Among his fellow students were future anthropologists Katherine Dunham, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Elsie Clews Parsons, and Frances Shapiro.
[2] In 1928 and 1929 he and his wife Frances Herskovits did field work in Suriname, among the Saramaka (then called Bush Negroes), and jointly wrote a book about the people.
[2] In the early 1940s, Herskovits and his wife Frances met Barbara Hadley Stein, who was in Brazil to do research on the abolition of slavery there.
[5] The goals of the program were to "produce scholars of competence in their respective subjects, who will focus the resources of their special fields on the study of aspects of African life relevant to their disciplines.
"[2] The Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies at Northwestern University, established in 1954, is the largest separate Africana collection in the world.
The development of African-American Christian churches, which served as one of the only places to provide these peoples with access to social mobility, further established a distinctly western culture among Africans in America.
This became apparent in a number of aspects of the spirituals, from the inclusion of call and response lines and alternate scales to the varied timbres and rhythms.
Herskovits debated with sociologist E. Franklin Frazier on the nature of cultural contact in the Western Hemisphere, specifically with reference to Africans, Europeans, and their descendants.
[7] After World War II, Herskovits publicly advocated independence of African nations from the colonial powers.
He strongly criticized American politicians for viewing African nations as objects of Cold War strategy.