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Anthropology and the Black Experience

St. Clair Drake
Published online: 14 Apr 2015.

To cite this article: St. Clair Drake (1980) Anthropology and the Black Experience, The Black Scholar:
Journal of Black Studies and Research, 11:7, 2-31

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 ANTHROPOLOGYANDTHE
BLACK EXPERIENCE
he Black Experience in North
T America covers a time-span of
about 360 years, and the primary contact
Downloaded by [New York University] at 07:08 08 June 2015
of Africans and their descendants has
been with a variety of Europeans and
their descendants. Secondary, but signif-
icant, have been relations at some peri-
ods with Amerindians and ··colored" im-
migrants from Asia. Miscegenation and
acculturation have gone on, as in all con-
tact situations, conditioned by social sys-
tems imposing varying degrees of sepa-
ration from, and subordination by, the
power-holding elites.
For the first 246 years, in what is now
the United States, slavery was the domi-
nant form of oppression to which the
masses of black people were subjected;
and some social anthropologists have de-
fined the social system that evolved after
slavery as being either a caste/class
system of an ethnic/class system. 1
However the structure of relations is
defined, the oppressive and exploitative
system has been supported by an ideol-
ogy of white racism, the dogma that black
people are inherently inferior in intellect
and in type of temperament and person-
ality to white people. During the ear~y
years of the 19th century, as individuals
calling themselves ethnologists and phys-
ical anthropologists began to publish,
they lent pseudo-scientific support to the
racist dogmas that defended slavery.
PAGE2 THE BLACK SCHOLAR
by St. Clair Drake
When anthropology emerged as an aca-
demic discipline and a profession during
the 1890s, its mainstream incorporated
Darwinist views that reinforced the con-
clusions of comparative anatomy that Af-
ricans and people of African descent were
inferior, weaving the new Mendelian
genetics into the argument. Ethnograph-
ic data from Africa were used to support
contentions that sub-Saharan cultures
were "retarded" and/or "degenerate." 2
Shortly before the turn of the century,
racist dogmas were challenged by an-
thropologist Franz Boas who was begin-
ning his career in the United States after
emigration from Germany. 3
Anthropology had been considered an
"enemy" by the small but growing group
of Afro-American intellectuals that had
come into existence by the turn of the
century, much as African intellectuals
have tended to consider the discipline an
adjunct to oppressive colonialism. 4 Boas,
however, won the trust and respect of
those educated blacks who were carrying
on the two-century old task of what they
called "racial vindication." There were
no anthropologists in their own ranks,
however, until the 1920s when two pio-
neers emerged-Caroline Bond Day 5
and Zora Neale Hurston. 6 The number
increased during the next decade.
Establishment anthropologists fought
Boas bitterly, but his department at Co~
SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1980
 Downloaded by [New York University] at 07:08 08 June 2015

,.;j
ANTHROPOUOGYANDTHEBLACKEXPDUENCE
~ Periods in
1:11
System of Afro-American Relations 1 Role of Anthropology in Black Participation in the Discipline
!;: Black South Race Relations USA Haiti Africa
North
~ History
1970-present Transitional System Ethnic/Class Critique of the "Culture of Black caucus in Participation in
~ (10 years) Expanded Black po- Rise in use of Poverty" concept and of caste/ AAA becomes Asso- Leakey Institute
Incipient litical participation Marxist analysis class analysis ciation of Black in Kenya
5 Depression Anthropologists

{II
!Ill

~ 1965-70 Transitional System Ethnic/Class Critique of the Shockley-Jensen- Post-1965 group Institute of African
= (5 years) Voter Registration Emphasis on Black I.Q. racism. (n.b. UlfHannertz' of Black Studies at University
Black. Power Act and aftermath; Nationalism Soul Side.) Anthropologists of Liberia
~
1:11 Upsurge school desegregation
....
~
=
QD
0

1953-1965 Caste/Class Ethnic/Class Kenneth Little, Banton, et al., in Ford Africa Area Folklore collection
(13years) Caste-system disin- Rise in Black Con- Britain; Ashley Montagu; in- Group (since 1953) at University of
Civil Rights tegrating under im- sciousness and in tercultural education in United Vera Green, Liberia
Movement pact of Civil Rights Pan-African States Charles Warren
Movement relations

1941-1952 Caste/Class Ethnic/Class Ruth Benedict and Ashley- "Pioneer" Kofi Busia in Ghana,
( 11 years) NAACP & Federal March on Washing- Montagu lead anti-racist Individuals Ph.D., in Social
World War II Government begin ton (1941) inaugu- forces; increasing interest in Hugh Smythe Anthropology from
&Post-War desegregation drive; rates Black. mass social action; UNESCO studies St. Clair Drake Oxford
Prosperity resistance to Black action
Emmanual C. Paul
political participation
Remy Bastien
~
loll Denis Lorimer, et al.
 Downloaded by [New York University] at 07:08 08 June 2015

., -

> 1930-1940 Caste/Class Ethnic/Class Controversy between Radcliffe- Jacques Roumain

C'l ( lO years) Brown social anthropologists Jean Price-Mars
!01 Communists chal- Racism challenged
and American Historical School Fran~,:ois Duavlier
"" "Depression" lenge "separate but by Communist Party, and Bureau of
CIO and New Deal with Warner, a Radcliffe-Brown
equal"; liberals in- Ethnology
as part of "anti- student, beginning community
crease efforts for Suzanne Sylvain
Fascist" movement studies in U.S. caste/class model.
equalization
Boasians lead anti-racism split
between Boasians and racists Irene Diggs Jomo Kenyatta's
over immigration policy and Allison Davis Facing Mt. Kenya
biological determinism; Mali- [Montague Cobb]* (numerous infor-
nowski and students supplying [Lorenzo Turner]** mants for European
rationale for "indirect role" Mark Hanna anthropologists in
and enlightened mission work Watkins Africa]
1920-1929 Caste/Class Ethnic/Class Zora Neale
(9 years) White liberals es- Black Nationalist Hurston (folklore)
pouse interracial co- challenge as racism Caroline Bond
"Prosperity"
operation to make increases; market Day (Physical
"separate" equal; for Afro-American Anthropology)
~
::c!01 "romantic racialism" exotica (art, litera-
Ill prevalent ture, music)
!;:
(') 1866-1919 Poly genesis, retardation and
Caste/Class Ethnic/Class Use of anthropol- Some ethnology by
II':
(54 years) Supported by racist degeneration theories about ogy in "vindication" Blyden, et al., at
[t5 Supported by racist
::c Reconstruction dogma; opposed by dogma; occasional blacks popular; Hamitic Myth arguments by University of Liberia
0 &Aftermath "separate but used to support imperialism in DuBois, et al.
"race riots"; liberal!
equal" liberals Africa. Biological determinism
black protest
5 rampant. By 1900 Franz Boas
challenging racists.
til
!01
~
!01
1619-1865 Slavery justified with Mild form of slavery; "American School of Ethnol- Expedition to
(246 years) anti-Black racist class-stratified. Free ogy" provides pseudo-scientific Nigeria by Dr.
~!01
Indentured ideology which was Negro group; in- support for racial slavery (n.b. Martin Delaney in
11:1 very strong after tense racism among Nott & Glidden). 1850s
Servitude
and Slavery 1830; occasional white workers
8 rebellions
0
Ill
!:
10 1
QD
- Classification based on discussion in St. Clair Drake, "The * Medical doctor doing some publishing in Physical
Q
Social and Economic Status of the Negro in the United States," Anthropology. ** English professor interested in linguistics and folklore.
Daedalus, Fall 1965.
 lumbia managed to train many of the
next generation's most distinguished an-
thropologists including Ruth Benedict,
Margaret Mead and Melville Herskovits.
Then, the anti-Facist mood of the 1930s
created a favorable climate for a victory
of the idea of the "Boasians." Overt
racist propaganda and theories of bio-
logical determinism virtually disappeared
from American social science textbooks.
The media generally spread "environ-
mentalist" as opposed to genetic explana-
tions of "undesirable" group behavior
widely.
A fter World War II, UNESCO car-
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l""l.ried out an international campaign
against racism in which anthropologists
played an important part, as they did in
programs for "intercultural education"
and "Intergroup education" in the
United States. 7
Afro-American leaders welcomed the
activities of the progressive anthropolo-
gists and supported various kinds of pro-
grams fostering inter-racial co-operation,
but concentrated their efforts on the ac-
tivities of their own organizations that
were fighting against second class citizen-
ship, such as the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People, the
African Methodist Episcopal Church and
the A.M.E. Zion Church, as well as some
of the black Baptist groups; the Ameri-
can Council on Human Rights which lob-
bied in Washington and was financed by
the Greek letter fraternities and soror-
ities; the Independent Benevolent Pro-
tective Order of Elks; the Prince Hall
Masons; and various ad hoc local groups.
The N.A.A.C.P. was concentrating upon
test cases carried before the Supreme
Court in an assault upon legal sanctions
for segregation and discrimination on
public carriers, in public educational in-
stitutions, and against the enforcement
of restrictive covenants in housing. Most
blacks accepted allies where they could
THE BLACK SCHOLAR. SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1980
find them despite the redbaiting of the
House Un-American Activities Commit-
tee.
Afro-Americans who wished to use
their college training in the fight against
racism tended to choose law, social work,
political science, sociology, and econom-
ics-not anthropology-when making
career choices during the thirties and
forties. Those with less "practical" hu-
manistic interests took literature and his-
tory. No efforts were made to recruit
blacks into anthropology departments,
although there were few among the 300-
odd departments that did not consider
themselves "liberal" in the field of race
relations. This was to some extent a ques-
tion of "placement." What could a black
man or woman with a degree in anthro-
pology do? No more than three black
institutions taught the subject regularly
and white universities, museums, and re-
search institutes rarely employed blacks.
That more Afro-American students
could be interested in this field became
clear, however, when, after 1953, the
Ford Foundation announced an African
Area Training Fellowship Program. It
became even more apparent when a
broader range of fellowships for ethnics
became available in the 1960s and some
university departments began to encour-
age Afro-Americans to apply.
In 1980 there are less than one hun-
dred Afro-Americans who hold a mas-
ter's or Ph.D. degree in anthropology.
Up to 1945 when World War II ended,
only ten Afro-Americans had secured
professional training in anthropology,
and as recently as 1965, 20 years later,
there were no more than six employed as
full-time anthropologists.
This small but significant increase has
taken place concurrently with three im-
portant changes in the black experience
and in American race relations: (a) a dra-
matic increase in the number of black
students enrolled in colleges and univer-
PAGES
 sities where an undergraduate major in
anthropology is possible or an M.A. or
Ph.D. in the field is offered; (b) consider-
able expansion of employment possibili-
ties on college and university faculties
due to Affirmative Action programs and
to ecological changes that have increased
the number of predominantly-black
community colleges; (c) a shift in values
among many young black Americans
away from interest in "integration·· to-
ward developing black communities and
black institutions, and toward cultivating
values that have arisen out of the black
experience. This latter tendency, of ne-
cessity, includes a refusal to think of black
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communities as "laboratories" of the
black experience useful for testing other
people's "scientific" hypotheses, or to
play the role of "informants" in the eth-
nographic enterprise. It encourages the
study of black communities and institu-
tions by blacks themselves. 11
On the other hand there are points of
contact with the new "radical anthropol-
ogy" which rejects "culture of poverty"
explanations of current behavior pat-
terns among Afro-Americans and calls
for "studying up" instead of having Cau-
casians concentrating only upon "the na-
tives:· The "natives" everywhere-in the
internal colonies of Europe, Britain and
the Americas as well as the overseas colo-
nies-are now insisting upon participa-
tion as equals in the processes of ethno-
graphic recording, analysis and interpre-
tation, and in the writing and teaching
about themselves-and the colonizers.
l'o;ew perspectives are likely to open up
for creative collaboration between white
radical anthropologists and Third World
anthropologists that now can only be
dimly glimpsed at. 9
THE ROOTS OF RACISM
Anthropology as an academic disci-
pline is a 19th century "invention" that
PAGE6 THE BLACK SCHOLAR
brought together a wide range of schol-
arly endeavors around certain basic
problems. Some of these were by no
means new, for instance, an attempt to
discover the causes and significance of
anatomical and cultural differences be-
tween human groups. The folklore of
many non-literate peoples reveals a simi-
lar interest, and the Western world was
familiar with some of the Near Eastern
origin myths about linguistic and cul-
tural differences that became incorpor-
ated into the Old Testament. It is signifi-
cant that none of these are concerned
with what we now call "racial" differ-
ences. The Greeks and Romans, on the
other hand, combined observation, logi-
cal argument, and speculation in an ef-
fort to explain the physical differences
between themselves and the lighter peo-
ple to the north and the darker people to
the south, as well as to account f(lr the
tact that some people were "civilized ..
and some "barbarian:·
slam and Christianity inherited both
I the Judaic and the Graeco-Roman
traditions, and Arabic scholars restated
and passed on to the West the dominant
view among classical scholars that skin col-
or, hair form, and temperament of sub-
Saharan Africans was a product of in-
tense heat, while the traits of northern
peoples were due to the cold climate.
Arab scholars also perpetuated the ideas
of Galen, the one influential Greek scho-
lar who made unflattering comments
about blacks, as well as those contained in
a 6th century A.D. Talmudic legend
about Noah, the Ark, and the Flood.
This version made derogatory aesthetic
and moral appraisals by de<;laring that
Ham was guilty of sexual delinquencies
while on the Ark and that God punished
him by making him "ugly"-by turning
his color black, making his hair kinky,
and giving him "puffy" lips. His descen-
dants inherited these traits. 10
SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1980
 Neither the Talmudic story nor Ga-
len's description of"typical" sub-Saharan
Africans, nor the speculations of Greeks
and Romans, Arabs and Medieval Chris-
tians, imputed a cognitive deficit to blacks
despite ethnocentric aesthetic biases or
stereotypes about temperament. In fact,
Greek legends assigned superior intelli-
gence and special virtues of piety to the
Ethiopians. It was never said that the des-
tiny of blacks was to be slaves in perpetu-
ity (except for the Talmudic stories), nor
was mating with blacks considered im-
moral or polluting. Mixed progeny were
not called degraded and degenerate.
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Such belief were peculiar to societies aris-
ing in the New World from the 16th cen-
tury onward. These beliefs became ob-
sessive in the variety of racism that grew in
the American South. 11
With the rise of the African slave trade
and imperialist conquest in the Ameri-
cas, speculations about the meaning of
racial and cultural differences ceased to
be the relatively harmless intellectual ex-
ercises of theologians· and devotees of
natural history of whose existence the
masses of the poeple were unaware.
They became part of an ideology defend-
ing slavery that press, pulpit and public
platform propagated everywhere. Slave
dealers and plantation owners elaborat-
ed a "folk anthropology"-unchecked
generalizations about the traits of various
African ethnic groups whom they grad-
ed according to European norms of at-
tractiveness and ugliness, docility and
combativeness, and especially according
to their suitability for various kinds of
work.
Soldiers and sailors, as well as Euro-
pean indentured servants, who made the
first intimate contact with blacks, had lit-
tle to do with either the genesis or
spreading of such stereotypes. They
worked alongside them, rebelled against
oppressors in joint action, frolicked and
fornicated with them, and sometimes
THE BLACK SCHOLAll SEPTEMBER..ocTOBER 1980
married them. Blacks and whites at this
level fought and cheated each other, but
formed friendships as well. The priests in
Latin America and Africa were cultural
imperialists intent on wiping out heath-
enism, but their sole concern with pagan
bodi~s was to cover them up so they'd be
less seductive, not to speculate about the
relationship between melanin and the
quality of the soul. The historic record is
clear about the fact that dogmas of racism and
white supremm:y which later permeated whole
populations, particularly beliefs about a black
cognitive deficit, grew up not because of race
prejudice, but to justify a massive trade in
human beings that some Europeans thought
was wrong, and to defend the ''justice" of
social systems in which the fruits of labor were
being appropriated shamelessly by an exploit-
ing class. 12
European theologians, philosophers,
and people interested in "natural his-
tory" pounced avidly upon every tale that
travelers brought back from Africa, Asia,
Oceania and the Americas as they grap-
pled with an intellectual problem inherit-
ed from the Middle Ages, the elaboration
of The Great Chain of Being. Most of
them had no vested interest in the new
mercantile capitalism that was replacing
feudalism and financing New World
plantations, but they did bring cultural
and aesthetic biases to their tasks. They
used the new data-fact and fantasy-
to reinforce these biases, so Africans
were almost invariably slotted into the
chain somewhere close to gorillas and
chimpanzees. Apologists for African
slavery promptly used these new intellec-
tual products for their own ends, how-
ever innocent of such intent, the scholars
who elaborated them may have been.
By the 18th century, European taxono-
mists were clasSifying plants, animals,
and mankind into species, genera, and
varieties (races). Some of the schemes
were very eurocentric and hierarchical,
some less so, but all were biased against
PAGE7
 blacks. Such taxonomic speculation had
been a relatively harmless exercise in
classical antiquity and throughout the
world of Islam because slavery had never
been confined to one variety of mankind,
and the barbarism vs. civilization contrast
had never been defined in racial terms.
Now, in the Americas all slaves were non-
white and eventually all were black. None
were allowed to rise into positions of high
honor and influence.· What began as an
interest in taxonomy developed into
studies of paleontology, human evolu-
tion and comparative anatomy with all
tending to justify a differential allocation
of power to non-whites. Physical anthro-
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pology was born in this milieu. 13
American anthropology developed
concurrently with the conquest of the In-
dians and their confinement on reserva-
tions, the massive importation of Afri-
cans for slave labor, and the develop-
ment, after slavery, of a system of racial
segregation and discrimination. It was
influenced by British and European an-
thropology which had developed earlier
within a context of imperial domination
in the Caribbean, Oceania, and Asia.
During the 18th century, Cuvier and a
number of other French and German
scholars developed concepts as well as
instruments of measurement used in
comparative anatomy of the living and of
fossil finds. By the end of the century
their work was providing an aura of sci-
entific accuracy to the tables and charts
and diagrams that "proved;' Negroes to
be the most "primitive" of men and Cau-
casians the most "advanced:' 14
By the end of the 19th century Cauca-
sians themselves were being graded
into a hierarchy with Nordics at the tqp,
Mediterraneans at the bottom and Al-
pines in the middle, and nations and so'-
cial classes were being described in terms
of the proportion of Nordic (or Aryan)
inheritance they had. Cephalic indices
PAGES THE BLACK SCHOLAR
instead of color became the decisive diag-
nostic criteria for classifying Caucasoids.
Much of physical anthropology was de-
veloped as the avocation of medical doc-
tors, who along with dentists, forged the
links between measurements on fossils
and the living.
Darwinism and Mendelian genetics
added new dimensions to physical an-
thropology during the late 19th century.
By the mid-1930s Hitler's Institute of Ra-
cial Biology was specifying the varieties of
mankind slated for extermination. It is
no mystery why well into the post-war
period many Afro-American intellectu-
als considered physical anthropology sin-
ister at its worst and a waste of time at its
best. The fulminations of a Carleton
Coon, who even into the sixties was talk-
ing about a 250,000 year evolutionary
retardation of Africans, reinforced
their opinion, although Ashley Montagu
helped to offset the negative image. They
were unaware of new trends among physi-
cal anthropOlogists. 15 There was one sig-
nificant exception, Dr. William Montagu
Cobb (now 76 years of age), listed in
Who's Who in America as "anatomist and
anthropologist." As early as 1948 he was
elected Vice President of the American
Association of Physical Anthropologists
and in 195 7 president. His election was
an index to post-World War II change in
an association where Dr. Cobb has once
been in militant opposition. The kind of
cultural anthropology that grew up in
the United States concurrently with this
racist brand of physical anthropology
was at the opposite pole from the science
of man visualized by the French m-
tellectuals of the 18th century as
"ethnology." 16
They were non-racists betrayed by
their Darwinist colleagues. The "Amer-
ican School of Ethnology" that emerged
in the 1840s was dedicated to proving
that Africans were an inferior breed of
men, living in the most savage kind of
SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1980
 societies. Their enslavement was said to
have benefited them as much as it did the
masters. By this and other arguments,
American ethnology reinforced the specu-
lations of theologians intent upon prov-
ing that black skin was the sign of Cain,
and that Afro-Americans should be
slaves because Noah cursed the descen-
dants of Ham.
These American anthropologists did
not express much interest in Afro-
Americans after the abolition of slavery.
Little in their culture was exotic enough
to elicit interest, and contempt for Afri-
can cultures reinforced contempt for the
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few "Africanisms" that were thought to
be present such as "conjuring" or "inde-
cent" dancing. White educators and
home missionaries collected spirituals
while neglecting blues and work songs,
b\lt used jubilee choirs to raise money for
black schools. 17 Promoters co-opted
plantation songs and what was some-
times called "Ethiopian dancing" for pre-
sentation in commercialized form in
minstrel shows by white performers in
blackface. Not until the 1930s were black
communities studied by anthropologists
although the gathering of "Negro folk-
lore" began a decade earlier.
The Bureau of American Ethnology
and the Smithsonian Institution did not
concern themselves with Afro-Americans.
Their role was to assist in forming and
carrying out an Indian policy while the
Native Americans were being swept off
the plains and prairies and herded onto
reservations. Collecting and preserving
vestiges of their dying cultures were also
self-appointed tasks. Individual investiga-
tors, of course, may have had a genuine
interest in Indian welfare and in cultivat-
ing an appreciation for what they would
have called "the best in Indian cultures;'
but such interests had to be carried out in
collaboration with a government that was
intent on stamping out the last vestiges of
rebellion, abolishing treaty relations, and
THE BLACK SCHOLAR SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1980
turning the land over to settlers, rail-
road and mining corporations. Blacks,
on the other hand, were left to the home
missionary societies to be molded into
abstemious, docile, industrious workers,
clean, deferential and tractable.
During the latter part of the 19th cen-
tury the northern white working class,
fearful of competition from recently
freed ex-slaves, seized upon myths about
black stupidity and unreliability to rein-
force their arguments for excluding
them from artisan crafts and anything
other than the most menial jobs in in-
dustry. Racism which had always existed
in the North was now exacerbated, and
practices of segregation and discrimina-
tion were entrenched. Theories of bio-
logical determinism, along with Darwin-
ism, suffused the intellectual life of the
period and were eventually used against
European immigrants as well as blacks.
Virtually no one, black or white, ques-
tioned the idea that groups inherited var-
ied special propensities, although blacks
fought against the idea that they inherit-
ed deficient and defective mental pow-
ers. "Gifts" of musical ability, endurance,
compassion and spiritual power were
stressed by black leaders as group assets.
"Friends of the Negro" in the North
accepted the current beliefs in biological
determinism (coupled with Lamarckian-
ism), but not to justify beliefs in a cogni-
tive deficit. Quite the contrary, they be-
lieved that the ex-slaves could and should
learn whatever white people learned.
Yet, their "romantic racialism" was ac-
companied by a belief in an inherited
moral deficit-blacks were thought to be
handicapped by overdeveloped sexual
proclivities and an inclination to sloth
and laziness, and their emotion had to be
curbed so reason could develop. (Their
style of religious worship was cited as an
example.)
PAGE9
 A ll of this required special education-
~1 procedures and institutions and
the Hampton-Tuskegee prescription of
industrial education was widely popular
among philanthropic whites. (A curious
but significant footnote to the period is
the fact that General 0.0. Howard, after
whom Howard University is named, be-
came an· Indian fighter after the Civil
War as well as head of the Freedman's
Bureau, and that Hampton was selected
as a training school for Ind1ans of the
Plains as well as for blacks.) Two eminent
scholars led the struggle for new intellec-
tual approaches to ethnic and racial rela-
tions as the 19th century was ending; one
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was black, the other white.
FRANZ BOAS AND W.E.B. DUBOIS
AND BLACK PIONEERS
A special genre of intellectual activity
emerged among literate blacks in the
18th century-what might be called the
literature of"racial vindication:· Free Ne-
groes during slavery, and educated
freedmen thereafter, sought to disprove
slander, answer pejorative allegations,
and criticize pseudoscientific generaliza-
tions about Africans and people of Afri-
can descent. W.E.B. DuBois, who re-
ceived a doctorate from Harvard in His-
tory in 1896, emerged as the most articu-
late of the "defenders of the race" in the
late 19th century. 111
At this time, theories of "degeneration-
ism" were widespread, involving the be-
lief that blacks, with the firm hand of
masters gone, were reverting to savagery
and becoming weakened by a variety of
diseases. (Some saw in this a hope for
eventually achieving a "lily-white Amer-
ica:') "Mongrelization" was defined as a
more insidious evil even than black domi-
nation, and although mulattoes were
considered mentally superior to blacks,
they were also stereotyped as trouble
makers who inherited the worst traits of
both groups of ancestors.
PAGE 10 THE BLACK SCHOLAR
DuBois, like all other black intellectu-
als, judged anthropology partly in terms
of how favorable or inimical it was in the
"vindication" struggle. At the turn of the
century the discipline had to be grouped
with "the enemy" for it gave aid and com-
fort to what Richard Hofstader calls the
"mystique of Anglo-Saxonism" which
"became the chief element in American
racism in the imperial era," the period of
"Manifest Destiny" jingoism and stepped-
up oppression ofblacks. 19
In the early 20th century an influential
American anthropologist, Daniel Brin-
ton, was typical of the kind of "objective
scholar" black students had to put up with
in graduate school, and were expected to
admire. Brinton believed in Jewish genes
for aggressiveness, intellectuality, and
business acumen which he hoped inter-
marriage would eventually mix with
Anglo Saxon genes for political sagacity,
while both groups held the line absolutely
against any infiltration of black blood! A
challenge to such ideas had been brewing
for almost a decade, having been
launched in 1894 by one of the vice presi-
dents of the anthropology section of the
A.A.A.S., Franz Boas, who made what
Hofstader calls a ". . . fresh and skep-
tical address ... a cogent criticism of pre-
vailing attitudes toward the colored
races:· He challenged the assumption
that European civilizations were "high-
er" than all others, but said that even if
they were it would be due to the " ...
circumstances of their historical develop-
ment rather than to inherent capacities:'
The battle was on between the "So-
asians" a~d the anthropological main-
stream. 21 Seventeen years later Boas
published The Mind of Primitive Man
which not only argued this point but al-
so demonstrated the Boas method of de-
bate, which was simply to demand proof
instead of assertions and to use the com-
parative method to throw doubt upon
generalizations about so-called "primi-
tive" peoples.
SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1980
 Boas was an "outsider;· a German-Jew-
ish anthropologist who had been origi-
nally trained in geography and physics
and whose canons of scientific rigor were
outraged by much of what passed for
cultural and physical anthropology in
those days. After a period as a professor
at Clark University and a museum spe-
cialist in the United States he secured a
post at Columbia University and pro-
ceeded to train the anthropologists who
dominated the field for the next gener-
ation.
DuBois was developing a program in
sociology at Atlanta University and noted
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in his autobiography that not only was ·he
impressed by Boas, but also the anthro-
pologist directed his attention to study of
the Sudanic kingdoms in W~st Africa.
Between 1896 and 1913 DuBois edited
13 volumes in the Atlanta University ser-
ies. Of these, No. II, published in 1906,
contained a quotation from Boas:
An unbiased estimate of the anthropo-
logical evidence so far brought forward
does not permit us to countenance the
belief in a racial inferiority which would
unfit an individual of the Negro race to
take a part in modern civilization. We
do not know o.f any demand m~de on
the human body or mind in modern life
that anatomical or ethnological evi-
dence would prove to be beyond the
powers of the Negro .... ~~
For the next 40 years this was the "char-
ter" of the anti-racists.
DuBois commanded the respect of all
educated Afro-Americans at the time, in-
cluding Booker T. Washington who had
tried to get him to accept a research post
at Tuskegee. Atlanta University Study
No. 11 certainly must have given anthro-
pology a role in the "vindication" strug-
gle it had never had before and put the
seal of approval on Boas as a friend. The
Boas statements were always cautiously
phrased and he never stated that the evi-
dence showed that all races had equal
capacities. What he did say was that no
THE BLACK SCHOLAR SEPTEMBER.ocTOBER 1980
one had ever been able to prove that they
did not. His stand came at a time when
even small blessings were welcome, how-
ever, for the St. Louis Book and Bible
House was distributing Charles Carroll's
scurrilous book-The Negro a Bea.st But
Created With Hands and Speech That He
May Be Of Service to His Ma.ster the White
Man-as late as 1911.
This kind of theology was disappear-
ing, howeyer, and more sophisticated ra-
cists were trying to use the new upsurge of
interest in Darwinism to argue that blacks
were "closest to the ape in the evolu-
tionary tree" and that history had proved
them unfit to survive. The eugenicist
movement arose in the wake of Social Dar-
winism, and in the United States spread
alarm over the "bad stock" from southern
and eastern Europe that might "swamp"
the Anglo-Saxons, as well as implying,
hopefully, that if blacks were not coddled
they would eventually die out. Although
young sociologists and economists made
the first tentative break with Social Dar-
winism when the Progressive Movement
gathered ~omentum, historian Richard
Hofstader notes that Franz Boas led a
generation of anthropologists away from
unilinear evolutionary theory toward cul-
tural history and took pioneer steps in the
criticism of race theory .... "13
n 1911, both Boas and DuBois read
I papers at the Universal Races Con-
gress in London where the anti-racists
had gathered to clarify their thinking
and raise their morale. They met in the
citadel of the. Empire at a time when Brit-
ish anthropologists and missionaries
were elaborating the Hamitic Myth for
Africa as a counterpart to the Aryan
Myth in Europe, arguing, that is, that
wherever one found "advanced civiliza-
tion" in Africa it was due to the presence
or influence of lighter skinned Caucasoid
Hamites-not Negroes who were incap-
able of developing "civilization:' Some of
PAGE 11
 the most highly respected names in Brit-
ish anthropology were associated with
this idea. Boas had argued against it in
his writing and speaking. (Even Frobeni-
us, whom DuBois often quoted to sup-
port the view that Africans were re-
sourceful and creative, seemed to have a
similar belief.) A Nigerian at the Univer-
sal Races Congress propounded the anti-
Boasian view that West Africans were in-
herently superior to Europeans because
their cultures were more humane, artistic,
and sensitive to spiritual matters. 24 With-
in three years, World War I began with
Europeans assailing each other in derog-
atory terms that implied biological deter-
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miniSm.
In 1910, DuBois gave up his post at
Atlanta and came to New York to edit
Crisis, the organ of the newly established
National Association for the Advance-
ment of Colored People. Within a few
more years a social service organization,
the Urban League, was operating which
also began to publish .a monthly journal,
Opportunity. Its editor, black sociologist
Charles S. Johnson, was also the full-time
research director. In 1915 another Har-
vard-trained Afro-American historian,
Carter G. Woodson, assumed the "vin-
dicationist" role and organized the As-
sociation for the Study of Negro Life and
History which founded the journal ofNe-
gro History the next year. It began to at-
tract contributions from scholars of both
ra~es. Black newspapers added their
VOICe.
By the eve of America's entry into
World War I these publications had be-
come popularizers among the educated
Afro-American public of ideas espoused
by Boas and his students, which coin-
cided with ideas black leaders already
had. Boas had stated in 1898 at a very
conservative professional meeting that
anthropology had educational value:
... insofar as it broadens the historical
views of the student . . . extends his
PAGE lZ THE BLACK SCHOLAR
view over cultures and civilizations that
have grown up uninfluenced by our
own. The advances made by our own
race will appear to him in a truer light
when he is able to compare them with
the work done by other peoples and
races; and if he understands how much
our own civilization owes to the
achievements of people who appear to be
at present on a low level of culture ....
(Italics added.)
Black graduate students tended to
choose history and sociology, not anthro-
pology. They let the Boasians carry out
the research to disprove the conclusions
that Professor Bean and others drew
from slicing up brains or that Egyptol-
ogists deduced from fossils. They used
the results for "racial vindication"
purposes.
There were very few favorable ethno-
graphic accounts about Africa that could
be used to counter the flood of deroga-
tory propaganda that began to spew
forth as France, Britain, Germany and
Belgium moved in to take over the con-
tinent. But, surprisingly, the literature of
early explorers and travelers, and even
of some missionaries belied the stereo-
type of "savage" Africans. Writers and
orators had always used what little favor-
able ethnographic data they could find
from the time of Frederick Douglass and
Booker T. Washington onward. One
Afro-American, Martin R. Delany, had
contributed to that literature. He visited
Nigeria in the 1850s, and with his compa-
nion, Robert Campbell, wrote a report
recently published under the title, Search
for a Plm:e: Blm:k Separatism and Africa,
1860. (Ann Arbor: University of Michi-
gan Press, 1971).
Egyptology was on the cutting edge of
the fight against racism in those days,
but Delany, who wrote a book on Ethio-
pian and Egyptian civilization, has been
best known as a pioneer in gathering
data on contemporary African societies
through visiting them. He and Campbell
SEPTEMBER-ocTOBER 1980
 went to Yorubaland in Nigeria as repre-
sentati\'es of a ;\;ational Emigration Con-
vention of Colored Men that met in 1854.
In 1~59 Delany headed the Niger Valley
Exploring Party. His report, published in
Search for a Ploce, contained these words:
The people are of fine physical struc-
ture and anatomical conformation, well
and regularly featured; not varying
more in this particular from the best
specimens of their own race than the
Anglo-Saxon or Caucasian from that of
theirs. They are very polite-their lan-
guage abounding in vowels, and conse-
quently euphonious and agreeable-
affable, sociable, and tractable, seeking
information with readiness and evinc-
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ing willingness to be taught. They are
shrewd, intelligent, and industrious,
with high conceptions of)he Supreme
Being, only using their images, gener-
ally as mediators ....
Delany's comments about the Africans'
looks were obviously directed at all the
racists from Thomas Jefferson on who
wrote that blacks from sub-Saharan Af-
rica were both ugly and dumb.
Tn discussing the markets of the larger
Lowns Delany mentioned that the
market of Ijaye "contains fully twenty
acres or more, in which, like the markets
generally, everything may be obtained.
These markets are systematically regu-
lated and orderly arranged ... with offi-
cially appointed and excellent managing
market masters ... :"
Delany had an eye for the significant,
but he sometimes drew conclusions that
were not supported by his observations.
Moreover, his will to believe and the short-
ness of his stay led him to paint too rosy a
picture of human bondage in Africa, even
for the Yoruba. And apparently, he ig-
nored Benin close by. He conceded, how-
ever, that criminals and prisoners of war
were legally sold into slavery, stating that
this had been the custom in every "civil-
ized country in the world" until recently
when "advanced intelligence and pro-
THE BLACK SCHOLAR SEFI'EMBER-OCTOBER 1980
gressive Christianity among the people
put a stop to it." 25
A great deal of literature was being
turned out during this period by travel-
ers and missionaries, and what Delany
wrote certainly merits as much atten-
tion-and I think more-than much of
what was written by them.
Mention of Delany reminds us of other
journeys into the African interior made
by black people from·the Diaspora. The
expatriated ex-slaves from North Amer-
ica and the West Indies who established
the Republic of Liberia in 184 7 found
themselves faced with implementing a
governmental policy that the British over
half a century later named "indirect rule."
This required some understanding of
how "native peoples" were organized po-
litically. Several expeditions went into the
backlands of Liberia on behalf of the Li-
berian government and their reports
merit re-publication just as Delany's did.
In 1856, President Benson dispatched an
expedition that traveled 280 miles inland.
In the 1860s, .Edward Wilmot Blyden,
the energetic West Indian immigrant who
became so influential in both Liberia and
Sierra Leone, persuaded two white New
Yorkers to finance an expedition led by a
Liberian. During a period of 13 months
its members moved deep in the Islamized
Mandingo area north of Liberia's bor-
, ders. The expedition report was · pub-
lished in New York in 1870 by Benjamin
Anderson, A Narrative of ajouT'I'I.e'J to Mu-
sardu, the Capital of the WesternMandingos.
During the 1870s, Blyden, himself, made
several journeys to various parts of West
Africa, as well as to Egypt and the Middle
East. The impact made upon him is evi-
dent from the tone of two chapters in his
Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (re-
printed by the University of Edinburgh
Press in 1967): "Mohammedanism in
West Africa," and the "The Mohamme-
dans of Nigritia." Blyden who came to
Africa from the West Indies via the U.S.A.
PAGE 15
 with a Christian "uplift" ideology gradu-
ally shifted his position to favor a Muslim
"uplift" ideology. Despite his reputation
as "Father of Black Nationalism," Blyden
never seemed to appreciate the virtues of
traditional African culture. He was
neither a cultural relativist nor a cultural
black nationalist.
Another intellectual from the Diaspora
should be numbered among the "pio-
neers." As an official at the American lega-
tion in Monrovia during the 1880s and
1890s, he cultivated an interest in an Is-
lamized ethnic group found on both sides
of the Liberia-Sierra Leone border that
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had developed its own syllabary and was
noted for its "progressiveness." So George
Washington Ellis wrote one of the first
reliable studies of the Vai-speaking
peoples.
On the whole, Afro-American contact
with Africa was through missionaries who
had no reason to emphasize positive val-
ues in African cultures and usually didn't
Some Afto-American missionaries were
different. Rev. William Shephard, who
worked among them, in the Belgian
Congo, helped to expose the atrocities
and was jailed for his efforts, and on re-
turn brought back a magnificent collec-
tion of artifacts which is now housed at
Hampton Institute. One black Baptist
missionary, writing many years after he
was back home, spoke of the skill in farm-
ing he had observed in the Congo and
the orderliness of family life and public
life. He wrote in The Congo as I Saw It
(1927):
So many have written and spoken con-
cerning my people in Africa and have
either attributed all of their ingenuity
to the white man or discredited their
capabilities all together, that I am glad
to be able to give a true testimony of
what I really saw in the land of my
fathers.
The editing of reports sent back by black
missionaries might make a substantial
PAGE 14 THE BLACK SCHOLAR
contribution in the field of ethnohistory.
This is a virtually untapped source of
data.
Establishment anthropologists, among
whom were some outright racists, and
who formed the so-called "Washington
group," were in constant battle with the
Boasians throughout the first two decades
of the 20th century and attempted to
destroy Franz Boas' influence after World
War 1. 26 DuBois and Boas' other black
admirers were not involved in these mat-
ters. They were busy fighting against the
conditions that flared up into over 30
race riots during the summer of 1919,
and also against the general system of
race relations that would have made it
impossible for Boas to have brought a
black professor-even DuBois, had he
been an anthropologist-to work with
him at Columbia, even had he wished to.
During the 1920s conditions became
propitious for the first black anthropol-
ogists to emerge (and a few appeared).
ANTHROPOLOGYANDTHE
NEW NEGRO
Alain Locke, the Howard University
philosopher and spiritual guide of the
Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, edited
a book with a title widely used during the
period, The New Negro. It implied that a
younger generation was repudiating
leadership and guidelines from any
sources that were "Uncle Tomish." It also
referred to a positive acceptance of
"blackness" in a culture that had denig-
rated it for centuries. And it signalled a
reassessment of the meaning of Africa.
At the mass level, Marcus Garvey's Uni-
versal Negro Improvement Association
burgeoned between 1917 and 1927 with
a slogan of "Africa .For the Africans at
Home and Abroad." Simultaneously,
W.E.B. DuBois was organizing four Pan
African Congresses that brought together
groups of intellectuals from Africa, the
SEPTEMBER.-OCTOBER. 1980
 U.S.A., and the Caribbean to protest called "interracial cooperation" during
against racial discrimination and Euro- the 1920s and 1930s.
pean imperialism. At the literary level, The Rosenwald Fund became the ma-
Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and jor financial backer of this southern
Countee Cullen are the best known ex- movement with a research and graduate
amples of poets whose works reflected fellowship program and a primary
the new black internationalism. school building project. 27 Its fellowships
were also available to northerners. with a
wide range of academic, literary, and
ut, more general than the int~rest in artistic interests. The Rosenwald Fund,
B Africa among poets and wnters of through Fisk sociologist, Charles S.
fiction was their positive affirmation of
Johnson, played a major role in shaping
folk roots in the South and in urban ghet-
the intellectual orientations of Afro-
toes. Post World War I white America
Americans, as well,as of a new generation
was in the mood for accepting what it
of college-bred southerners. Several an-
considered the "primitive," the "exotic,"
Downloaded by [New York University] at 07:08 08 June 2015

thropologists were consultants to the

and the "uninhibited," so a white clientele
Fund's officials, among them Ina Co-
bought literary products and art pro- rinne Brown of Vanderbilt, but of the
duced by the "New Negro," while white
ten black anthropologists trained be-
entrepreneurs discovered jazz, blues and tween World War I and World War II,
the folk artists and commercialized them. not one influenced education or social
This was the intellectual milieu out of policy until after the Second World War,
which the first professionally trained and then only one.
black anthropologists emerged.
The involvement of anthropology in
There was no "New Negro" movement
the "New Negro" movement began in
in the South, but there was what might be
the field of physical anthropology, and
called a "New White" movement, the
with one of Franz Boas' white students,
emergence of "liberals" in church and
Melville J. Herskovits. He had written a
university circles who believed in main- doctoral dissertation on the East African
taining separate black and white institu- Catlle Complex and ha~ begun applying
tions but in working assiduously to make one favorite analytical tool of the Ameri-
them "equal." Their message to conserv- can Historical School-culture area an-
atives was that a "New South," prosper- alysis-to Africa. Then he and his wife
ous and "progressing," needed to expand did some research among the Bush Ne-
health and educational facilities to all of groes in Surinam and she commented
its people as an act of enlightened self- that " ... the emphasis was on African
interest. And they hastened to reassure carry-overs-'pure' Africanisms-for he
the nervous that none of this would gen- was seeking firm leads that would point
erate any desire for "race-mixing" on the to regional and tribal origins of the Afri-
part of Afro-Americans. They considered can-derived populations of the New
the mores of the southern folk to be an World .... " In 1930, he published an
impediment to progress, but wanted to article in the American Anthropologist which
see their folklore collected and preserved. began with the words,
Two white universitites, Vanderbilt and
The Negro in the New World has given
the University of North Carolina at
rise to a situation which is of the utmost
Chapel Hill, in conjunction with the bla~k scientific importance and which, in the
university, Fisk, became the leaders m final analysis may have far-reaching
the movement for wha't was generally practical significance .... [and which]
THE BLACK SCHOLAR SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1980 PAGE 15
 may also contribute impressively toward
the understanding of some of the basic
questions which confront the study of
man .... 28
Herskovits then proposed a research
program that emphasized physical an-
thropology and folklore.
Four years before he went to Surinam
Herskovits had taught at Howard U ni-
versity for a year and carried out an exer-
cise in anthropometry which led to his
conclusion that a "new race" had become
stabilized in North America combining
Amerindian, Caucasian, and African
genes. One measure of degree of change
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that fifty years can bring is to try to
imagine a white professor (or any person,
for that matter) appearing on the How-
ard University campus today with head
calipers and color top asking students to
let him take measurements on them!
In the 1920s, physical anthropology
pursued by friendly Boasians was con-
sidered a potential aid in mounting a
counter-attack on the racists. One Afro-
American woman during this period
decided to enter the fray (reputedly at
the suggestion of Dr. DuBois) and may,
thereby, have become the first Afro-Am-
erican to secure a Ph.D. in anthropology.
Caroline Bond Day attended Radcliffe
and studied with Ernest Hooten who was,
by no means, a "Boasian." She produced
an interesting illustrated book on racially
mixed Afro-American families complete
with genealogical data, A Study of Some
Negro-White Families in the United States.
That Howard University sanctioned
Herskovits' activities on the campus and
that DuBois might have been interested
in Dr. Caroline Day's research is consis-
tent with the intellectual temper of the
times. White Americans had always been
ambivalent toward the progeny resulting
from miscegenation. On one hand they
denounced them as degenerate and un-
reliable; on the other, they were con-
sidered more intelligent than "pure-
PAGEI6 THE BLACK SCHOLAR
blood" Negroes. Sociologist Edward B.
Reuter, who once taught at Fisk, wrote a
book contending that all important
"Negro leaders" had white blood.
Marcus Garvey was fighting back when
he coined the slogan "Black is beautiful"
and suspected light-skinned leaders of
being "ashamed of the race."
From 1790 through 1920 the Census
actually divided Afro-Americans into
"mulatto" and "black," and sociologist E.
Franklin Frazier, in his study of The Ne-
gro Family in Chicago (1922), broke his
data into these two categories. The desig-
nation mulatto was dropped in 1930.
Marcus Garvey would have imputed a
nefarious motive to Afro-American so-
cial scientists who studied and wrote
about "mulattoes." He would have con-
sidered it propaganda by pro-miscegena-
tionists. 29 In general, Afro-American so-
cial scientists accepted the prevailing
categories used in research.
Herskovits' research emphasized his
"discovery" that less than a quarter of
the Afro-Americans were "pure-blood";
Day's work revealed the kinship between
some Afro-Americans and prominent
southern families. For most "race lead-
ers," defending those who had some ob-
vious white blood was considered just as
important as defending Africa and blacks
against their detractors if Afro-American
solidarity was to be achieved. Herskovits'
concept of a "new race" was not dysfunc-
tional to the goal when viewed this way.
Shortly after Caroline Bond Day's vol-
ume appeared another Afro-American
woman decided to secure training in an-
thropology. Boas, not Hooten, was her
mentor, and folklore, not physical an-
thropology, her area of specialization.
This was Zora Neale Hurston, whose in-
terest in the Harlem Renaissance was
fused with her interest in anthropology.
C oming up from the South, viva-
cious, ebullient, and gifted, Zora
SEPTEMBER..()CTOBER 1980
 Neale Hurston enrolled at Barnard, the
women's college affiliated with Columbia.
Franz Boas, whose interest in folklore
had always been strong, encouraged her
to pursue this aspect of anthropology.
She was an excellent collector and became
a very successful novelist and popular-
izer of Afro-American and West Indian
folklore, with both Rosenwald Fund and
the Guggenheim Foundation recognizing
her talent and aiding in her fieldtrips.
Boas wrote the introduction to her Mules
and Men.
It was hard for those who knew her
after she was a "success" to visualize Zora
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Neale Hurston submitting·to the pedes-
trian humdrum grind involved in getting
a Ph.D. She didn't. But she must have
played the academic game to some ex-
tent because Langston Hughes once re-
marked that Zora was the only person on
earth who could have gone up and down
the streets of Harlem as she did, with her
strange instruments, actually persuading
people to let her measure their skulls and
lips and inter-pupilar distance. At the
time Boas was at work on the massive
research on immigrants that led to his
classical study questioning the stability of
the cephalic index and its usefulness in
racial classification. He wanted compara-
tive data and he needed a "native" to
secure it in Harlem; Zora Hurston needed
a mentor in university circles and Boas
became her enthusiastic and loyal backer.
This was the nature of the academic
''trade-offs" in those days. Zora had a
wealthy female white patron whom she
could turn to occasionally too, one who
also funded Langston Hughes from time
to time. 30
Zora Neale Hurston's career brings to
mind that of another talented Afro-
American woman who took a master's
degree in anthropology at the University
of Chicago about a decade after Zora
Hurston first began to study with Boas at
Barnard. This was Katherine Dunham,
THE BLACK SCHOLAR SEPTEMBER-ocTOBER 1980
who was also interested in literature,
music, art and folklore, and like Ms. Hur-
ston, wrote a fascinating autobiography.
As a part of her work at Chicago, she and
an Asian student carried out a study of
the Moors, the Islamic predecessors of
the Black Muslims in the Chicago ghetto.
But Katherine's heart was in the dance.
With a grant from the Rosenwald Fund
she went to Haiti to gather data that could
be used eventually in a doctoral disserta-
tion. The sequel is public knowledge. She
chose, instead, to organize what became a
world-renowned dance troupe specializ-
ing in Afro-Caribbean dancing. But she
published a book about a maroon com-
munity in Jamaica and read a paper be-
fore the Royal Anthropological Society
in Britain.)
In 1966 Katherine Dunham was asked
by the President of Senegal to train that
country's dancers for the First World
Festival of Negro Art. The paper she
read to the colloquium on that occasion
displays great sensitivity to the problem
of choreographing African folk material
for western audiences.
Both of these women needed a broader
stage on which to act than academia could
provide; however, what both did was
profoundly influenced by their training
in anthropology. 31 Zora Neale Hurston
was an unconventional "original" for
whom anthropology provided one, but
only one, tool in helping her to discipline
her efforts and to conceptualize her data
gathered in the field. She never had any
sense of shame about not taking a Ph.D.
or sense of guilt about extracting folk-
tales from illiterate black folks. She en-
joyed just being Zora Neale Hurston as
her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road,
made very clear.
As the twenties drew to a close, Mark
Hanna Watkins, another young Afro-
American, very different in temperament
and lifestyle from Zora Neale Hurston,
was in the process of becoming an an-
PAGE 17
 thropologist. If she is to be understood
against the background of the Harlem
Renaissance, he is to be considered with-
in the context of the "New South" move-
ment. He was a college teacher who took
a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University
of Chicago, and wrote a dissertation on
some technical aspects of Bantu lan-
guages. The range of his interests is ex-
emplified by the fact that one of his earliest
articles was on bush schools in Africa. Dr.
Watkins eventually became a leading Af-
ricanist, was a founding fellow of the Af-
rican Studies Association, and helped to
organize a program in African studies at
Howard. It was almost a decade after he
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received his degree in 1933 before
another Afro-American scholar received
a doctorate in anthropology. That was
Allison Davis, also a graduate of the Chi-
cago department. Arthur Huff Fauset
soon took a doctorate at Penn with Black
Gods of the Metropolis as his dissertation.
Irene Diggs and St. Clair Drake were
taking advanced work in the field 32 when
World War I broke out.
The fundamental issue with which
Afro-Americans were grappling through-
out the 1920s was, "How can blacks sur-
vive and express themselves as individ-
uals, and as a group, in a society where
they are only one tenth of the popula-
tion, powerless, and subjected to an espe-
cially virulent kind of racism?" Marcus
Garvey said they couldn't and should
prepare for eventual emigration to a "re-
deemed" Africa. Mainstream leadership
adhered to a policy of "protective racial
solidarity" while maneuvring, and occa-
sionally struggling, to secure full equal-
ity. The learned professions were the fa-
vored choices of those fortunate enough
to secure some education beyond· the high
school level. For teachers who chose ad-
vanced training in the social sciences,
survey research or teaching in the better
black colleges were the only possible
careers.
PAGE 18 THE BLACK SCHOLAR
A nthropology did not seem like a ra-
l""ltional choice because sociology not
anthropology provided personnelforthe
study of black communities and race re-
lations. Also, no more than three black
institutions could consider hiring a full-
time anthropologist. Even Howard only
taught anthropology intermittently and
usually with visiting professors, Mark
Hanna Watkins being the first full-time
anthropologist appointed at Howard and
that not until 1944. 33
Fellowships were not available for re-
search in colonial Africa, and Liberia was
so sensitive about its image that it didn't
welcome any anthropologists, white or
black. Imperialist powers valued anthro-
pology as an aid to making indirect rule
work and the professors and mission-
aries used "natives" as informants, but
not as colleagues. When France or Brit-
ain did employ an occasional black or
mulatto in the colonial.. service they pre-
ferred West Indians. There was no room
for Africans, themselves, not to mention
Afro-Americans.
Incidentally, when Kwegyir Aggrey
was teaching in a b~ckinstitution in North
Carolina and began to consider training
for the doctorate at Columbia, Boas is
reported to have suggested that he take
education not anthropology when this
African college graduate who later be-
came famous expressed an interest in be-
coming an anthropolo~t 34 Boas was not
carrying on research in Africa and could
hardly have used Aggrey for fieldwork
among the Kwakiutl in those days, or
recommend him to colleagues for field-
work training with reservation Indians. It
would be revealing to know how fre-
quently blacks were counseled away from
anthropology in those days, if and when
an occasional student appeared before a
professor either because he had become
excited and intrigued about some aspects
of the field, or because he thought it
SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1980
 would be useful in the work of "vindi-
cation."
Because American anthropologists
were not working regularly among Afro-
Americans, there was no market for in-
formants. There was little opportunity to
do what Jomo Kenyatta was doing in
London at the time. He insisted upon
being more than a mere informant at the
School of Oriental and African Langu-
ages and took anthropology courses at
the London School of Economics, meet-
ing Malinowski and Thrunwald and
arguing continually with them. Mean-
while he lived on his informant's fees,
and wrote his own book, Facing Mount
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resentment over occupation by U.S. Ma-
rines, were led by Jean Price-Mars and
Francois Duvalier in a movement for a
"return to the roots." This was one aspect
of mobilization for resistance. "Haitian-
isme" was a Caribbean counterpart of the
Harlem Renaissance and a precurser of
the negritude movement. Jacques Rou-
main, the Haitian communist novelist,
returning home from exile in Paris in
1939, studied briefly with Boas at Colum-
bia and then went home to found the
Bureau of Ethnology in collaboration
with a number of his Haitian colleagues. 36
Afro-Americans were welcomed as guests
or collaborators and both Katherine

Kenya. Malinowski did not refuse the plea Dunham and Zora Neale Hurston did
for an introduction, and while he tried to field work in this favorable atmosphere.
withhold his seal of full approval, did A group of distinguished Haitian an-
defend an African's right to write about thropologists developed, who studied
hisownpeople.Jomodefiantlydedicat~d and wrote about their own people from
the book to two Kikuyu Freedom Fighters. their own perspective.
It is quite likely that Kenyatta would have
been granted the doctorate had he cared he "New Negro" in the United
to prepare for the necessary examina- T States could draw inspiration from
tions, but as a representative of the Ki- rhese other diaspora blacks who freed
kuyu Central Association his political themselves in 1791 and foynded a nation
work did not allow him the time or peace in 1804, but for them to develop similar
of mind for that. institutions was impossible and inappro-
British and French anthropologists did priate. Blacks in independent Haiti had
very little research in the Caribbean and their own Bureau of Ethnology; blacks in
few West Indians in Britain were brought the U.S. had social science research insti-
into contact with anthropology or anthro- tutes at Fisk, Howard, and Atlanta U ni-
pologists as they pursued their courses in versity and an Association for the Study
the classics or did graduate work in the of Negro Life and History. Ethnography
professions. There were no universities was something done on Indians in the
in the British and French West Indian U.S.A., and the study of African survi-
colonies, but there was one in sovereign vals could not achieve the importance in
Haiti, and it was there that ethnology, the eyes of Afro-Americans that they
linguistics and folklore took root. 35 necessarily did in Haiti or Brazil, or even
In Haiti, unlike Liberia, there was an in Jamaica and Trinidad, where they
open door to anthropologists of any race were very obvious.
or nationality and people curious about SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Voodoo came frequently. But Haitians DURING DEPRESSION AND WAR
also began to develop their own anthro-
pologists during the twenties. The "New When the depression came in 1930
Negroes" in Haiti, given their ll":imulus by folklore and physical anthropology

THE BLACK SCHOLAR SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1980 PAGE19

 seemed very irrelevant to the fate of the
masses of black men and women, as did
Herskovits' studies of Africa and the
Caribbean. Attention of black people be-
came focused on another brand of
anthropology.
rylle key concept of the American His-
.1. torical School which was dominant
in cultural anthropology during the
1920s was "culture." Much energy was
expended in defining culture areas and
seeking to refine the concept of accul-
turation. In later years an interest in pat-
terns of culture emerged and "way" be-
came a popular part of book titles: An
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Apache Lifeway, The Ways of Men, etc. By
the 1950s, culture and personality studies
were in vogue and a refinement of the
concept of culture had begun that still
continues. All of the social sciences be-
came culture-conscious. Then during the
1930s, another approach to anthropol-
ogy acquired considerable influence, em-
phasizing social structure instead of cul-
ture.
An Englishman, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown,
teaching at the University of Chicago,
stirred up something of a storm between
1930 and 193 7 with his insistence upon
the legitimacy of social anthropology.
With magisterial manner that annoyed
his opponents, he insisted that five fields
of anthropology must be defined as re-
lated, but logically separate: physical an-
thropology, archaeology, linguistics, eth-
nology, and social anthropology. Neither
psychology nor history were essential to
the work of the social anthropologist,
who uses the same data as the ethnologist
but for different ends. Ethnology is his-
torical, interested in the particular and
the discrete; social anthropology· is sci-
ence, concerned with generalizing even
to the extent of establishing "laws." An
anthropologist must be trained in all five
fields, but the affiliations of social anthro-
pology are in some ways closer to sociol-
PAGE20 THE BLACK SCHOLAR
ogy than to a sub-field like physical an-
thropology.
The social in social anthropology indi-
cates a primary interest in interaction be-
tween people and in the forms such in-
teraction takes. In the final analysis this
means an interest in social structures-
kinship, economic, political, etc. and in
function, that is the part that each ele-
ment plays in maintaining the whole. A
prime goal is to so develop the compara-
tive method so that generalizations can be
made that have predictive value. Social
anthropology as so defined by Radcliffe-
Brown became a subject for debate in the
journals and at meetings. In this form,
Chicago was the only institution that
taught it. It never "caught on" among
American anthropologists but in a mod-
ified form, became the paradigm out of
which Mertonian and Parsonian sociol-
ogy developed. 37
An American graduate student whom
Radcliffe-Brown had taught in Australia,
W. Lloyd Warner, returned from field
work among the Murngin in the early
1930s and went on the staff at Harvard
where he began to write A Black Civiliza-
tion. He never bothered to complete the
formal, requirements for the doctorate,
but instead, began to organize a research
project of his own in a small Massachu-
setts town that he named "Yankee City,"
using a combination of ethnographic and
statistical methods within a holistic struc-
tural framework suggested by Radcliffe-
Brown's type of social anthropology. It
was Warner's contention that, in the same
way that kinship provided the "integra-
tive structure" of folk societies, "social
class" provided the integrative structure
of American societies.
The six volumes of Yankee City examine
the way in which individual and family
behavior is shaped by norms and values
of several empirically defined social
classes. It was Warner's contention too,
that relations between Afro-Americans
SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1980
 and white people in the South could best
be understood as constituting a dual-
caste system with each caste having social
classes within it. 38 Field research to test
the model could only be carried out by a
bi-racial team.
r"')1le caste-class hypothesis was studied
.1. in the field by two Harvard graduate
students, one black and one white, and
their wives. The Afro-American student,
Allison Davis, was a professor on leave
from Hampton Institute where he taught
after receiving a master's degree in Eng-
lish Literature from Harvard. He had
decided he wanted to shift into a field
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that was more relevant to the problems
of black Americans who were begin-ning
to feel the brunt of•the depression that
began in · 1929. With a grant from the
Rosenwald Fund he b'egan to "retool"
himself in 1931. He spent a year in
London studying anthropology with
Malinowski and social statistics with
Lancelot Hogben. We have no record of
why Allison Dayis chose anthropology at
a time when it was the common practice
to take sociology if interested in the prac-
tical side of social change in race rela-
tions.
Davis met Warner at Harvard to which
he returned for his post-masters' grad-
uate training, worked with him on the
Yankee City study and helped to design
the study of a community in Mississippi.
Why Davis wanted to go South is clear
from an article he wrote in the magazine
Plain Talk in 1929, "The Negro Deserts
His People." He, himself, had grown up
in a Washington, D.C. middle class fam-
ily but was deeply concerned about the
fate of the masses. The result of the Mis-
sissippi research became a classic in the
discipline, Deep South: A Social Anthropo-
logical Study ofCa.5teand Class ( 1941). Less
well known but of important theoretical
significance is Allison Davis' unpublished
doctoral dissertation presented for the
THE BLACK SCHOLAR SEPTEMBER.()CTOBER 1980
Ph.D. in anthropology atChicago in 1941,
"Caste, Economy, and Violence." 39
By the mid-thirties, American social
scientists were searching for conceptual
tools to supplement Parkian and Marxian
models to help understand black-white
relations. However valuable the Marxist
concept of an oppressed nation might
have been for mobilization purposes, it
did not explain all of the facts nor did the
concept of "proletariat" exhaust the con-
tent of social stratification among blacks.
The concept of race relations obscured
social facts, and Park's "race relations
cycle" was value-laden and did not fit the
realities ofthe North American black ex-
perience. Cooperation conflict, accom-
modation, and assimilation-these did
not fully explain lynching and Jim Crow.
Nor did blackness as an "id symbol" or
"scapegoating." "Prejudice" was the most
useless concept of all. New dynamic
structural concepts were needed.
When the American Youth Commis-
sion sponsored a series of studies two of
these were carried out in the caste-class
frame of reference: Allison Davis and
John Dollard's Children of Bondage, and
Warner, Junker, and Loeb's Color and
Human Nature. Other scholars began to
adopt the model as Buell Gallagher did
when he wrote Ca.5te and the Negro College.
By 1942, when Gunnar Myrdal was writ-
ing An American Dilemma, he chose to em-
ploy a modification of the caste-class con-
struct for organizing his unwieldly mass
of data.
The caste-class analysis played a pro-
gressive role for the period by breaking
the habit of viewing black-white relations
in terms of fixed categories of psychol-
ogy or genetics. It stressed the r~le of
social structure, not values, as the mde-
pendent variable. It asked new questions:
"How can a white person at point X in the
caste class structure be expeCted to act
toward a person at point Y? How are
individuals socialized to act toward cues
PAGEZI
 of color and caste? If we change the social
structure of relations will attitudes begin
to change "on their own/" "How can we
change them?"
After World war II, caste-class analysis
lost its popularity. Community Studies
went out of fashion and policy-related
investigations became dominant in the
field of race relations. However, Deep
South had helped to prepare the way for a
Civil Rights Movement in the South by
clarifying the nature of the system for
many of the participants.
POST-WAR TRANSFORMATIONS
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World War II was defined as a crusade
to destroy fascist dictatorships and ra-
cism. American anthropologists played
their part by carrying out research on
subjects ranging from food preference
in small towns to the national character
of the Germans and the Japanese. When
the Japanese and Japanese-Americans
were herded into concentration camps,
that experience was a matter of concern.
When the war was over anthropologists
were on MacArthur's staff helping to ad-
minister occupied Japan. Some had
served as intelligence agents throughout
the war in the Office of Strategic Ser-
vices, and anthropologists continued to
assist in both intelligence and counter-in-
telligence work when the Cold War be-
gan. Whatever pretensions to "objectiv-
ity" or devotion to extreme cultural rela-
tivism may have existed among anthro-
pologists in the past evaporated. Most of
them generally expressed commitment
to the high ideals of the newly organized
United Nations or to what was called a
"defense of the Free World" (often a
euphemism for anti-Communism). 40
One by-product of World War II was
the sharp escalation of black protest
against segregation and discrimination
which elicited the first tentative gestures
PAGE22 THE BLACK SCHOLAR
by the federal government and some
municipal and state governments toward
the desegregation of public institutions
-including the army. A number of an-
thropologists were drawn into consulta-
tion by a wide range of private and gov-
ernmental agencies for expert advice on
what was called "inter-group relations;·
or "intercultural relations" or just plain
"race relations" in those days.
Leaders of Afro-American organiza-
tions considered anthropology on "their
side;' but saw its function as one of edu-
cating the white public and of combat-
ting prejudice and stereotyped thinking,
not as a discipline for making ethno-
graphic studies of Afro-Americans. It
could be useful, too, in studying Africa
"to set the record straight:' For instance,
George Peter Murdock in Africa present-
ed evidence for a West African center of
plant domestication. 41
Ruth Benedict ranked very high in the
estimation of Afro-Americans because
she had been the target of reactionaries
in Congress during the war who tried to
have the pamphlet that she and Gene
Weltfish wrote, Races of Mankind, barred
from use in Army educational courses.
They called it communist propaganda
because it presented the Boasian view on
matters of racially inherited cognitive
deficit. (Few of them were familiar with
her Race, Science and Politics where her
discussion of the origins of racism virtu-
ally ignored slavery and the slave trade, a
matter about which a fellow anthro-
pologist, years later, expressed some sur-
prise.42 The anti-racism of the 1930s
which Benedict represented was a reac-
tion to Hitler's anti-Semitism; it was only
the action of Afro-Americans themselves
that forced a wartime application of it to
their fate.)
r-y-1J.en after the war the N.A.A.C.P.
~ began a series of court cases chal-
lenging discriminatory legislation and
SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1980
 making use in some of its briefs of the
contemporary social science which an-
thropology had done so much to influ-
ence. The culmination of its effons was
the favorable decision in 1954 by the Su-
preme Coun outlawing enforced segre-
gation on the basis of race in public
school systems.
No more than three or four Afro-
Americans staned graduate training in
anthropology between 1945 and the be-
ginning of the southern Civil Rights
Movement of 1955. The best known
black anthropologist during this period
was Allison Davis, who had become one
of the first of a half-dozen or so Afro-
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Americans to receive full-time positions
at predominantly white institutions (Lor-
enzo Turner, Kenneth Clark, Ira De A.
Reid, and St. Clair Drake were among
the others). Working in the School of
Education at the University of Chicago
with Robert Havighurst and W. Lloyd
Warner, Davis was able to make signifi-
cant contributions in the application of
social anthropology to the sociology of
education.
While teaching at Dillard University,
Davis' Children of Bondage ( 1940), written
with John Dollard, had used a caste/class
analysis along with Mark May-Clark Hull
learning theory to focus attention upon
the disabilities suffered by all black chil-
dren in the South and the more serious
plight of what were defined as "lower
class" black children. The book was writ-
ten primarily to sensitize black middle-
class teachers to the differences in norms
and values between themselves and low-
er class children some of whom were at-
tempting to be upward mobile.
The Father of the Man ( 194 7), which he
wrote with Roben Havighurst, com-
pared the socialization of children at
middle and lower class levels for both
white and black samples of families in
Chicago. The impact of child-training
procedures was interpreted in modified
THE BLACK SCHOLAR SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1980
Freudian terms. Personality-type simi-
larities within classes across ethnic lines
were reported as stronger than similari-
ties between classes within ethnic groups.
Although the basic approach was struc-
tural, "classes" were viewed as sub-cul-
tures, "classways" being learned as a part
of the socialization process. "Classways"
affect the learning process, and negative
evaluation of lower-class values and
norms and behavior resulted in impedi-
ments to learning the middle-class cul-
ture which was the stated aim of Ameri-
can school systems. Because Davis and
Havighurst did not criticize that goal
some modern young blacks take a dim
view of their work. Yet, the enduring
contribution made by this type of re-
search was incorporation of its ideas into
textbooks, thus sensitizing a wide circle
of educators to the need for understand-
ing disadvantaged children, irrespective
of their race. This value remains whether
or not cultural deprivation theories ex-
plain educational black disabilities.
When Davis was invited to give the In-
glis lecture at Harvard in 1948 he spoke
on "Social Class Influences on Learning:·
He also organized an important critical
attack upon I.Q. testing in the form of a
research project by his graduate students:
Intelligence and Cultural Differences: A Study
of Cultural Learning and Problem Solving by
Kenneth Eels, et al. under the Chairmanship
of Allison Davis ( 1951). The work of this
pioneering scholar merits critical evalua-
tion today by both those anthropologists
who in studying the education of minori-
ties are stressing structural constraints
and those who are emphasizing cultural
factors.
During the first post-war decade two
other graduate students who had begun
their work before or during World War
II opted for careers that combined teach-
ing with Africa area studies and social
action. One of these, St. Clair Drake, had
bee~ a research assistant to Ailison Davis
PAGE%3
 during the field-work phase of Deep South.
""(;'or 23 years (from 1946-1969) he
£ made his base at Roosevelt U niver-
sity in Chicago where he taught both an-
thropology and sociology regularly and
assisted in the organization of an African
Studies Program. He spent over five
years of that period in Africa. Drake's
primary professional affiliations and
published work were in African area
studies rather than in mainstream an-
thropology.
The other scholar of the early post-war
period became a professor of sociology at
Brooklyn College in the 1950s from
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which he took leave for a period of re-
search in Africa out of which came Hugh
Smythe and Mabel Smythe's The Nigerian
Elite. He was subsequently granted an-
other leave to serve as Ambassador to
Syria, and then to Malta. Dr. Smythe is
listed in Who's Who in America as a sociolo-
gist, not as an anthropologist. However,
he took a doctorate in anthropology at
Northwestern where he went originally
to prepare himself for field work on the
Black Caribs in the Caribbean. Various
circumstances related to the War made
this an unrealistic goal, as was a projected
field trip to West Africa. Smythe wrote a
dissertation on Yoruba kinship systems
from library sources and then spent
three years teaching and doing research
in Japan as his first post-doctoral em-
ployment.
The careers of two younger anthro-
pologists who appear later in the 1945-
55 decade are an index to changes that
took place after the war. During the pre-
war period, if a black student had indi-
cated a desire to study a non-black group
he would have been discouraged ·by his
professors who would very likely have
used the argument that such a specializa-
tion "wouldn't lead anywhere:· In some
cases they might have felt that blacks
would not have been accepted in the field
PAGE24 THE BLACK SCHOLAR
by either the "natives" or their "colonial
overlords:· By the 1950s, however,
Charles Warren was studying Tagalog
and Philippine cultures with Eggan at
Chicago. The other case was that of a
young woman who chose a research
problem on social structure in the Dutch-
controlled island of Aruba. Well into the
1960s she was the only Afro-American
anthropologist who was a Caribbeanist.
There were very few West Indian an-
thropologists of color either, graduate
students from the islands preferring
fields like economics, political science,
history, and the classics. When Vera
Green, who teaches now at Rutgers, chose
the Caribbean she was breaking new
ground; when she chose the Dutch Carib-
bean it put her into the category of the
unusual.
Their status as Afro-Americans is suffi-
cient to explain why Africa had an attrac-
tion for many black scholars and writers.
However, until the 1950s there was never
any positive encouragement for black
graduate students in anthropology-few
though they were-to express this inter-
est. Individuals and groups who con-
trolled the fellowship money as well as
the channels of entry did not wish to
alienate colonial powers whom they knew
would not welcome black American in-
vestigators, and at least one influential
professor stated frankly that he didn't
feel Afro-Americans could be objective
about Africa so was reluctant either to
accept them for training or to recom-
mend them for grants.
The situation changed after 1951
when Kwame Nkrumah's Convention
Peoples Party took power in the Gold
Coast. Government and business circles
then felt a need to know more about an
Africa that might slip into the Communist
orbit and Afro-Americans were viewed
as "a national asset" in an attempt to
"keep Africa in the Free World:' When
the Ford Foundation decided to establish
SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1980
 a fellowship fund in 1953 to increase the
total pool of African experts the barriers
to blacks came down. It was this relaxa-
tion that led to the emergence of a group
that might be called the Ford Foundation
Black Africanists among whom were an-
thropologists. Ignoring whatever mo-
tives people in power may haye had in
opening the doors, and not feeling bound
by them, black graduate students with an
interest in both Africa and anthropology
began to apply. Between 1953 and 1970
at least a dozen exceptionally well-pre-
pared Africanists with their academic
roots in anthropology came out of the
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Afro-American ranks. Most prolific in
book publication has been Dr. Elliott
Skinner, who has also made an enviable
reputation in the public life of the coun-
try, having served as Ambassador to the
Voltaic Republic and being Chairman of
the African American Scholars Council
Inc. He has also held the Franz Boas chair
in anthropology at Columbia.
The negative implications of the Ford
training program for Afro-American
Studies were indirect but important. This
expansion of opportunity coincided with
the Desegregation Decade in the U.S.A.
One can imagine some excellent studies
that a group of scholars such as this might
have written similar to Kuper's book on
passive resistar:tce in South Africa or Ep-
stein's account of politics on the Zambian
Copperbelt. Doing ethnographic report-
ing on 'The Movement;' the Black Mus-
lims, the ghetto rebellions, etc., would
have offered a challenge to Afro-Ameri-
cans with anthropological training. How-
ever, those who could have accepted it
were off to Africa. (Drake had planned to
do a Black Metropolis Revisited in 1955, ten
years after the initial publication of Black
Metropolis. As it turned out he was in Af-
rica that year studying Ghana, a new na-
tion in the making.) The Ford Fellows
were gathering the data for the first crop
of scholarly books on Africa by Afro-
THE BLACK SCHOLAR SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1980
Americans, and they come home to play
roles in the mushrooming new field of
African Studies. Virtually all found posts
at predominantly white universities even
before the black student movement
made demands for more Affirmative Ac-
tion in the wake of the assassination of
Dr. King. Africa had relevance to being
Afro-American·.
The group of young people trained af-
ter the Ford Africanists has a more di-
versified range of interests including ur-
ban anthropology with an applied em-
phasis. It is very conscious of the respon-
sibilities of educated Afro-Americans for
identifying with the needs and aspirations
of the masses. The first two Afro-
American anthropologists expressed
commitment to their ethnic groups in a
quite different way. Caroline Bond Day
and Zora Neale Hurston, the pioneers of
the 1920s, came during the period of the
Harlem Renaissance and reflect some of
its orientations.
However, the first group of Afro-
American anthropologists emerged be-
tween the beginning of the Depression in
1929 and the end of World War II in
1945. During this fifteen year period only
ten persons qualify for listing as anthro-
pologists. Of the ten, six have had careers
that combined university teaching and re-
search, while one, Katherine Dunham,
took up a university post (at the Univer-
sity of Illinois, Carbondale) only after a
long and highly successful career as
dancer and choreographer. Katherine
Dunham was, however, always essentially
a teacher, a person who viewed her art as a
kind of adult education in the apprecia-
tion of other cultures. Only three of the
six have pursued their academic careers
at black institutions, Mark Hanna Wat-
kins at Fisk and Howard; Irene Diggs. at
Morgan State, a base from which she has
functioned as a Latin Americanist, espe-
cially as an interpreter of the role that
blacks have played in Hispanic American
PAGE25
 societies and Brazil; and Montagu Cobb at
Howard's medical school.
There were only three black institu-
tions prior to 1940 where there might
have been any realistic expectation of de-
veloping graduate work in anthropology
at the master's level but none at the doc-
torallevel-Howard, Fisk, and Atlanta.
There were, however,· no situations
where funds could be attracted to sup-
port research programs under black con-
trol in the field of anthropology. Africa
area studies after World War II opened
up the first prospects of introducing seri-
ous anthropological study and research
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at black American institutions. Fisk start-
ed an African Studies program in 1944
and Lincoln started one in 1950. No
foundation saw fit to give either them or
Howard funding in sufficient quantity to
keep a program alive at a time when mil-
lions were pouring into Boston Univer-
sity, UCLA, and Northwestern Univer-
sity for such programs. What did occur,
however, was the training of a number of
black anthropologists through African
Area Training Fellowship grants. They
did not find employment in black institu-
tions, however, after they received their
Ph.D.s.
With the founding of Black Studies
Programs after 1968, for the first time, it
was possible for black students, faculty,
andadministrators to have something to
say about the kind of anthropology they
wanted taught and the lines of research
they would like to see developing. And
some white anthropologists as well as
black ones began to publish in a field that
took the name "Afro-American Anthro-
pology." Not all Afro-Americans with a
training in anthropology have wanted to
operate in the field of Black Studies or
African American Studies and there is
no reason why they should. But for those
who do, a new opportunity is present. 43
While it was impossible to institutional-
ize training., teaching, and research m
PAGE 26 THE BLACK SCHOLAR
anthropology at black institutions in the
United States until after World War II
and the efforts to do so at the University
of Liberia had been only partially effec-
tive (a Liberian woman with a degree
from Fisk did try to keep the teaching of
anthropology alive at the University of
Liberia), Haiti developed a group of
scholars with a serious interest in cultural
anthropology and folklore. Occupied by
the U.S. Marines in 1915 and searching
for an ideology that could mobilize resis-
tance, a small group of Haitian intellectu-
als, including Dr. Francois Duvalier and
Dr. Jean Price-Mars, began to organize
research on Haitian peasant life in the
early 1920s. So, in this independent state,
anthropology was thriving before the first
Ph.D. in the discipline appeared in the
U.S.A. An analysis of the growth and de-
velopment of anthropology in Haiti de-
serves a Ph.D. dissertation in some Black
Studies department.
What happened in Haiti should be
compared with what was going on in
Cuba at the same time where Fernando
Ortiz, Alejo Carpentier, and a group of
white intellectuals were beginning to
study and write about Africanisms in
their country. Their perspective was that
of esthetes interested in the primitive ex-
otic at first, but shifted in the direction of
an anti-racist concerh for Cuban blacks,
particularly as Nicholas Guillen prodded
them. The University of the West Indies
was established in 1948 in Jamaica and
embarked upon a program of research
on the family in the Anglophone Carib-
bean. Anthropology as a discipline never
took root, however, and the two ]a-
maican social anthropologists, Henri-
ques and M.G. Smith eventually took
overseas posts, although the latter has
recently returned as an advisor to the
present government. Out of the Carib-
bean have come a number of our col-
leagues, participating as a part of the de-
velopment of anthropology in the
SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1980
Downloaded by [New York University] at 07:08 08 June 2015
United States. Among these I mention
Professor Van Sertima whose They Came
Before Columbus courageously chose to
grapple with that highly controversial
matter of whether there was an African
impact upon this hemisphere before the
slave trade began.
Literature, not anthropology, has tra-
ditionally attracted individuals from
Martinique, Guadeloupe and Cayenne
with an interest in acculturation, social
stratification, African impact, and such
themes.
The work of anthropologists in Sene-
gal, Ivory Coast, Zaire, and Cameroon is
not so well known to Afro-American
scholars as it should be, and the eventual
publication of abstracts of some of their
works by the Association of Black An-
thropologists would be of value to the
entire profession in th~ United States as
well as to black arlthropologists. The Af-
ricans should be brought into some kind
of co-operating relationship with the
ABA. Anthropology should have a Pan-
African dimension.
THE BLACK SCHOLAR SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1980
FUTURE PROSPECTS
The racist origins of ethnology in the
United States and its close connection
with colonial imperialism in Africa made
anthropology something of a "dirty
word" for years among black intellec-
tuals. However, they have always tried to
sift out the wheat from the chaff and to
handle sources critically even when they
were offensive. Late 19th century Afro-
American scholars were also able to rec-
ognize the "vindicationalist" potential
within the ranks of anthropologists even
though the British and American main-
stream was racist.
uBois "discovered" Boas before
D 1900 and he, as well as others, be-
came aware of the fact that the Belgian,
Torday, was exposing the ridiculous
tautological "Hamitic" theory of the Brit-
ish anthropologists before World War 1. 45
Blacks watched Boas battle against the
Washington D.C. establishment rooted
PAGE27
 in the Smithsonian Institution that tried
to "destroy" him-a story told in detail
by Stocking. They knew where their
friends were in the field as well as their
enemies. And when the Boasians won
and the Holo<:aust turned the world
against racism in the mid-thirties, and
Boas' students took up the anti-racist
crusade, Afro-American scholars were
ready to give crCdit to American anthro-
pology for having purged itself of its past
and for providing much of the personnel
that led the fight against theories of bio-
logical determinism.
Issues which an earlier generation of
anthropologists thought had been laid to
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rest were reopened during the 1950s and
1960s. The basic strategy of the fight
against racism in the 1930s and 1940s
had involved explaining group differ-
ences in mean IQ ~cores in terms of
socio-cultural differences instead of
genetic inheritance. Differences in temp-
erament and personality were explained
similarly and at one point neo-Freudian
explanations relating to child training
practices were in vogue. When the
Shockley-Jensen-Herrenstein attack on
the "environmentalists" began, younger
black social scientists were more inclined
to argue about the validity of the tests
themselves than about the relative roles
of hereditary and non-hereditary com-
ponents in performance on them. This
stance was closely associated with a will-
ingness to accept the idea of inherited
temperament but not an inherited cogni-
tive deficit. One African, teaching in the
United States, stated an extreme view
that attacked certain anthropologists!
I believe many of the differences be-
tween black and white people cited in
these studies are genuine-genuine in
the sense that they stem from the gene-
tic constitution of a people.... I have
not dismissed the genetic factor as Les-
lie White does .... 46
PAGE28 THE BLACK SCHOLAR
Radical anthropology of a neo-
Marxian type offers support to black an-
thropologists who reject this reversion to
discredited biological theory. Several
varieties of a black perspective on an-
thropology are developing alongside
mainstream anthropology and Marxist
anthropology which should welcome in
the spirit that both cultural relativism
and the sociology of knowledge have
brought to Western social science, even
while criticizing them. Older black an-
thropologists were closer to the main-
stream and it is inevitable that some con-
temporary black anthropologists will
find that milieu congenial and will wish
/to work professionally with the problems
of discipline concern.
Anthropology, because it flings its net
so wide in time and space has always had
an exotic and glamorous side to it that
other disciplines lack. It has attracted to
its ranks-as amateurs and profession-
als-an exceptionally wide range of per-
sonality types. It would be unusual if all
Afro-Americans who sought graduate
training in the discipline were primarily
interested in applied anthropology or
wished to combine their social action in-
terest with their intellectual interests. As
their numbers increase this is likely to
become even more true. The healthiest
situation to emerge in the future would
be one in which the ranks of Afro-
American anthropologists grew large
enough so that all who chose the field
would not be "needed" on the instru-
mental side, expected to use the disci-
pline in the liberation fight and criticized
if they pursued anthropology for its own
sake.
I can conceive of an individual who
might want to teach general cultural an-
thropology, to publish on Levi-Strauss
and structuralism, and whose racial soli-
darity would be expressed not through
anthropology but through being active
in some militant social action organiza-
SEl"''EMisER-OCTOBER 1980
 tion; who paid dues regularly to the As-
sociation of Black Anthropologists but
also read papers in A.A.A. section meet-
.ings in fields that had nothing to do with
either blacks or applied anthropology.
And, for that rare individual who loved
"digs" and had become intrigued by ex-
cavating Near Eastern Neolithic sites, it
would be both unfair and unnecessary to
try to get him to shift his attention to
Olduvai Gorge. But as it is, today, there is
not even one expeJ1 on African archaeol-
ogy in the Afro-American ranks!
Finally, for all whose consciences and
tastes have impelled them to choose ap-
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plied anthropology and to relate it to t,he
struggle against racism, if they cannot
also be "turned on" by the full range of
articles in Current Anthropology, perhaps a
congenial choice of field has not been
made. Anthropology, as a discipline, is a
search for truth about man in all places
and at all times. Anthropology is a tool-
certainly-but it should not be only that;
it has always had affiliations with art and
literature as well as with administration .
and revolutionary action. Beyond the
black experience lies the human ex-
perience.
REFERENCES
Research on anthropology and the black ex-
perience was carried out during 1977 as one
minor aspect of a larger study of "Coping and
Co-optation" for which the National Endow-
mentfor the Humanities awarded Dr. Drake a
grant. A portion of the data was used in pre-
paring an article with an autobiographical
emphasis, "Reflections on Anthropology and
the Black Experience" in Anthropology and
Education Summer 1978.
1. Drake, St. Clair, "The Social and Economic
Status of the Negro in the United States,"
Daedalus, Fall, 1965. For the classical attack on the
caste concept see Oliver Cox, "Race and Caste: A
Distinction," Americanjourrwl ofSociowgy, Vol. 50,
No.5, March 1945, pp. 360-368.
2. The definitive discussion of the develop-
THE BLACK SCHOLAR SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1980
ment of anthropology within this intellectual at-
mosphere is George Stocking's Racism, Culture,
and Anthropology (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1968).
For a more general discussion of the role of an-
thropology in relation to the growth of racism in
the United States, see George Frederickson, The
Image of the BlackMan in White America: 1800-1915
and "Racism and Imperialism," Ch. 9, in Richard
Hofstadter, Social Danvinism in American Thought
(Boston: The Beacon Press, 1955).
3. Stocking, "The Critique of Racial Formal-
ism,"pp. 161-189.
4. For an assessment of the role of anthropol-
ogists in the Third World by an African anthro-
pologist see Bernard Magubane, "A Critical Look
at Indices Used in the Study of Social Change in
Colonial Africa," Current Anthropology, Vol. 12, No.
4-5, Oct.-Dec, 1971. For a statement by an anti-
imperialist French anthropologist, note "L'Ethno-
graphie Devant Le Colonialisme" in Michel Leiris,
Cinq Etudes d'Ethnologie: Le Racisme et le Tiers Monde
(Paris: Mediations, 1972). See also Anselme Remy,
"Anthropology: For Whom and What?" The Black
Scholar, Vol. 7,No. 7,Aprill976,pp. 12-17.
5. Her best-known published work is Caroline
Bond Day, a study of Some Negro-White Families in
the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: Peabody Mu-
seum, Harvard African Studies Series, 1932). Re-
printed in 1970 by the Negro Universities Press,
Westport, Ct.
6. For an autobiographical statement, see Zora
Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road: An Auto-
biography (New York: Arno Press, reprint edition,
1942). See also Robert Hemenway, "Folklore Fit:1d
Notes from Zora Neale Hurston," The Black Schol-
ar, Vol. 7, No.7, April 1976, pp. 39-46.
7. Note as early as 1937, Morris E. Op1er's "An-
thropology, Democracy and the School" in Cali-
fornia journal of Education, 7: 206-209. UNESCO
_j)Ublished ten pamphlets in a series, The Race Ques·
tion in Modern Science, with contributions by histor-
ians, sociologists, geneticists and anthropologists.
Ashley-Montagu published an official UNESCO
Statement on Race in 1951, which he has updated
subsequently. Among publications by other an-
thropologists during this period was that of St.
Clair Drake who the same year published in the
Summer Yearbook of the journal of Negro Educa-
tion, "The International Implications of Race and
Race Relations." Among publications by other an-
thropologists during the war and the decade after
were: Hortense Powdermaker, Probing Our Pre-
judices: A Unit for High School Students (New York:
Harper, 1944); William E. Vickery and Stewart G.
Cole, Intercultural- Education in American Schools:
Proposed Objectives and Methods (New York:
Harper, 1943); Rachel Davis DuBois, Get Together
Americans: Friendly Approaches to Racial and Cultural
Conflicts Through the Neighborhood-Home Festival
(New York: Harper, 1943). Elmer R. Smith circu-
lated a pamphlet in 1944 called Race and Democ-
racy: an Anthropowgisfs View.
PAGE29
 8. For a review of the intellectual developments
accompanying the raising of black consciousness
during the 1960s, the tiles of The Black Scholar,
which began publication in 1969, would be useful
and Black Students by Dr. Harry Edwards of the
Department of Sociology, University of Califor-
nia, Berkeley, is a per.ceptive account by a partici-
pant (Glencoe: Free Press, 1970). See also Educa-
tion and Black Struggle: Notes }Tom the Colonized
World, Monograph No ..2. Harvard Educational
Review, 197-!, edited by the Institute ofthe Black
World.
9. See Dell Hymes (ed.), Reinventing Anthropol-
ogy (:--lew York: Pantheon Books, 19i2). Note a
statement by two white sociologists in Robert
Blauner and David Wellman. "'Toward the De-
colonization of Social Research,·· and a citation of
some of the barriers to close collaboration as seen
by an Afro-Caribbean sociologist, Dennis For-
sythe, in "Radical Sociology and Blacks." Both arti-
Downloaded by [New York University] at 07:08 08 June 2015
cles appear in Joyce A. Ladner (ed.), The Death of
White Sociology (New York: Random House, I 97:\).
For important statements by black anthropologist,
see Remy, op. cit., and "Skeletons in the Anthro-
pological Closet" by William Willis. Jr., in Dell
Hymes, op. cit.
10. Mainstream Jewish tradition in Palestine
had no such derogatory myth. It appears in the
Babylonian Talmud late in Jewish history as a
rabbinical justification of the enslavement of Afri-
cans on plantations in· Mesopotamia. For a scho-
larly critical discussion of the Ham myth see
Robert Graves and Raphael Patai, Hebrew Myths:
The Book of Genesis (Garden City: Doubleday,
196:\), ch. 21, ":'l:oah's Drunkeness," pp. 120-12-!.
They give the precise Talmudic references.
I I. The definitive work on color prejudice in
the Greco-RomaQ, world is Frank M. Snowden,
Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman
Experience (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press
of Harvard L'niversity Press, 1970). For a state-
ment that emphasizes color prejudice toward
blacks among Arabs but points out factors that
kept blackness from being equated with slave
status or color-caste from arising, see Bernard
Lewis, Color and Islam (New York: Harper Torch-
book, I 97 I). The literature on racism in the
American South is voluminous, but Frederickson,
op. cit., is the most convenient comprehensive dis-
cussion of racism in the t.: nited States in relation to
the forces that generated it. · 20. Daniel G. Brinton, A.M., M.D., L.L.D.,
12. Jordan, Winthrop, White Over Black: Ameri-
can Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel
Hill: L'niversity of North Carolina Press, 196~).
See also Eric Williams, Capitalism a1ul Slavery
(Chapel Hill: L'niversity of North Carolina Press,
1944).
13. Jordan, op. cit., Ch. 6, "The Bodies of Men:
The Negro's Physical Nature," pp. 216-26~.
14. Susan Dwyer-Shick and Wilfred C. Bailey,
"The Development of the Academic Study and
Teaching of Anthropology" in Anthropowgy and
PAGE30 THE BLACK SCHOLAR
Education Qwrterly, Vol. VIII, No. I, February
1977, provides an excellent brief history of the
growth of the discipline and Stockard, op. cit.,
relates that history to the development of racist
ideology. Frederickson, op. cit., is one ofthe best
sources for tracing this relationship.
13. Hitlerism carried to its logical conclusion
the type of thinking popularized in such works as
Arthur de Gobineau's Essay on the Ineqwlity of the
Human Races (published in an English edition in
the t.:nited States by Putnam in 1915); Madison
Grant, The Passing of the Great Race or the Racial
Basis of A171t'TUan History (published by Scribners
and Sons in 1916; see also WilliamS. Sadler, Race
Decadence: An Examination of the Causes of Racial
Degeneracy in the United States (Chicago: McClurg,
I 922) and James D. Sayers, Can the White Race
Survive? (Washington, D.C.: Independent Pub-
lishing Co., 1929). One of the earliest and most
widely read expressions of these ideas was a book
by a New York physician whom Frederickson calls
. "the father of racism in the t.:nited States," j.H.
\'an Evrie, WhiteS upremacy and Negro Subordination
(:'\Oew York: Horton and Co., 1~68). Nazism was
an extreme expression of more widespread
tendencies. ·
16. Stocking, op. cit., Ch. 2, "French Anthro-
pology in 1800," pp. 13-41, pp. 232-233 for a
discussion of the aims of the founders of French
ethnology and Frederickson, op. cit., pp. 74-90;
12:J; 232-2:\:\ for a description of the work of the
American ethnologists. In Europe and America:
there was a tendency to detine ethnology as a
"science of the human races" interested in study-
ing differences and explaining them.
I 7. Northern white teachers at Fisk, Hampton,
and Tuskegee were very active collectors. Vol-
umes 20-:\:\ of the Southem Workman wul Hampton
School Record, December 189:\ to January 190-!,
carried a note from a "Department of Folklore
and Ethnology" at the schoot. .
18. See, e.g., Rev. Norman B. Wood's The White
Side of a Black Subject (enlarged and brought down
to date), A Vindication of the AJTo-American Race
From the Landing ofSlaves at St. Augustine, Fwrida, in
1565 to the Present Time (published in 1897). See
The Autobiography ofW.E.B. DuBois, (International
Publishers, 1968), for the details of his intellectual
growth and development.
I 9. Hotstadter, op. cit., p. l 72.
Sc.D., The Basis of Social Relations: A Study in Ethnic
Psychology (New York:·G.B. Putnam's Sons, 1902),
pp. 139, 195-196, and pp. 298-300, "The Future
Aryo-Semitic Stock." A p.rofessor at the t.:niversity
of Pennsylvania.
21. HofStadter, op. cit., p. 193.
22. Quoted by DuBois in The Negro in 1915. See
reprint edition, 1970, Oxford University Press, p.
83. Cf. Willis, op. cit., who is less enthusiastic about
Boas.
23. Hofstadter, op. cit., p. 169.
SEPTEMBER-ocTOBER 1980
 24. Spiller, G. (ed.), Papers on Interracial Prob-
lems: Communicated to the First Universal Races Con-
gress held at the University of London, July 26-29,
1911, (available as Arno Press reprint). For a brief
summary of the history of the Hamitic Theory, see
St. Clair Drake, "Destroy the Hamitic Myth" in
Presence Africaine special number reporting on
Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Rome,
1958.
25. M.R. Delany and Robert Campbell, Search
For a Place (AmY Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1969), pp. 82-86.
26. Ch. 9, "Franz Boas and the Cultural in His-
torical Perspectives," pp. 195-233 and Ch. II,
"The Scientific Reaction Against Cultural Anthro-
pology," pp. 270-308.
27. Julia Waxman and Edwin Embree, Invest-
ment in People (Privately published by Julius Rosen-
wald Fund, 1950s).
28. M.J. Herkovits, "The Negro in the New
Downloaded by [New York University] at 07:08 08 June 2015
World: The Statement of a New Problem," Ameri-
can Anthropologist, Vol. 32, 1930, pp. 145-155.
29. Amy Jacques Garvey, (compiler), The Phi-
losophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, with intro-
duction by Essien-Udom, E.U.,(London: Cass,
1967).
30. Hurston, op. cit., pp. 182-185; Langston
Hughes,/ Wonder As/ Wander(New York: Hill and
Wang, 1956), pp. 4-5; and James A. Emanuel,
Langston Hughes (New York: Twayne Publishers,
1966 ), pp. 30-31.
31. Who's Who in America, 1950.
32. Ibid.
33. Personal communication form Prof. G.
Franklin Edwards, professor of Sociology, How-
ard University.
34. Personal communication from an historian
who wishes to remain anonymous.
THE BLACK SCHOLAR SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1980
35. G.R. Coulthard, Race and Colour in Carib-
bean .f.-iterature (London: Oxford University Press,
1962), pp. 28-37.
36. Introduction to Jacques Roumain's Masters
of the Dew, Translated by Langston Hughes and
Mercer Cook.
37. Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social
Structure (New York: Free Press, 1957).
38. W. Lloyd Warner and Allison Davis, "A
Comparative Study of American Caste" in Edgar
Thompson, Race Relations and the Race Problem
(Raleigh: University of North Carolina Press,
1939), pp. 219-229.
39. Allison Davis, "'Caste, Economy ahd Vio-
lence," American journal ofSociology, Vol. 51, No. I,
July 1945, pp. 7-15.
40. Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the
Sword: Patterns of japanese Culture ( 1946); Alex-
ander Leighton, The Governing ofMen ( 1945); and
Robert Lowie, Toward Understanding Germany
(1954).
41. George Peter Murdock, Africa: Its Peopks
and Their Culture and History (New York: McGraw-
Hill, 1959).
42. Paul Bohannon, Social Anthropology (New
York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston), Ch. 12, "The
Chimera of Race," p. 204.
43. For an evaluation of Davis' work by a form-
er stude.nt and research assistant, see St. Clair
Drake, "Reflections on Anthropology and the
Black Experiences," Anthropology and Education
Quarterly, Vol. IX, No. 2, Summer 1978, pp.
85-109.
44. Julius M. Waiguchu, "Black Heritage: of
Genetics, Environment, and Continuity," Rhoda
L. Goldstein (ed.), Black Life and Culture in the
United States (New York: Crowell, 1969), pp.
64-86.
PAGE31