Henry Louis Gates, Jr. & the Golden Age of African American Studies

From the pages of our Fall 2022 Issue.

He first saw a picture of W.E.B. Du Bois in his American history textbook. It was Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr.’s senior year in high school in Piedmont, West Virginia, 1968, and he was leafing through the back of the book—the part they never got to, the late-20th century. There was a picture of this man—so very handsome, so obviously brilliant, sporting a Van Dyke goatee. Gates thought, Man, I don’t know how to pronounce his name, but I want to know all about him. His freshman year of college, Gates read The Souls of Black Folk—the bible for Black intellectuals—and his destiny was set. Some years later, in 1991, Gates was appointed W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities at Harvard. He went deep into Du Bois, editing the Black intellectual and civil rights leader’s completed works for Oxford University Press. One of his proudest possessions in his library was a first edition of The Souls of Black Folk, signed by Du Bois—with a dust jacket. He gave the book to the Houghton Library at Harvard because “it was just too much for me to be hoarding in my study.”

STEPHANIE BERGER COURTESY HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.

Gates sits on the board of the W.E.B. Du Bois Museum Foundation, whose goal is to construct a multi-million dollar museum complex in Accra, Ghana, Du Bois’s final resting place. Gates, who calls himself “the Du Bois man,” has collected thousands of lost works (short stories, poems, reviews, and notices) by African American authors, dating from the early 19th to the mid-20th century. Many of us know Gates as the host of the popular Finding Your Roots series on PBS, but this scholar’s work is vast and purposeful. He will be here in the Berkshires, in dialogue with David Blight at the Authors Guild Foundation’s inaugural Words, Ideas, and Thinkers (WIT) Festival, September 22–25 on the grounds of Shakespeare & Company and other Berkshire locations. We talked with Gates recently from his home on Martha’s Vineyard. That evening, he was to attend the screening of the EMMY® nominated documentary Frederick Douglass in Five Speeches, of which Gates is the executive producer.

There’s heightened awareness of notable Black literary and social figures who have lived here in the Berkshires. What are your thoughts on how we are giving due recognition to individuals like Du Bois?

I cannot imagine a greater American who hailed from Great Barrington, Massachusetts, as William Edward Burghardt Du Bois. He loved Great Barrington, and his account of race relations there is very positive. There’s always a moment when you discover that you’re Black, which is simultaneous with discovering racism, and it’s genuinely painful. For Du Bois, that was when a girl in elementary school refused to take his calling card, but she was a visitor. And that’s what’s important. She’s not one of the children he started school with. His school life was integrated from the get-go, and that speaks well of race relations. Then he went to Fisk, where his education was supported by a group of people in Great Barrington. The problem for Great Barrington was Du Bois’s later politics.

Not the fact that he went to Harvard, not the fact that he was a Pan-Africanist and attended the first Pan-African Congress in London in 1900. Not the fact that he was one of the founders of the NAACP. But the fact that he ended his life as a communist and renounced his American citizenship and died in Ghana. This was very hard for some of the good citizens of Great Barrington to wrap their head around. I think now that sufficient time has passed. The McCarthy era for the persecution of so-called communists is long gone. Just on the face of it, everyone in Great Barrington should be proud of its greatest resident, and as a practical measure, Du Bois’s legacy is a potentially lucrative tourist attraction. So it’s a win-win situation.

In a community like Great Barrington, like a lot of small communities, we’re paying greater attention to Black notables such as James Weldon Johnson, whose writing cabin is in Great Barrington. What are your thoughts on that?

James Weldon Johnson adored Du Bois and his writing style. His novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, published anonymously in 1912, is a riff on Du Bois’s metaphor of double consciousness. He literalized the metaphor by creating a character who is both Black and white—he is born Black but passes for white. That is the organizing principle of The Souls of Black Folk. Johnson was the most famous Black literary figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Du Bois was seen as being in the old guard by that time, but Johnson was truly a Renaissance man. He and his brother composed Under the Bamboo Tree, and The Negro National Anthem, now the Black National Anthem. Johnson started as a field secretary for the NAACP and was the first African American to be chosen as executive secretary. We tend to forget that the NAACP was an overwhelmingly white organization when it was formed, with major exceptions, including Du Bois, who was the editor of its magazine, The Crisis, starting in 1910 and lasting until he was fired in 1934.

What is happening now throughout our country?

Every major university now has the Department of African American Studies, in historically white research universities. But it’s taken a while. Harvard just rebuilt their department starting in 1991, when I was invited to come for that purpose, along with my colleague Kwame Anthony Appiah. We published all sorts of reference tools. I’ve just embarked on a new project with Oxford University Press, the Oxford Dictionary of African American English. In 1999, Anthony Appiah and I published Encarta Africana with Microsoft, with a huge print volume, trying to fulfill Du Bois’s dream of publishing the Black version of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Now, the Ford Foundation is headed by a Black man, Darren Walker. And the Mellon Foundation by a Black woman, Elizabeth Alexander, who was a professor of African American studies and happened to be taking a course with me as an undergraduate at Yale when I was on the faculty. Since the onset of affirmative action, starting really in 1969, it has led to a larger Black presence at historically white schools. These people have gone on to positions of authority in the Academy, in the foundation world, in government, which is responsible for declaring structures to be on a historic register, etc., etc. It took a while for all of that to unfold and to have an impact. Now we see it at its maximum efficiency.

How is that done in our schools?

I’m an advisor to the College Board, and the College Board last year announced that they were going to mount an AP course in African American studies. Well, this is great because where do you learn how to be a citizen? In this country, you learn in our public schools. Black History Month is well and good, but I want every day to be Black History Month, and the only way for that to happen is for the narrative of the African American experience to be integrated and inextricably intertwined with the larger narrative of America.

You and David Blight will be talking about “Reexamining American History” at the WIT Festival. Have you worked with him before?

Yes, I read his monumental biography of Frederick Douglass in draft form. He would send me chapters, and every weekend I would read a chapter and I would send him back all my comments, criticisms, and suggestions. He laughs about that. He would open his email and say, “Oh my God, there’s Gates again!”

Are you looking forward to being in dialogue with him?

I’m so excited. David Blight is one of the greatest American historians at work in the Academy today, bar none, and he was the perfect person to write the definitive biography of Douglass. There’s a passage in which Douglass says, “One day, a great historian will emerge who will tell the true story, the full story, of this great drama of the defeat of slavery and the rise of Reconstruction and its rollback.” That great historian is David Blight. Not only was I vetting his chapters, but I asked him if I could obtain the documentary film rights. I wanted to do that before anybody else beat me to it. And I got them. Of course, the Obamas got the scripted rights, the feature rights. But I got the documentary film rights, my partner and I, Dyllan McGee. Our first film is called Frederick Douglass in Five Speeches, and we have been named finalists for an EMMY®. Then we’re going to do a long-form documentary of Douglass for PBS. David was our consultant for both.

We did an interview with David that was published in an earlier issue of Berkshire Magazine. Can you elaborate on the topic for your WIT Festival discussion?

How do we integrate the narrative of African Americans into the larger narrative of American history? Black History Month is wonderful but, as I said, every day has to be Black History Month, and the only way to do that is to see American history as consisting of many strands—the story of women, the story of Native Americans, the story of immigrants, the story of African Americans, the story of a Latino Americans. There’s never been a time with more potential for the narrative of the American experience to be recast and retold on a fair and equitable basis, so that a multiplicity of voices and experiences can be incorporated into our textbooks, into our classroom, in a way that was impossible for my generation.

What sort of impact are you wanting to leave?

My goal has been to eliminate the need for subsequent generations of students and scholars of African and African American studies to start all over, to reinvent the wheel. John Blassingame led the way of collecting all of Frederick Douglass’s speeches and essays and autobiographies with the Frederick Douglass Papers Project published by Yale University Press. Well, David could draw from that research to do the biography along with a lot of other archival materials that had been maintained in the private library by an African American doctor in Savannah, Georgia. He approached David about using that archive. Now that archive is housed in Yale, in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. So, you see, David couldn’t have written that biography in the same way 50 years ago, or 30 years ago. It had to wait for the field to mature. This is the Golden Age of African American Studies. I wish that Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson and Alain Locke and Zora Neale Hurston and Mary McLeod Bethune were alive to see it. But they aren’t. So we have to celebrate them.

That’s incredible that you are doing this within your lifetime, creating this foundation to build upon—and it’s being built upon as we speak.

As we speak. And no single person controls it. It’s a field. As Mao used to say, “Let a thousand flowers bloom.” Well, in African American studies, tens of thousands of flowers are blooming, and not all African violet either. (Laughs) A field has to be open to anybody.

Do you think that an author’s race should be promoted as being the work of a Black author, or should an author’s work speak for itself? Well, both. If I teach a course on the American novel,

how many Black texts can I possibly have in that course? You

have to have Melville and Hawthorne and Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Hemingway. But if I teach a course in the African American novel as well, then all the authors are Black. It’s the same analogy of Oxford wanting 50 entries for their American National Biography. Yes, we want more Black people in the broader American National Biography, but we can’t have 6,000. We would take the thing over. These texts exist in a double textual universe. You can teach Toni Morrison in the African American literature course. You can teach Toni Morrison in American literature. You can have a triple life. You can teach her in a women’s literature course. And that’s all good. You read her differently in each of those contexts.

While you were at Yale, you mentored Jodie Foster, who wrote her senior essay on Morrison. Would you agree that that was an example of a white woman trying to grow and expand her understanding of the Black experience?

She wanted to expand her understanding of the Black experience, but she also was intrigued by the literary genius of an American novelist. Toni was notoriously private. I wrote to her and said—I didn’t even tell her it was Jodie Foster—I have a brilliant student writing a senior essay about you. Her name is Alicia C. Foster, which is Jodie’s real name. Jodie used to babysit for my two daughters, and we’re very good friends still. I don’t know if she figured out it was Jodie or not, but she wrote back and said, “Tell this girl to come see me.” Jodie did this amazing interview. Toni was so open with her but made her swear never to publish it. I read it and said, “You’ve gotta publish this.

Toni’s giving her secrets as a novelist.” Even to this day—after Toni’s transition—Jodie won’t publish it, but I keep working on it. Look, who is the most brilliant scholar about the life and times of Frederick Douglass? David Blight. I didn’t do his DNA, but he looks pretty white to me. And if anybody tried to say that David Blight wasn’t qualified, they’d have to come through me. We have to fight against the excesses of woke culture, cancel culture, and allegations of cultural appropriation. Anybody sufficiently motivated has the right to teach or study or write about any subject.

As you’ve said, you are serving as editor-in-chief of the Oxford Dictionary of African American English. Why is this an important endeavor for you? How will you go about documenting the entries?

I grew up in a household of people talking and analyzing language, just in the normal course of things, and exhilarating in the richness of African American speech. I was just programmed that way. I’ve long had a dream of doing what Samuel Johnson did for the English language in 1755 with his dictionary. Then there’s James Murray, who did the Oxford English Dictionary, the greatest dictionary ever produced. It’s a dictionary on historic principles, meaning you give the history of the early uses of the word. So examples will include: “hip” and “cool”; “hokum” and “rap”; “aks” and “banjo”; and “okra,” which came from Africa, and “goober” for peanut—that’s a word that slaves brought over from West Africa. If you read the Oxford English Dictionary from cover to cover, it is another way of encountering the history of the English people. We have an editorial board of ten linguists, all distinguished people in their field. With this dictionary, it will be another way of encountering the history of the African American people by how they spoke English, and how they reinvented English to mirror their own experiences.

Finding Your Roots Season Nine premieres in January. Are there any segments that you’re especially looking forward to? We have so many stories. We got Julia Roberts. Julia Roberts is not a Roberts; her name should be Mitchell. Carol Burnett’s 88, and she wants to know if her grandfather was really her grandfather. Joe Manganiello, who was in True Blood, it turns out that his great-grandmother was a victim of the Armenian genocide. She escaped miraculously and was in a German refugee camp, and she became pregnant by a German military officer. She kept his photograph, but it disappeared. So was this a legend? Well, we found the guy using DNA. It was a true story. In addition, we found out that Joe’s paternal grandfather was mixed race, and that he descended from, like I do, a Black man named Plato Turner, who was a hero in the American Revolution. There’s a monument to Plato Turner in Plymouth. That’s Joe Manganiello’s fifth great-grandfather, and he had no idea. We have a zillion stories like this.

You’ve got so many projects going on. Any that stand out? A few years ago, the great philanthropists Robert Smith came to me and my partner, Dylan McKee. We own all of our content for Finding Our Roots and all the Black history series, and he said, “Our young people have a short attention span. So can you do two-minute videos on these various topics?” In a one-hour documentary, basically you’re telling 10 or 12 stories anyway, in five-minute units. We take those five-minute blocks and cut them into two, put me at the top, and the bottom interview maybe one or two scholars, and it’s called Black History in Two Minutes. They’re being used all over the country in classrooms. One of the inspirations for the College Board to create an AP curriculum was Black History in Two Minutes. We’ve done 150. I might not invent a good idea, but I’m smart enough to know one when I see one. My job, my ambition, my goal, my pleasure is to tell the story of the African and African American people through as many media as I possibly can, as originally and as compellingly as my father’s stories to my brother and me when we were kids. All I’m trying to do is extend traditions that were born in my own household through my beautiful mother who was a great writer and my father who was a fabulous storyteller. I’m just bringing up the rear.

For more on the Authors Guild Foundation’s WIT Festival, September 22–25, and to view the schedule, go to authorsguild.org/wit-festival

—Anastasia Stanmeyer