(From an American Book Award-winning author comes a pungen...)
From an American Book Award-winning author comes a pungent and poignant masterpiece of recollection that ushers readers into a now-vanished "colored" world and extends and deepens our sense of African-American history, even as it entrances us with its bravura storytelling.
(As some remarkable men talk about their lives, many persp...)
As some remarkable men talk about their lives, many perspectives on race and gender emerge. For the notion of the unitary black man, Gates argues, is as imaginary as the creature that the poet Wallace Stevens conjured in his poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." James Baldwin, Colin Powell, Harry Belafonte, Bill T. Jones, Louis Farrakhan, Anatole Broyard, Albert Murray - all these men came from modest circumstances and all achieved preeminence.
(Henry Louis Gates, Jr., takes us to twelve countries in s...)
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., takes us to twelve countries in search of Africa's magnificent past, the now neglected civilizations that in their day were as grand and sophisticated as any on the face of the earth. From Nubia's ancient empire, which for a time ruled Egypt and centuries before had established the earliest known African city, to the fabled town of Timbuktu, where during the medieval period there thrived a center of scholars that rivaled any in Europe and where books were as prized as gold, to Ethiopia's Christian kingdom, where the Lost Ark of the Covenant is said to reside under perpetual vigil, Gates reveals an Africa little known to Westerners.
(Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s Tradition and the Black Atlantic...)
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s Tradition and the Black Atlantic is both a vibrant romp down the rabbit hole of cultural studies and an examination of the discipline's roots and role in contemporary thought. In this conversational tour through the halls of theory, Gates leaps from Richard Wright to Spike Lee, from Pat Buchanan to Frantz Fanon, and ultimately to the source of anticolonialist thought: the unlikely figure of Edmund Burke. Throughout Tradition and the Black Atlantic, Gates shows that the culture wars have presented us with a surfeit of either/or tradition versus modernity; Eurocentrism versus Afrocentricism. Pointing us away from these facile dichotomies, Gates deftly combines rigorous scholarship with humor, looking back to the roots of cultural studies in order to map out its future course.
(Henry Louis Gates, Jr., gives us a sumptuously illustrate...)
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., gives us a sumptuously illustrated landmark book tracing African American history from the arrival of the conquistadors to the election of Barack Obama. Informed by the latest, sometimes provocative scholarship and including more than seven hundred images - ancient maps, fine art, documents, photographs, cartoons, posters - Life Upon These Shores focuses on defining events, debates, and controversies, as well as the signal achievements of people famous and obscure. Gates takes us from the sixteenth century through the ordeal of slavery, from the Civil War and Reconstruction through the Jim Crow era and the Great Migration; from the civil rights and black nationalist movements through the age of hip-hop to the Joshua generation. By documenting and illuminating the sheer diversity of African American involvement in American history, society, politics, and culture, Gates bracingly disabuses us of the presumption of a single “black experience.” Life Upon These Shores is a book of major importance, a breathtaking tour de force of the historical imagination.
(Henry Louis Gates, Jr., presents a seminal volume of four...)
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., presents a seminal volume of four classic slave narratives, including the 1749 texts of The Life of Olaudah Equiano, the last edition corrected and published in his lifetime. The collection also includes perhaps the best known and most widely read slave narrative - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, as well as two narratives by women: The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave, and Incident in the Life of a Slave Girl, written by Harriet Jacobs as Linda Brent.
(Henry Louis Gates, Jr. gives us a corrective yet loving h...)
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. gives us a corrective yet loving homage to Roger’s work. Relying on the latest scholarship, Gates leads us on a romp through African, diasporic, and African-American history in a question-and-answer format. Among the one hundred questions: Who were Africa’s first ambassadors to Europe? Who was the first black president in North America? Did Lincoln really free the slaves? Who was history’s wealthiest person? What percentage of white Americans have recent African ancestry? Why did free black people living in the South before the end of the Civil War stay there? Who was the first black head of state in modern Western history? Where was the first Underground Railroad? Who was the first black American woman to be a self-made millionaire? Which black man made many of our favorite household products better?
(A profound new rendering of the struggle by African-Ameri...)
A profound new rendering of the struggle by African-Americans for equality after the Civil War and the violent counter-revolution that resubjugated them, as seen through the prism of the war of images and ideas that have left an enduring racist stain on the American mind. The abolition of slavery in the aftermath of the Civil War is a familiar story, as is the civil rights revolution that transformed the nation after World War II. But the century in between remains a mystery: if emancipation sparked "a new birth of freedom" in Lincoln's America, why was it necessary to march in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s America? In this new book, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., one of our leading chroniclers of the African-American experience, seeks to answer that question in a history that moves from the Reconstruction Era to the "nadir" of the African-American experience under Jim Crow, through to World War I and the Harlem Renaissance. Through his close reading of the visual culture of this tragic era, Gates reveals the many faces of Jim Crow and how, together, they reinforced a stark color line between white and black Americans.
(Henry Louis Gates, Jr. presents a journey through America...)
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. presents a journey through America's past and our nation's attempts at renewal in this look at the Civil War's conclusion, Reconstruction, and the rise of Jim Crow segregation. This is a story about America during and after Reconstruction, one of history's most pivotal and misunderstood chapters. In a stirring account of emancipation, the struggle for citizenship and national reunion, and the advent of racial segregation, the renowned Harvard scholar delivers a book that is illuminating and timely. Real-life accounts drive the narrative, spanning the half century between the Civil War and Birth of a Nation. Here, you will come face-to-face with the people and events of Reconstruction's noble democratic experiment, its tragic undermining, and the drawing of a new "color line" in the long Jim Crow era that followed. In introducing young readers to them, and to the resiliency of the African American people at times of progress and betrayal, Professor Gates shares a history that remains vitally relevant today.
(Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. weaves together ge...)
Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. weaves together genealogical detective work with cutting-edge DNA analysis to trace the ancestry of a diverse array of trailblazing public figures. The result is a captivating cross-section of history.
(This six-hour PBS series explores the evolution of the Af...)
This six-hour PBS series explores the evolution of the African-American people, as well as the multiplicity of cultural institutions, political strategies, and religious and social perspectives they developed - forging their own history, culture, and society against unimaginable odds.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. is an American literary critic, teacher, historian, filmmaker and public intellectual who currently serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.
Background
Ethnicity:
Gates's family is descended in part from the Yoruba people of west Africa. He also has some European ancestry, and is connected to the distinctive multiracial West Virginia community of the Chestnut Ridge people. He is also of part Irish descent.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. was born in Keyser, West Virginia to Henry Louis Gates Sr. (c.1913–2010) and his wife Pauline Augusta (Coleman) Gates (1916–1987). He grew up in neighboring Piedmont. His father worked in a paper mill and moonlighted as a janitor, while his mother cleaned houses.
Education
Gates graduated as valedictorian of his Piedmont High School class in 1968 and initially enrolled at Potomac State College of West Virginia University, transferred as an undergraduate to Yale College. While at Yale, Gates spent a year volunteering at a mission hospital in Tanzania and traveling throughout the African continent in order to complete the year-long “non-academic” requirement of his five-year bachelor program. In 1973 he became a Bachelor of Arts.
The first African American to be awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, Gates sailed on the Queen Elizabeth 2 for England and University of Cambridge, where he studied English literature at Clare College, Cambridge and earned his Doctor of Philosophy.
In October 1975 Henry Louis Gates Jr. was hired by Charles Davis as a secretary in the Afro-American Studies department at Yale. In July 1976, Gates was promoted to the post of Lecturer in Afro-American Studies with the understanding that he would be promoted to assistant professor upon completion of his doctoral dissertation. Jointly appointed to assistant professorships in English and Afro-American Studies in 1979, Gates was promoted to associate professor in 1984. While at Yale, Gates guided Jodie Foster, who majored in African-American Literature at Yale with her thesis on Toni Morrison.
In 1984, Gates was recruited by Cornell University with an offer of tenure; Gates asked Yale if they would match Cornell's offer, but they declined. Gates moved to Cornell in 1985, where he taught until 1989. Following a two-year stay at Duke University, he was recruited to Harvard University in 1991. At Harvard, Gates teaches undergraduate and graduate courses as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, an endowed chair he was appointed to in 2006, and as a professor of English. Additionally, he is the Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research.
As a literary theorist and critic, Gates has combined literary techniques of deconstruction with native African literary traditions; he draws on structuralism, post-structuralism, and semiotics to analyze texts and assess matters of identity politics. As a black intellectual and public figure, Gates has been an outspoken critic of the Eurocentric literary canon. He has insisted that black literature must be evaluated by the aesthetic criteria of its culture of origin, not criteria imported from Western or European cultural traditions that express a "tone deafness to the black cultural voice" and result in "intellectual racism". In his major scholarly work, The Signifying Monkey, a 1989 American Book Award winner, Gates expressed what might constitute a black cultural aesthetic. The work extended the application of the concept of "signifyin'" to the analysis of African-American works. "Signifyin'" refers to the significance of words that is based on context, and is accessible only to those who share the cultural values of a given speech community. It is rooted in African-American literary criticism in the African-American vernacular tradition.
As a literary historian committed to the preservation and study of historical texts, Gates has been integral to the Black Periodical Literature Project, a digital archive of black newspapers and magazines created with financial assistance from the National Endowment for the Humanities. To build Harvard's visual, documentary, and literary archives of African-American texts, Gates arranged for the purchase of The Image of the Black in Western Art, a collection assembled by Dominique de Ménil in Houston.
As a result of research as a MacArthur Fellow, Gates discovered Our Nig, written by Harriet E. Wilson in 1859, and therefore thought to be the first novel written in the United States by a black person. Later, he acquired and authenticated the manuscript of The Bondwoman's Narrative by Hannah Crafts, a novel from the same period that scholars believe may have been written as early as 1853; if so, it would have precedence as the first-known novel written in the United States by a black person. The Bondwoman's Narrative was first published in 2002 and became a bestseller.
Asked by National Endowment for the Humanities Chairman Bruce Cole to describe his work, Gates responded: "I would say I'm a literary critic. That's the first descriptor that comes to mind. After that, I would say I was a teacher. Both would be just as important." After his 2003 NEH lecture, Gates published his 2003 book, The Trials of Phillis Wheatley.
In 1995 Gates presented a program in the BBC series Great Railway Journeys (produced in association with PBS). The program documents a 3,000-mile journey Gates took through Zimbabwe, Zambia and Tanzania, with his then-wife Sharon Adams and daughters Liza and Meggie Gates. This trip came 25 years after Gates worked at a hospital in Kilimatinde near Dodoma, Tanzania, as a 19-year-old pre-medical student at Yale University.
In September 1995, Gates read a five-part abridgment (by Margaret Busby) of his memoir Colored People on BBC Radio 4.
Gates was the host and co-producer of African American Lives (2006) and African American Lives 2 (2008) in which the lineage of more than a dozen notable African Americans was traced using genealogical and historic resources, as well as genealogical DNA testing. In the first series, Gates learned that he has 50% European ancestry and 50% African ancestry, He had known of some European ancestry but was surprised to learn the high proportion; he also learned that he was descended from John Redman, a mulatto veteran in New England of the American Revolutionary War. Gates has joined the Sons of the American Revolution. In the series, he discussed findings with guests about their complex ancestries.
In the second season, Gates learned that he is part of a genetic subgroup possibly descended from or related to the fourth-century Irish king Niall of the Nine Hostages. He also learned that one of his African ancestors includes a Yoruba man who was trafficked to America from Ouidah in the present-day Republic of Benin. The two series demonstrated the many strands of heritage and history among African Americans.
Gates hosted Faces of America, a four-part series presented by PBS in 2010. This program examined the genealogy of 12 North Americans of diverse ancestry: Elizabeth Alexander, Mario Batali, Stephen Colbert, Louise Erdrich, Malcolm Gladwell, Eva Longoria, Yo-Yo Ma, Mike Nichols, Queen Noor of Jordan, Mehmet Oz, Meryl Streep, and Kristi Yamaguchi.
Since 1995, Gates has been the jury chair for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, which honors written works that contribute to society's understanding of racism and the diversity of human culture. Gates was an Anisfield-Wolf prize winner in 1989 for The Schomburg Library of Women Writers.
Since 2012 he has hosted a PBS TV series, called Finding Your Roots – with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The second season of the series, featuring 30 prominent guests across 10 episodes, with Gates as the narrator, interviewer, and genealogical investigator, aired on PBS in fall 2014. The show's third season was postponed after it was discovered that actor Ben Affleck had persuaded Gates to omit information about his slave-owning ancestors. Finding Your Roots resumed in January 2016.
Gates's critically acclaimed six-part PBS documentary series, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, traced 500 years of African-American history to the second inauguration of President Barack Obama. Gates wrote, executive produced and hosted the series, which earned the 2013 Peabody Award and NAACP Image Award.
(Henry Louis Gates, Jr. returns as series host to guide no...)
2008
Politics
When Gates was asked about Trump's election as the President of The United States, he said: "We have no choice but to give the president-elect of the United States a chance. This is a democracy. This is how our country works. If more people who agreed with us had voted, you wouldn’t be asking this question. Who’s responsible? People who didn’t vote. I have friends who know Donald Trump. I’ve never met Mr. Trump myself. But those friends, some of whom are black, say that he was a perfectly center of the road, cosmopolitan person. Unfortunately, his campaign rhetoric leant itself to xenophobic, anti-immigration, isolationist attitudes by addressing people’s fears. Not by assuaging them, but by exacerbating them. The fears are economic fears.
I grew up with white working-class people in West Virginia. And I know that you can’t dismiss all white working-class people as being racist. That’s ridiculous. I have very close friends who voted for Donald Trump and they think the economy is going to be better and America is going to be stronger. They’re not racist, I know them. I think that the failure was that the Democratic Party didn’t find a way to speak to these anxieties. I don’t use the term “trailer trash” because I grew up with people for whom that was the equivalent of the “n-word.” You can’t demonize white working-class people just because we’re unhappy with the election results."
Views
While Gates has stressed the need for greater recognition of black literature and black culture, he does not advocate a "separatist" black canon. Rather, he works for greater recognition of black works and their integration into a larger, pluralistic canon. He has affirmed the value of the Western tradition, but has envisioned a more inclusive canon of diverse works sharing common cultural connections: "Every black American text must confess to a complex ancestry, one high and low (that is, literary and vernacular) but also one white and black... there can be no doubt that white texts inform and influence black texts (and vice versa) so that a thoroughly integrated canon of American literature is not only politically sound, it is intellectually sound as well."
Gates has argued that a separatist, Afrocentric education perpetuates racist stereotypes. He maintains that it is "ridiculous" to think that only blacks should be scholars of African and African-American literature. He argues, "It can't be real as a subject if you have to look like the subject to be an expert in the subject, adding, "It's as ridiculous as if someone said I couldn't appreciate Shakespeare because I'm not Anglo-Saxon. I think it's vulgar and racist whether it comes out of a black mouth or a white mouth."
As a mediator between those advocating separatism and those believing in a Western canon, Gates has been criticized by both. Some critics suggest that adding black literature will diminish the value of the Western canon, while separatists say that Gates is too accommodating to the dominant white culture in his advocacy of integration of the canon. Gates has been criticized by John Henrik Clarke, Molefi Asante and the controversial Maulana Karenga, each of whom has been questioned by others in academia.
Quotations:
"I have a couple of missions. One is to show that we're all descended from people who came to this country from somewhere else. Secondly, that we're all related. If you go back far enough, everybody came out of Africa. This idea still makes some people uncomfortable."
"Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice."
"The first step toward tolerance is respect and the first step toward respect is knowledge."
"Learning to sing one's own songs, to trust the particular cadences of own's voices, is also the goal of any writer."
Personality
Physical Characteristics:
At the age of 14 Gates was injured playing touch football, fracturing the ball and socket joint of his hip, resulting in a slipped capital femoral epiphysis. The injury was misdiagnosed by a physician, who told Gates' mother that his problem was psychosomatic. When the physical damage finally healed, his right leg was two inches shorter than his left. Because of the injury, Gates now uses a cane to help him walk.
Interests
Music & Bands
Jazz
Connections
Gates married Sharon Lynn Adams in 1979. They had two daughters together before they divorced in 1999.