Day 60: Bob Jones University

So today is officially two months of working on the project, whoo-hoo! It's also the Fourth of July, and what I wanted to share here today is some stuff that I tweeted about yesterday, starting with this disclaimer that was pasted into a used book that I had purchased, which turns out to be a library discard from Bob Jones University. Here's the disclaimer:

And the book that caused the Bob Jones censors to intrude this way: Melville Herskovits's Myth of the Negro Past, a classic from 1941 which shows the importance of African culture that lives on in the lives of African Americans. The book is important enough to have its own Wikipedia article in fact.

Given that Bob Jones University was still prohibiting interracial dating in the 1980s and 1990s, and willing to pay a million dollars for the privilege to do so (Wikipedia), I guess it's not surprising that this fundamental anti-racist text was something that made them uncomfortable.

Meanwhile, the book is excellent, but depressing too, documenting so clearly the many prejudices that prevented scholars, serious scholars, from being able to see the African evidence that was right in front of their eyes. I'll write up some notes from the book later!

Herskovits is a really important writer for my project, especially because one of his major books, Suriname Folk-lore, is a public domain text available online at Hathi Trust. You can find other books by Herskovits at Internet Archive (although the copyright status of some of those always-available items is not clear).

As I was thinking about Bob Jones University's effort to undermine Herskovits's anti-racist project, it got me to thinking that I should try to learn more about him, so I ended up ordering another used book: Melville J. Herskovits and the Racial Politics of Knowledge by Jerry Gershenhorn. Yay for books! There is always more to read and learn, no matter what despite the pink slips of Bob Jones University.