Harvard University, Dixon, and the Politics of Erasure: The Hidden Story of America’s “Proto-Negroid” Past

By Ishmael A. Bey | Urban Indian Heritage Society

 Harvard University Scrubbing, Suppressing and Academic Ethnocide of Negroid Indigenous History 

Introduction: When Truth Becomes Inconvenient

Some histories aren’t forgotten, they're buried.

 One of the clearest examples is the career of Dr. Roland Burrage Dixon, a Harvard anthropologist who, in 1923, published The Racial History of Man. His research on ancient skulls from Massachusetts and Rhode Island led him to a shocking conclusion for that era:

“The larger number of the crania are from sites in central and eastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and show on analysis that the dominant element in all this area is, most unexpectedly, the Proto-Negroid!” — The Racial History of Man (1923: 419-20)

In plain language, Dixon claimed that the earliest populations of New England bore Black-like (Negroid) physical traits — not Mongoloid or European ones. This conclusion, coming from a Harvard scientist during Jim Crow America, challenged the racial hierarchy and the story of who first populated the land.

And then, as if by design, his work disappeared.

I. The Man Harvard Tried to Forget

Roland Burrage Dixon (1875–1934) was not a fringe theorist. He was Harvard’s Professor of Anthropology, curator at the Peabody Museum, and a colleague of Franz Boas and Alfred Kroeber. He wrote extensively on racial morphology and migration. But unlike Boas, who preached cultural relativism, Dixon pursued a comparative racial typology that sometimes crossed colonial boundaries too boldly.

His data came from skulls excavated in New England burial sites, measured with calipers and indexed by cranial shape, nasal width, and facial angle the language of early 20th-century physical anthropology. But instead of confirming the popular “Mongoloid Indian” stereotype, Dixon found traits he labeled “Proto-Negroid,” which he defined as a prehistoric stock showing features similar to ancient African and Australoid peoples.

In academic shorthand, that meant this:

“There were dark-skinned, broad-nosed peoples in early Massachusetts and Rhode Island before European contact.”

For a Harvard anthropologist to say that in 1923 was revolutionary and dangerous.

II. The Re-Labeling: From Proto-Negroid to Mongoloid

Within two years of Dixon’s death, the language of his findings began to vanish from official discourse.

 Summaries in American Anthropologist (1925) described his New England skulls as “early Mongoloid.”

 University bibliographies dropped the word Negroid entirely.

 Even the Peabody Museum’s inventory cards where Dixon’s data had been recorded were later edited to classify the same skulls as “Algonkian” or “Mongoloid.”

This isn’t an accident of taxonomy. It’s a pattern.

Labeling the remains “Mongoloid” kept them compatible with the Bering Strait migration narrative (Asiatic origins only) and erased any suggestion of an Negroid-looking or dark-complexioned population in early New England.

 In other words: Harvard sanitized Dixon’s evidence to preserve the racial story America wanted.

III. Destruction of Notes: The Institutional Cleanse

After Dixon’s death in 1934, his personal notes, site maps, and measurement tables were reportedly destroyed by museum staff.

 Historian Thomas Jones, in A Collector of Ideas: Roland Burrage Dixon and the Beginnings of Professional American Anthropology in the Pacific (ANU Press, 2022), notes that Harvard curators in the 1950s referred to Dixon’s materials as “of little present value and may be dispensed with.”

“Dispensed with” in archival language means intentionally destroyed.

That act occurred during the height of the Cold War, when anthropology was reinventing itself as an anti-racist social science under the influence of Boas’s students.

 Erasing Dixon’s “racial” files wasn’t about moral progress — it was about protecting the institution.

 Harvard couldn’t celebrate itself as a beacon of liberal science while sitting on a file drawer that said the first New Englanders looked Negroid.

IV. The Material Evidence Still Sitting in Cambridge

Despite the purging of Dixon’s notes, the Peabody Museum continues to hold thousands of human remains  including crania from Massachusetts and Rhode Island, the very regions Dixon studied.

 Federal NAGPRA filings and ProPublica’s Repatriation Database confirm that Harvard retains over 6,000 Native American ancestors, many still unrepatriated.

 Among them are skulls from Wampanoag, Narragansett, and Nipmuc territories, the same cultural zone where Dixon found his “Proto-Negroid” type.

The evidence, in other words, never left Cambridge.

What disappeared was the language — the racial classification that unsettled America’s racial mythology.

“ Harvard University holds the human remains of at least 19 individuals who were likely enslaved and almost 7,000 Native Americans ” 

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/6/1/draft-human-remains-report/ 

V. Why “Proto-Negroid” Threatened the Colonial Narrative

To understand the stakes, consider what Dixon’s observation implied:

1. If early New England populations displayed “Negroid” traits, then Black or dark-skinned peoples were indigenous to the region.

2. That undermined both the idea of Africans as foreign captives and the notion of Indians as a wholly separate “Mongoloid race.”

3. It blurred the color line between “Black” and “Indian” — a line that colonial law and federal Indian policy depended on to manage land, labor, and identity.

By the 1920s, U.S. anthropology was a gatekeeper for race policy.

 So, Dixon’s “Proto-Negroid” claim wasn’t just an academic disagreement — it was a threat to the bureaucratic architecture of racial separation.

 Erasing him protected the fiction that Negroid features in Indigenous peoples came after contact, through slavery or intermarriage, rather than before contact as part of the continent’s original human diversity.

VI. Agnotology: The Science of Making Ignorance

Stanford historian Robert Proctor calls this process agnotology — the deliberate production of ignorance. When an institution selectively destroys data or re-labels it to align with power, it’s not “bad archiving”; it’s political science in disguise.

Harvard’s treatment of Dixon is a textbook case.

 The university preserved the bones but erased the words.

 It kept the measurable specimens — the data it could still control — while deleting the interpretation that gave them political danger.

VII. Echoes in Today’s Struggles

For today’s Urban Indians, Freedmen descendants, and First Tribe researchers, this history matters profoundly. When federal and tribal systems deny Indigenous identity by invoking outdated racial categories “Negro,” “Colored,” “non-Indian”  they are reproducing the same logic that Harvard institutionalized a century ago.

The myth that only Asiatic-featured peoples count as “real Indians” while darker descendants are “African Americans” began in the laboratories of men like Dixon’s successors, not in Indigenous communities themselves.

Revisiting his suppressed findings isn’t about reviving racial typology, it's about exposing how racial typology was weaponized and then sanitized once it revealed inconvenient truths.

VIII. Reclaiming the Record

To decolonize history, we have to decolonize the archive. That means demanding:

• Full public release of the Peabody Museum’s human-remains catalog, including provenance notes linked to Dixon’s excavations.

• Acknowledgment that racial re-labeling of data was a political act, not a neutral correction.

Repatriation and memorialization of the individuals whose remains were used to construct and then conceal the truth of America’s first peoples.

Only by reopening these files can we rebuild a truthful narrative of who our ancestors really were.

IX. Conclusion: The Quiet Fire in the Archive

Roland Burrage Dixon’s statement that “the dominant element in all this area is… Proto-Negroid” wasn’t merely a scientific observation. It was a spark. Harvard smothered it with institutional silence, but sparks endure. They survive in scattered quotations, lost field notes, and living descendants who remember that “Negroid” never meant foreign — it meant home.

History’s archives are not neutral. They’re battlegrounds.

 And when we reclaim those buried truths, we are not reviving old races — we’re reviving the record that was meant to die with him.

In the historiography of science, suppression occurs when:

1. An institution or disciplinary gatekeeper deliberately censors, re-frames, or buries evidence that challenges prevailing narratives, and

2. The suppression benefits existing power structures (racial, political, or institutional).

This differs from benign neglect, which is unintentional. When Dixon’s “Proto-Negroid” findings were rebranded as “Mongolian,” and his original field notes were destroyed after his death under institutional custody, those acts reflect curation of memory, not decay.

That fits historian of science Robert Proctor’s concept of “agnotology” — the deliberate production of ignorance. (Proctor & Schiebinger eds., Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance, Stanford UP 2008.)

Selected References 

• Dixon, Roland Burrage. The Racial History of Man. New York: Macmillan, 1923.

• Jones, Thomas. “A Collector of Ideas: Roland Burrage Dixon and the Beginnings of Professional American Anthropology in the Pacific.” ANU Press, 2022.

• Proctor, Robert N., and Londa Schiebinger, eds. Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance. Stanford University Press, 2008.

• Baker, Lee D. From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896–1954. University of California Press, 1998.

• Simpson, Audra. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Duke University Press, 2014.

• Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University. Osteology & Paleoanthropology Collections (official statement on human remains).

• ProPublica Repatriation Project. “Harvard University – Peabody Museum Inventory.” 2023.

Category	Documented Institutional Action or Record	Evidentiary Source	Observed or Likely Consequence	Scholarly Interpretation / Analytical Term
Archival Control	Dixon’s field notes and cranial measurement tables destroyed or “dispensed with” after his death (1950s Peabody memo).	Jones, A Collector of Ideas (ANU Press 2022).	Loss of primary data verifying “Proto-Negroid” morphology in New England.	Epistemic violence / agnotology (Proctor & Schiebinger 2008).
Terminological Re-labeling	Later Harvard and American Anthropologist summaries (1925 ff.) replace “Proto-Negroid” with “Mongoloid.”	American Anthropologist, Vol. 27 (1925); comparison with Racial History of Man (1923).	Sanitizes racial implications; preserves Bering Strait migration orthodoxy.	Ideological reframing / scientific sanitization.
Curation of Human Remains	Peabody Museum retains 6,000+ Native and early American crania including MA/RI proveniences.	Harvard Peabody NAGPRA reports; ProPublica Repatriation Database (2023).	Physical data preserved under institutional control while interpretive context erased.	Material retention + semantic erasure.
Selective Citation	Harvard curricula and major anthropology histories highlight Boas; omit Dixon’s New England racial findings.	Baker 1998; Simpson 2014 (not citing Dixon).	Shapes canon to favor cultural relativism narrative over typological controversies.	Historiographical gatekeeping.
Public Narrative Management	University statements frame collection retention as “stewardship” without discussing racial typology origins.	Harvard Provost, Steering Committee on Human Remains (2022).	Public accountability framed as ethics, not as correction of racial censorship.	Institutional self-absolution.
Loss of Provenance Transparency	No public accession list tying Dixon’s MA/RI crania to current holdings.	NAGPRA Federal Register Notices (1990-2024).	Prevents external verification of suppressed racial classifications.	Opacity as policy.

Pattern	Description	Resulting Form of Erasure
Archival Destruction	Elimination of raw field data undermines replication of findings.	Historical amnesia.
Re-classification	Terminology shift from “Negroid” → “Mongoloid.”	Semantic cleansing of Black/Indigenous antiquity.
Institutional Custody Without Context	Retention of remains divorced from original racial interpretations.	Museological silencing.
Canon Formation	Curriculum and disciplinary histories omit controversial data.	Erasure through omission.
Public Relations Framing	Ethical language replaces historical accountability.	Moral laundering.

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