Between 1941 and 1943 the city of Salvador, Bahia became the site of the battle between two different perceptions of black integration in the United States and of the place of Africa in this process. Franklin Frazier, the most famous black sociologist of the time, was locked into an argument with the equally famous, white, and Jewish anthropologist Melville Herskovits on the “origins” of the so-called black family. To make things even more complex, both centered their contention on fieldwork done among the same informants: the povo de santo (the members) of the same candomblé house of worship in Salvador. In between the two of them was linguist Lorenzo vibrant v.8 n.1 livio sansone Dow Turner. The article shows how transnational was the making of Afro- Brazilian studies and how important is a critical assessment of power relations in this international field of studies.