Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Scholar

• Born: September 16, 1950
• Birthplace: Keyser, West Virginia

Educator, scholar, and writer

Gates is best known as a major exponent and promoter of African and African American literature. His groundbreaking work to win recognition and acceptance of both genres established him as an important literary critic and teacher. Gates raised awareness of the important contributions of African and African American writers and drew attention to many forms of racism, including intellectual racism.

Areas of achievement: Education; Scholarship; Social issues; Social sciences

Early Life

Henry Louis Gates Jr. was born on September 16, 1950, to Pauline Augusta Coleman, a housekeeper, and Henry Louis Gates Sr., a paper mill worker. Gates spent his earliest years in Piedmont, West Virginia, in the Allegheny Mountains. He graduated from high school in 1968, a few weeks after leading a school boycott on the day of the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr. His mother fought depression during his early years, and Gates devoted himself to religion, but turned away from it during the 1960s.

While playing touch football at the age of fourteen, Gates was injured. Although a physician at first thought his pain was psychosomatic, Gates later was found to have fractured a portion of his hip. As a result of the injury, he developed a condition known as slipped epiphysis and a right leg two inches shorter than his left. He wore an elevated shoe and used a cane to walk. (In 2001, his hip joint was replaced surgically.)

After briefly attending Potomac State College, Gates was awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Scholarship in 1973 to enroll at Yale University, where he finished his baccalaureate degree summa cum laude in history. He then received a Ford Foundation Fellowship to study for a doctorate at Cambridge University, where at Clare College he was mentored by several scholars, notably Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian writer who acquainted him with African literature. Soyinka became the first black African to receive a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986.

When Gates returned to Yale in 1975, he spent a month in law school but decided to look for other pursuits. Soon after, he got a job as a secretary in Yale's African American studies department. In 1976, he was hired as lecturer in African American studies and was promised an assistant professorship when his doctoral dissertation at Cambridge University was completed. In 1979, he received his doctorate and married Sharon Lynn Adams. They went on to have two daughters and later divorced.

In 1979, Gates was appointed as assistant professor in the English and African American Studies departments at Yale. In 1984, he was promoted to associate professor and applied for tenure. When he was denied tenure, he left Yale for Cornell University, where he taught from 1985 to 1989. Gates next taught at Duke University from 1989 to 1991. He moved to Harvard in 1991 as professor of English and as the second and only black member of the African American studies department, a department that he chaired until 2006. He is director of Harvard's W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.

Life's Work

Gates is foremost a scholar who brought African literature to the attention of the world. When he learned that Soyinka had been denied a position at Cambridge University because African literature was perceived as worthy of only anthropological or sociological consideration, Gates embarked on a quest to disprove that view among scholars of English literature.

Gates's major scholarly works, Black Literature and Literary Theory (1983) and The Signifying Monkey: Towards a Theory of Afro-American Criticism (1988), sought to define a distinctly black cultural aesthetic. He has explicated how the African American experience, unknown to those outside the culture, shaped black literature in the United States. His analysis of the works of African American writers shows how the themes of earlier writers were incorporated into the work of later writers but with different meanings in a kind of wordplay, similar to way the word "bad" can mean "good" in certain contexts.

Gates's publications received mixed reviews from scholars outside the African American mainstream. He responded that African and African American literatures have their own standards and should not be judged from a Eurocentric perspective. Gates also commented on how fellow academics harbor forms of racism in their criticisms and scholarship. He drew negative reactions from Eurocentric scholars and black separatists alike. He also sparked debate within the African American community when he urged black youths not to aspire to be athletes but to aim for other professions.

The intellectual discussion generated by Gates's views has resulted in much scholarly output. He is the author and editor (and frequently coauthor or coeditor) of more than thirty publications. His books have sought to bring less well-known writers to wider attention and to reinterpret the work of better-known writers in new contexts.

In 1980, Gates launched the Black Periodical Literature Project, which sought to unearth African American literature that had been forgotten over the years. In 1983, for example, he discovered that Harriet E. Wilson, author of the novel Our Nig (1859), was not white (as had been believed) but was instead America's first black female novelist.

Gates served as host, narrator, and scriptwriter of several documentaries. He was responsible for From Great Zimbabwe to Kilimatinde (1996), The Two Nations of Black America (1998), Leaving Eldridge Cleaver (1999), America Beyond the Color Line (2004), and Looking for Lincoln (2009). Perhaps the most notable is Wonders of the African World (1999), based on findings by scholars who traveled to twelve African countries for a year to find hitherto forgotten and venerable civilizations as well as traces of the slave trade.

Another major accomplishment was Gates's publication (with coeditor Kwame Anthony Appiah) of Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience (1999). Fulfilling W. E. B. Du Bois's dream of creating an African American equivalent to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Africana was completed with help from Microsoft president Bill Gates, who provided one million dollars toward the project. The encyclopedia's first edition contained five volumes, more than thirty-five hundred entries encompassing the history of African and the African diaspora in the Western Hemisphere, and a CD-ROM. A website was later developed to update the encyclopedia until its second edition was issued in 2005.

Gates also launched a genealogy project so that African Americans could trace their ancestry. As a result, he discovered that he was half European and half Yoruba, one of the major ethnic groups in Nigeria, and that he was descended from John Redman, a free African American who fought in the Revolutionary War. The project spawned three documentaries and a book, In Search of Our Roots: How Nineteen Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed Their Past (2009). In 2006, Gates was inducted into the Sons of the American Revolution in honor of his link to Redman. That year, he was also appointed to the Alphonse Fletcher Jr. University Professor at Harvard University.

In 2008, Gates cofounded and became editor-in-chief of the Root, an online magazine published by the Washington Post and aimed at African American readers. He frequently wrote about genealogy and African Americans' search for their ancestry for the Root. In 2009 he was the center of controversy after being arrested on a charge of disorderly conduct; he had attempted to force his way into his house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after being locked out, and reportedly refused to cooperate with police who responded to a neighbor's report of a potential burglary. Gates accused the police of racism in their conduct with him, leading prominent figures including President Barack Obama to criticize the Cambridge police department. Amid growing national attention, Obama eventually hosted both Gates and the arresting officer at the White House to mediate the issue.

In 2012 Gates became the host of the PBS documentary series Finding Your Roots, which traced the ancestries of famous guests. The series was temporarily suspended in 2015 after leaked emails from Sony brought to light that Gates had been persuaded by actor Ben Affleck to omit information about Affleck's slave-owning ancestors. The show returned to the air in 2016. Further pursuing his passion for genealogy and ancestry research, Gates received grants to create a genealogy and genetics summer camp for middle school students as well as college courses on the subject, beginning in 2017.

Gates's six-part documentary series The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross (2013) won a Peabody Award and an NAACP Image Award in 2013 and an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award in 2015. In December 2015, Gates and documentarian Ken Burns embarked on a lecture series about race, inspired by the mass shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Church earlier that year.

Gates also served as a member of the governing boards of the Fletcher Foundation, Aspen Institute, Brookings Institution, Stanford University's Center for the Institute for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Legal Defense Fund of the NAACP, and the New York Public Library.

Significance

Gates helped to establish African and African American literature within the multicultural mainstream of literature as a whole. He brought greater acceptance and attention to African American scholarship and spoke out against racism in America on many occasions. In 1981, the MacArthur Foundation awarded him a five-year "genius" grant of $150,000, recognizing him as a gifted scholar and enabling him to devote attention to intellectual pursuits. For The Signifying Monkey, Gates won the American Book Award in 1989. In 1997, Time magazine listed Gates among the twenty-five most influential Americans. In 1998, he received the National Humanities Medal, and in 2000, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) gave him the Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, Nonfiction, for Wonders of the African World.

In 2002, the National Endowment for the Humanities conferred its highest honor on Gates by inviting him to deliver the annual Jefferson Lecture. By the 2010s, Gates had received some fifty honorary degrees and numerous academic honors and social action awards.

Bibliography

"About." Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. PBS, 2015. Web. 4 Jan. 2016.

Gates, Henry Louis Jr. Colored People: A Memoir. New York: Knopf, 1994. Print.

Gates, Henry Louis Jr. "How to 'Find Your Roots' Like Henry Louis Gates Jr." Interview by Aviva Legatt. Forbes, 16 July 2018,www.forbes.com/sites/avivalegatt/2018/07/16/how-to-find-your-roots-like-henry-louis-gates-jr/#1e70bd5726f5. Accessed 8 Mar. 2019.

Gates, Henry Louis Jr., and Kevin M. Burke. And Still I Rise: Black America since MLK. New York: HarperCollins, 2015. Print.

Gates, Henry Louis Jr., and Kwame Anthony Appiah, eds. Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford UP, 2005. Print.

Gates, Henry Louis Jr., and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. The African American National Biography. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.

Koblin, John. "A PBS Show, a Frustrated Ben Affleck, and a Loss of Face." New York Times. New York Times, 25 June 2015. Web. 4 Jan. 2016.

Naden, Corinne, and Rose Blue. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Chicago: Raintree, 2006. Print.

O'Hagan, Sean. "The Biggest Brother." Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 20 July 2003. Web. 4 Jan. 2016.

Wolf, Abby, ed. The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader. New York: Basic, 2012. Print.