Interview: Henry Louis Gates
By JIMMIE BRIGGS
Unbowed by a painful hip replacement surgery from last spring, Henry
Louis Gates, Jr. is electrified when discussing the recent book on which he and
his friend Cornel West collaborated. The two academic superstars of Harvard University's
famed Department of Afro-American Studies spent two years researching "The
African American Century: How Black Americans Have Shaped Our Country." Taking
a perspective of history that looks at individual lives by decade rather than
larger events, the encyclopedic work focuses on 100 African Americans who contributed
to, and had a lasting impact on, American society.
"All these books
were coming out about the [twentieth] century, and none of them were coming out
about the African-American contribution to America," recalls Gates. "We
thought in so many ways it was truly the 'African-American century.' In 1900,
there was no civil rights movement, no blacks in professional baseball, no jazz.
The America that we know is indelibly stamped by African-American contributions.
Despite the gains of multiculturalism and African-American studies, Americans
still don't know enough about individual African-American contributions to the
arts, sciences, etc. This book is a love letter to our ancestors, to those on
whose shoulders we stand." If there is one person whose spiritual reach
infuses and extends throughout the book, it is W.E.B. DuBois. Unarguably one of
the most important intellectual and political figures in America, it was he who
so famously declared that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem
of the color-line." The first black American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard
University, in 1896, DuBois promoted the study of black history and was a founder
of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The
professorship in humanities and Institute for Afro-American Research which Dr.
Gates directs are both named for W.E.B. DuBois. Begun in 1975, the W.E.B. DuBois
Institute for Afro-American Research is the nation's oldest center for the study
of African-American life. "DuBois is the man," proclaims Gates.
"This is the kind of project he would have done in his lifetime. He was always
doing vast historical projects and it was he who conceived of the 'Encyclopedia
Africana.' Cornel and I hope this [book] is very much in the 'DuBoisian' tradition,
celebrating who he would have called 'race men' and 'race women.'" In
the expectation that schools and a wider public will take interest in the book,
the two scholars have arranged the profiles in very accessible, short sections
using general language. The subjects skew towards sports and the creative arts,
but political and business figures are not overlooked. Women are also well represented.
For the casual observer of black history, there are a number of expected inclusions
such as educator Booker T. Washington, singer Marian Anderson, businesswoman Madame
C.J. Walker, tennis phenomenon Althea Gibson, civil rights leader Martin Luther
King, Jr. and author Toni Morrison. The surprises, and likely disagreements, will
be in selections like slain West Coast rapper Tupac Shakur, minstrel-era comedian
Bert Williams, and scandalized singer Michael Jackson. “If you erased
them out, the shape of black culture and American culture throughout the twentieth
century would have been vastly different,’’ argues Dr. Gates. “Sarah
Vaughan, Rosa Parks, Miles Davis, Tupac Shakur—you can't even imagine who
we would be as an American people, as an African-American people, without them.’’
It is telling that a work that begins examining the life of an unabashed
"race man" such as W.E.B. DuBois ends with the ethnically ambiguous
golfer Tiger Woods. The authors make an important statement about the evolution
of race in terms of its definition and meaning in society. West and Gates point
out that, "despite the public's mixed reaction to his son's self-determination,
Earl Woods simply commented that no matter what Tiger might want, 'his race can't
be ignored.'" If one is discussing the reason why black Americans can never
be footnotes in the evolution of modern American history, then it shouldn't be.
"Readers should take away two things," says Gates, "that
[black] people not only endured but they prevailed against enormous odds. Odds
that many people in [recent] generations cannot even remember. The second is that
there wouldn't have been an 'American century,' as great as it was, without the
fundamental contributions of persons of African descent. I think what we want
is for our contemporaries and our children to have access to that history, a history
of travail and suffering on the one hand, but of glorious transcendence on the
other. America belongs to us and we belong to America."
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