The Observer, September 23, 2005
Volume XXXVIII, Issue 4
Henry Louis Gates Jr. delivers speech on furthering work of W.E.
"I am going to tell you about a dream," Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. began, "and it was a dream that I inherited."
Introduced by Mark Turner as an "esteemed public intellectual, a journalist, and an expert in memoir," Gates, the current W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University, delivered his personal account of his experiences as an African-American attempting to further Du Bois' work.
Gates's presentation, entitled "Pursuing a Dream: W.E.B. Du Bois and His Encyclopedia," was the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf/SAGES lecture delivered in Severance Hall on Thursday, Sept. 15.
Gates attended Yale in the 1960s, and that he "was one of 96 black boys and girls [there] in 1969." Of his matriculation at Yale, he said, "we were the affirmative action generation."
"We were all hungry for role models," said Gates, "and I found W.E.B. Du Bois." Du Bois dreamed of a day that he could create an Encyclopedia Africana to dispel myths and rumors of the African people and to fight racial misconceptions.
In his talk, Gates explained the delight he found in Du Bois' quest to document the history of the African people, and he expressed regret for the hardships that Du Bois encountered in his quest to further his dream. Gates painted a picture of Du Bois and a colleague waiting, with a bottle of champagne on ice, for a phone call to find out if they had received adequate funding. The call never came; the champagne was never opened.
Gates paralleled this story with one of his own: he recalled the time when he was signed to a publisher after having 25 consecutive rejections from previous publishers. Du Bois had smashed his bottle of champagne because of a rejection, but Dr. Gates "killed [his] bottle" in a celebration that ended decades of struggle. Where Du Bois had failed, Gates had succeeded, and on Jan. 14, 1999, the Encyclopedia Africana (Encarta Africana distributed via CD-ROM) was born.
The lecture ended with Gates demonstrating the electronic encyclopedia, which includes over 2.25 million words as well as audio and video clips. "Many people say that Mr. Bojangles was the greatest dancer…" Gates explained, "But how would you know?" With the media clips, an individual can draw his or her own conclusion.
Gates continued the demonstration by showing speeches by Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X. He also showed Encarta Africana's rare footage of Miles Davis and John Coltrane performing. "That's like having Bach and Beethoven in the same room," Gates remarked.
Some students found the event to be more of an advertisement than a lecture. "I admire his story of perseverance, but I'm not really sure what relevance it has to SAGES. It came across like a two-hour endorsement of his encyclopedia," freshman biology major Katherine Koot said.
"He was a good speaker and really held my attention, but I felt like he was trying to sell me his Encarta Africana in the end," said Kenny Long, a sophomore mathematics major.
The lecture gave insight into Du Bois' vision of an encyclopedia that would contain the history of the African people, a vision that Henry Louis Gates Jr. made into a reality. Gates has compiled a work that chronicles and celebrates the history of the African-American people.
