Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr. interviewed 44 famous and not-so-famous African-Americans from four disparate U.S. regions—the deep South, Chicago, the East and Hollywood
On a stormy night in the spring of 1968, a weary Martin Luther King Jr. was summoned to Mason Temple in Memphis, Tenn. Striking sanitation workers—demanding higher wages and better working conditions—had gathered at the church for a rally, and King was asked to address the people. He had just flown into town that afternoon from Atlanta. Rain pounded on the roof and shutters flapped violently in the wind as King made his way to the podium near the center of the church, according to records of the event.
In a hauntingly prophetic speech, the last oration he would ever give, King proclaimed in staccato phrases that he had “been to the mountaintop” and that he had “seen the promised land.”
“I may not get there with you,” he told a crowd of two thousand supporters who listened and shouted words of encouragement. “But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land. And I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.” The audience erupted into applause as thunder rumbled in the distance.
The following day—April 4, 1968—King was mortally wounded by a sniper’s bullet while standing on the balcony outside of his Memphis motel room. His death marked the beginning of a new, if unexpected and unwelcome, era.
***
Last month, as the arctic winds swirled through the narrow streets of Cambridge, DuBois Professor of the Humanities Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr. stood behind a podium inside the Harvard Book Store and gave a critique of the current state of black America, 35 years after the murder of “the last great civil rights leader.”
He spoke about the proliferation of poverty and drugs and the prioritization of the material wealth over education, but he also described his vision for change, which includes a comprehensive job program and school reform.
This year Gates is spending a sabbatical at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where he is writing a book on black writers of the 18th century. Gates came home to Cambridge, however, to promote his latest book, America Behind the Color Line.
The book is a compilation of essays based on 44 interviews Gates conducted last summer with black Americans from all walks of life for a four-part BBC/PBS documentary series called “America Beyond the Color Line.” Gates wrote and hosted the series, which was broadcast in honor of Black Awareness Month on February 3 and 4 on the local PBS affiliate, WGBH.
At the bookstore, Gates explained to a gathering of about 50 Harvard students, faculty members and Boston-area residents that the objective of the documentary was to gauge the economic, political and social progress that the African-American community had made since King’s death. In short, he described the mission as determining “where are we as a people, at the dawn of the twenty-first century.”
From May through July of 2002, Gates traveled to four disparate regions of the United States—the deep South, Chicago’s inner-city, the East and Los Angeles—in search of a representative sample of the black community that, collectively, could provide an answer to this question.
In addition to meeting with respected leaders and celebrities such as Colin Powell, Quincy Jones, Maya Angelou, Morgan Freeman, Alicia Keys, Chris Tucker and Jesse Jackson, Gates also interviewed the not-so-famous, such as Army Sergeant Major Kenneth Wilcox, based at Fort Benning in Georgia, and Kalais Chiron Hunt (a.k.a. Eric Edwards), a prisoner in Chicago’s Cook County Jail.
Through his dialogues with African Americans, Gates—in the style of renowned oral historian Studs Terkel—connects with his interviewees and earns their trust. As a result, he is able to access a wealth of information about how far the black community has come since King’s murder, how far his people still need to go and, more importantly, how they can get closer to the “promised land.”
In a recent interview with The Crimson, Gates, who was in Los Angeles in January on the sixth stop in his seven-city book tour, opens up about the book, the documentaries and the future of African-Americans.
Gates begins by describing how he celebrated Martin Luther King Jr. Day the week before.
