Henry Louis Gates’ new book, PBS series deliver a report card.
By: Jeff Milgram
In September 1969, Bobby Seale and eight other Black Panther leaders were on trial in New Haven, Conn., the comedy film "Putney Swope" was released and 96 black men and women began their undergraduate careers at Yale University.
One of them was Henry Louis Gates Jr., now the chairman of the Department of African-American Studies at Harvard, a visiting member of the Institute for Advanced Study, writer and host of a four-part PBS documentary "America Behind the Color Line: Dialogues with African Americans" and the author of a book of the same name (Time Warner Books, $25.95).
"It’s really about what happened to the black community since Martin Luther King was killed," Dr. Gates said in a telephone interview this week from Seattle, one of about a dozen stops on a cross country book tour.
For the documentary and book, Dr. Gates crisscrossed the country, speaking with blacks who have made it big in American society and some who have not.
What Dr. Gates found is that blacks in this country have grown into two very different communities one that has made the leap into the middle class and another that has become trapped in lives of poverty and despair.
In the introduction to the book, Dr. Gates remembers that he and his classmates at Yale made promises to themselves and "to the race" that they would be "accountable to the people" and bring them along to scale "the historical barriers to racial progress."
The book is Dr. Gates’ report card on his generation’s attempt to keep those promises.
"The book and the film series are wakeup calls that this black underclass will perpetuate itself," Dr. Gates said.
"Dr. King didn’t die to upraise only some of us," Dr. Gates said of the slain civil rights leader who is one of his heroes. "As Colin Powell says in my film series, ‘There for the grace of God go I.’"
Dr. Gates will end his book tour at 7 p.m. Monday with a lecture at the Princeton University Store.
Dr. Gates, author of "The Bondwoman’s Narrative," has worked on "America Behind the Color Line" since 2002. In September 2003, he began a sabbatical at the Institute for Advanced Study, fueling rumors that he might bolt Harvard for Princeton, where his close friends, Cornel West and K. Anthony Appiah, now teach.
At the institute, he is working on his next project, a book about 18th-century black literature. He also is working on a multi-volume series of black biographies.
"I love the Institute for Advanced Study. It’s a great place," he said.
For "America Behind the Color Line," Dr. Gates interviewed rap impresario Russell Simmons, Secretary of State Powell and actor Morgan Freeman, among others.
The interviews focus on black culture and accomplishments, but Dr. Gates expands the definition of success to mean people working with a neighborhood baton-twirling troupe, or becoming a master teacher at an inner-city high school, or simply rearing six children in the Chicago projects.
A member of the of the Memphis, Tenn., police force, James Bolden, recalled when blacks weren’t allowed to work in certain areas of the city. When he joined the force of 2,000 in 1968, he was one of 65 black officers. Today, he is chief of police and blacks work in every Memphis neighborhood.
Dr. Gates wants to see the gap between the privileged and underclass blacks made smaller.
"In fact, since 1968, the black middle class has tripled, as measured by the percentage of families earning $50,000 or more," wrote Dr. Gates. "At the same time and this is the kicker the percentage of black children who live at or below the poverty line is almost 35 percent, just about what it was on the day that Dr. King was killed."
To bridge the gap, several things must happen, Dr. Gates said.
One, he said, is that there needs to be a massive employment program that would create meaningful jobs so poor young black people wouldn’t have to choose between flipping burgers for $5.15 an hour or selling drugs for thousands of dollars a day.
One example is an afterschool program he and Dr. Appiah started for inner city youth that teaches black history and computer skills.
In addition, the educational system has to be overhauled on a more equitable footing and affirmative action needs to be strengthened, he said.
And there needs to be an attitudinal change within the black community.
"In a highly technological world, formal education is the principal conduit out of poverty, just as it has been for our people since slavery and the days of Jim Crow," Dr. Gates wrote. "Our people’s need to stay in school is even greater and more urgent today than it was back then, in harsher times under legal segregation."
As for his future after the institute, Dr. Gates is making no plans, or at least not revealing them.
"I have made no plans," Dr. Gates said. "I’m too busy."