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Early on in the African \"survivals\" debate when social scientists were really trying to figure out if any shreds of African culture survived in America, there were lots of theories that were put on the table. Generally, sociologists were opposed to those sort of ideas. Robert Park, his student E. Franklin Frazier generally were completely in disagreement with the possibility that African culture had survived.

They believe that slavery was so destructive in its impact on African culture. And anthropologists, of course, took a different view. Franz Boas’s student, in particular Melville Herskovits, was very much insistent that shreds of African culture did survive in black communities. But even though Robert Park was really, in general terms, completely in disagreement with the possibility that African culture had survived in black communities, he did make a sort of argument that was an exception.

He said, except for the blacks who are isolated on the Sea Islands, there because they have sort of minimal contact with the mainland and other communities, they're kept in sort of a primitive state. They were able to keep and retain some shreds of the culture. Even though he described those elements as being amorphous to a certain degree, they weren't very specific, but he said a general sort of African temperament that they retained.

And what we see looking at Park's very early description of Sea Islanders as unique and distinct people…he posited this sort of theory in 1919… what we see is that there's this sort of myth about isolation that has everything to do with the geography of the island.

The idea that you're cut off from modernity by waterways and that the mainland is the modern space and that the island is somehow separate. And we see the way that that plays out in the stories we tell in popular culture, etc.. So, I think for social scientists who were grappling with this question about African survivals, the notion that there were blacks who had been on an island for generations seemed like this perfect petri dish to kind of explore the possibility that this culture had survived and had been retained undisturbed by modernity.

But it was a fiction, right? Because contact between blacks who lived in coastal, on coastal barrier islands and mainland communities, were consistent, contact was consistent. People moved, migrated, ebbed, flowed. Almost every reality in their lives could be directly linked back to some phenomenon that was happening across the waterway. So it was a myth, but a myth, though, that seems to have a certain appeal when we like to think about people being pure and authentic and undisturbed.

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Melissa Cooper on the African survivals debate and the myth of Sea Islanders purity via isolation

Transcript