Melville Jean Herskovits thrived in the cross-hairs of racial conflict. He was a Jew who never rejected his own Jewish heritage, but insisted on defining his own relationship to it. He saw the Holocaust as a continuation of violence perpetrated against Africans under the colonial yoke. At a time when the Free World was squaring off against Communism, Herskovits protested that Africa was more than another Cold War chessboard. Here was the progressive man of science, who also told his students “L’Afrique, c’est moi!” His vision and ambition brought him into conflict not only with white colleagues but also with black intellectuals, who saw the bespeckled academic as yet another in a long line of patronizing white scholars. And even as he insisted his research linking African and New World cultures had no political aim, black liberation movements in Africa and the United States pointed to Herskovits’s books to justify their sometimes violent ideologies.

This will be a stylishly told story, using animation, reenactments, never before seen diaries, exclusive interviews with his surviving daughter and Herskovits’s own field footage. The clash of ideas is central here, but also a visually rich, and often disturbing drama, that weaves together complex characters, unusual relationships, conflict and surprise.

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