Almost fifty years ago Melville Herskovits set out to debunk the myth that black Americans have no cultural past. Originally published in 1941, his unprecedented study of black history and culture recovered a rich African heritage in religious and secular life, the language and arts of the Americas.
This book is so mis-titled as to mislead the potential reader. In fact, Herskovits argues against the notion, common when this was written (1941), that the American descendents of slaves were a people without cul…
