It’s not what you read about in textbooks like “ From Slavery to Freedom.” It is not a typical Black experience, but it is a real Black experience. We lived within a thirty-mile radius in eastern West Virginia. My family never moved, from fourth great-grandparents down to me. You write about this beautifully in your memoir “Colored People.” Tell me a little about Piedmont, where you grew up. I’d like to start out by looking back at your family and West Virginia. (We had a subsequent exchange over e-mail.) Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. On the day of an immense snowstorm, we connected over Zoom for a few hours and talked about matters past and present. Gates is married to the Cuban-born historian Marial Iglesias Utset they live in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Gates proved a dynamo of both intellectual energy and fund-raising finesse. Du Bois Research Institute, which is now part of the Hutchins Center. Bobo, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Suzanne Blier, and others-all while reinvigorating the W. E. B. Gates arrived at Harvard in 1991, and he swiftly recruited an extraordinary concentration of Black scholarship-William Julius Wilson, Cornel West, Lawrence D. Perhaps his most important and lasting role has been as a teacher and an institution builder. A collection of Hurston’s essays, “ You Don’t Know Us Negroes,” which Gates co-edited with Genevieve West, came out last month “ Who’s Black and Why? A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race,” which he edited with Andrew S. His book “ Colored People,” which explores his family and upbringing in West Virginia, is an important chapter in the modern history of African American memoirs. Gates is a prodigious cultural entrepreneur, editing countless anthologies and reference works (including “ Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience”), co-founding the online publication the Root, and publishing popular volumes about Black culture and history. Wilson (“ Our Nig”) and Hannah Crafts (“ The Bondwoman’s Narrative”), and assembled the thirty-volume Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers. Gates also unearthed and brought forward nineteenth-century texts by African American authors including Harriet E. In “ The Signifying Monkey,” he employed the tools of post-structuralism and semiotics to bear on both the vernacular tradition and authors as varied as Zora Neale Hurston and Ishmael Reed. Soyinka, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1986, helped convince Gates to study African and African American literature.Īs a literary critic, Gates made an impact on the field by helping to establish a canon of African American literature-one that was neither separatist nor a mere appendage to the traditional, white canon.
The English faculty at Cambridge did not take African literature seriously, according to Gates, relegating it to anthropology.
CENON BIBE JR TRIAL
Gates was also fascinated by the trial of Bobby Seale and other members of the Black Panthers at a courthouse near campus, and joined in the student strike in solidarity.Īfter graduating from Yale, he went, on a fellowship, to study at the University of Cambridge, where his most important mentor was Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian playwright, essayist, and novelist. His awakening did not take place only in the classroom and university meeting hall. In New Haven, he began to explore the depths of African American literature and history. After a year at Potomac State College, Gates transferred to Yale, which was starting to open up to a sizable number of Black students.
Town picnics were still segregated but, with the advent of Brown v. Board of Education, the schools were not. Gates was born in 1950 and grew up in Piedmont, West Virginia, where his family has deep roots.
Still, I don’t think it requires the prejudice of friendship to believe that Gates, who is now seventy-one, has left a lasting, multiform imprint on the culture. We’ve known each other first as colleagues at The New Yorker, where he wrote the Profiles that make up his collection “ Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man,” and then as friends. It’s important to say it up front: I can’t claim to approach Henry Louis Gates, Jr.-or Skip, as he’s known-as a subject of objective journalistic inquiry.
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