Frances Child, who was really more of a student of the grammar of old forms of English than a student of English Literature as we understand that term today taught a range of subjects including mathematics and history. He was a founder member of a journal of the American Folklore Society. One can find the first edition of the journal of the society online, for nothing, including a piece setting out the general approach and aims of the society. It includes references to 'primitive races' and 'the savage mind', meaning, basically Black and Native Americans.

I was introduced to this through a book which some might complain about as sweeping aside the research of the past so that we end up knowing less than we knew when we started, but which I found to be a reasoned and well argued critique from, I guess, a point of view of what one might call 'liberal'. It is called Segregating Sound by Karl Hagstrom Miller. One might agree or disagree with some of the analysis, but I think one would find it difficult to argue that it is not an excellent piece of research, even though it calls into question the orthodoxy of the past and points to the effects of that orthodoxy.

Oh, dear, I seem to have denigrated the great Child. And gone way off-topic.