior. He went to Africa – and disproved the tenet that black Americans had no cultural past.

Before getting his first regular academic appointment, at Northwestern in 1927, Herskovits took work doing anthropometric studies of African Americans. It was a time when biological theories still prevailed in anthropology, informed by an underlying belief that blacks were genetically inferior.

Herskovits didn’t buy it, and used the research money available, from the National Research Council, to conduct studies that led him to conclude that American blacks had a diverse enough racial heritage – i.e., enough mixed blood – that genetics couldn’t serve as the basis for any broad generalizations about them.