“I spent time with my daughters, both of whom live in Brooklyn,” Gates says. “And I also watched King documentaries all day and listened to him on the radio. Wherever I was, I was hearing those tapes of Martin Luther King, and I still get gooseflesh when I hear them and I still get tears in my eyes when I hear the ‘I’ve Been to the Mountaintop’ speech.”

Beginning to talk about his oral history project, Gates explains that “America Beyond the Color Line” is one installment in a three-part story that he is telling about major black populations throughout the world.

“Part one was Africa, part two would be black America, sort of where we were as a people 35 years after the terrible death of Martin Luther King, and part three, which is in development now, would be a series on blacks in Latin America,” Gates says. “So the triangular trade, as it were: Africa, America, and the Caribbean, Latin America and South America.”

Gates says that he chose his interviewees from various educational, professional and socioeconomic backgrounds, who, when taken together, would present a balanced picture of black life in America.

“The theme of the book and the series is the class divide within the black community,” Gates says, “and the fact that the black middle class has almost quadrupled since 1968, but the percentage of black children living at or beneath the poverty line is about 40 percent, which is about what it was when Dr. King was killed.”

This paradox has resulted because of affirmative action, Gates says.

On several occasions Gates has said that he firmly supports affirmative action—indeed he benefited greatly from it. He was one of 96 black men and women, the largest such group at the time, to enroll at Yale University in September 1969 as part of what would become known as the affirmative action generation.

However, Gates maintains that the controversial admissions program has created two nations within the African-American community: the educated black middle class and the uneducated black underclass.

“And so the book and the film series are a wake-up call to white America and black America, to the black middle class, saying, ‘We’ve come this far by faith,’ as the black spiritual goes, ‘but this is not far enough,’” Gates says. “And a wake-up call to America as a whole. Black poverty is costing us billions and billions of dollars in welfare, prison costs, the general cost of despair and that we need to do something systemic about it just like the black community needs to do something systemic about it.”

The Color Line

At the turn of the century, Gates says, DuBois asked, “What will be the problem of the 20th century?” He concluded that the problem would be that of the color line.

“I wanted to ask a wide cross-section of black America, ‘What would be the problem of the 21st century?’” Gates says. “All people talked about was, as Vernon Jordan put it, ‘the money,’ it was all about the money, it was about economic relationships. So that was very curious to me, very fascinating.”

“Black people, like everybody else, are concerned about economics. And our goal has to be to change the class distribution within the black community. We have too few people in the middle class and too many people in the under class,” he says. Gates says America needs a class distribution system in which most people fall into the middle class, the percentage of the black poor equals the percentage of the white poor, the percentage of the black wealthy equals the percentage of the white wealthy and the percentage of blacks in the middle class equals the percentage of whites in the middle class.

“And we are, believe me, a long way from that outcome,” Gates says.

In order to elevate the black under class, Gates believes that a federal jobs program and a Marshall plan for the cities must be adopted.