America's Color Line

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.

“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.

“We need to give people hope in the system again so they have a good education, stable learning environment, real jobs for a 21st century, highly technological global economy,” Gates says.

He adds, “But on the other hand, we need a revolution of attitudes within the black community. No white racist makes you get pregnant when you’re 16, no white racist makes you drop out of school, no white racist makes you not do your homework. Far too many of our values are associated with the bling-bling. No deferred gratification. And this is a horrible outcome.”

In his interview with Gates, the comedian Bernie Mac expresses some of the same concerns.

“Our mentality, and not just blacks, but a lot of minorities, has fallen,” Mac says. “It has fallen from where we were. The spiritual guidance has gone and left us, for number one, and that’s a very dangerous thing. And the mentality in terms of microwaves has risen. We want things overnight. It’s a fast-food, instant-gratification, efficiency-not-quality society.”

Gates says that wasn’t the way it was when he was growing up in the 1950s.

“Education was the blackest value of all. Getting an education was defeating white racists,” he says.

There is a knock at the door of Gates' hotel room. He puts the phone down for a moment. When he returns, he reports that he was making arrangements to have his suit pressed because "I gotta look clean." He laughs and explains that he is appearing on HBO’s “Dennis Miller Live.”

“Schwarzenegger’s on tonight. I’m on tomorrow,” he says.

Talk changes quickly to politics. Who does he predict will win the Democratic nomination?

“I think Kerry and Edwards. We’ll see if I’m right,” he says.

Back to the subject of education, Gates says people today do not have their priorities straight.

“Something’s happening to our community, when far too many people think it's easier to be a basketball player than a doctor, and that’s not true,” he says. “There are far more black doctors than black athletes, but we’ve lost our way. The black middle class is perpetuating itself, but the black underclass is perpetuating itself. Some of this is caused by historical forces like institutional racism. But some of it is caused by behavioral problems, and we need to return to our traditional values.”

People Person

Gates is a self-described people person.

“I love meeting people and I love interviewing people,” he says. Of the 44 interviews which he conducted, Gates says his conversations with Chris Tucker and Mac were the most fun.

The most moving interviews he says, were done with the prisoner Eric Edwards and the Massenbergs, a family living in the notoriously crime-ridden Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago’s South Side. “They were so extraordinarily articulate about the forces arrayed against them in the inner city that I learned so much and I was very deeply moved,” Gates says.

The interview with Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan proved to be the most enlightening, Gates says. Milchan told Gates that if the 2002 movie Panic Room, which starred Jodie Foster and grossed $100 million at the box office, had starred Halle Berry, it would have made half as much money. According to Milchan, the reason for this disparity would be that white people are “not interested in watching a black woman and her son being terrorized by burglars.”

Milchan also said, according to Gates, that a love story starring Denzel Washington and Halle Berry would never be made because both actors demand $20 million to appear on set, and the film would only make $50 million because “white people aren’t interested in watching black people fall in love and make love."

"But if it were Russell Crowe and Halle Berry, it would make $200 million, maybe $300 million,” Gates reports. “It’s astonishing. And [Milchan] was just very honest and graphic about it.”

Best of Times, Worst of Times

Gates says he is both pleased and disturbed by what he learned on his journey through black America.

“It’s the best of times, it’s the worst of times,” he says. “It’s the best of times because the middle class is doing so well. It does me proud to see Colin Powell as Secretary of State or Condi Rice as National Security Advisor.”

“But on the other hand, we have so many of our people stuck behind in the ghetto of despair,” Gates says. “And it made me sad and want to embark upon a campaign to restore the value of education to our people, and a campaign for a revolution in attitudes."

“Black people need to vote, we need to stay in school, we need to do our homework, we need to graduate,” he says.

During any given week, only 45 percent of black people in Chicago are gainfully employed, according to Gates.

He says part of the problem stems from historical forces such as institutional racism, though personal choices also contribute to the phenomenon.

“But simultaneously we have too many of our people who have internalized their own oppression. They’re having babies in their teens, they’re dropping out of school. They’re not deferring gratification. All those elements combined with a few more devastate the economic fabric of a community. And we can’t wait for Abraham Lincoln to come riding down the street on a white horse to save us anymore,” he says.

Blacks need after-school programs based on institutions like Hebrew school, for example, in which the traditions and customs of a people are taught in a safe haven, Gates says.

In fact, he and former Carswell Professor of Philosophy K. Anthony Appiah started the Martin Luther King after-school program in Roxbury. The program teaches computer skills and black history using Encarta Africana, which Gates and Appiah developed together.

“If Jewish people had waited for gentiles to stop being anti-Semitic, there wouldn’t be Jewish people,” Gates declares.

***

Gates has done much for the African-American community, yet he remains humble about the role he has played. When asked if he considers himself an activist, Gates replies with a chuckle, “I consider myself a little country professor.”

“No, I’m primarily a scholar,” he continues. “The reason I went into this business, the reason I pursued a career as a professor, is that I love to read and write books.

“But inevitably, my work has taken me along certain more, let’s say, activist paths than my colleagues in the English department. Because I have a social concern about the status of black Americans,” he says. “And I know how much I benefited from the Civil Rights Movement and affirmative action, and to see the progress of our people arrested by this class divide, which could very well be permanent, makes me deeply and profoundly sad, and I want to be at least one voice in trying to reverse that pattern.”

—Staff writer Andrew C. Esensten can be reached at esenst@fas.harvard.edu.

in their words

America Behind the Color Line: Dialogues with African Americans

AUTHOR: Henry Louis Gates Jr.

PUBLISHER: Warner Books

DATE OF PUBLICATION: January 2004

FEATURING: Interviews with Colin Powell, Vernon Jordan, Franklin D. Raines, Russell Simmons, Quincy Jones, Maya Angelou, Morgan Freeman, Samuel L. Jackson, Alicia Keys, Nia Long, Don Cheadle, John Singleton, Chris Tucker, Bernie Mac, Jesse Jackson

"When I was sixteen, I wanted to be an entrepreneur, but selling weed was one of the few options open to me. Today, however, young people are inspired to have higher aspirations because of hip-hop. Young people now have all these people visible who make the choice to be entrepreneurs and inspire them to do the same. It's now a cultural thing in our community." (from America Behind the Color Line)

—Russell Simmons, CEO and producer