Gates Recounts Racial History

Professor Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr., spoke about his book “Colored People: A Memoir”, a homage to his family and West Virginia hometown, to a crowd of nearly 500 people last night in Sanders Theatre.

Gates, who was at the center of a national controversy over his arrest by the Cambridge Police this summer, touched on the incident, but devoted the majority of the talk to discussing his book.

The presentation, hosted by the Cambridge Public Library’s ‘Cambridge READS’ program and sponsored by the Harvard Bookstore and Porter Square Books, featured a conversation between Gates, a professor and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Studies, and Callie Crossley, national media commentator and public speaker.

Gates began by reading excerpts from his memoir, including the preface in which he explained his compulsion to write “Colored People” as an attempt to preserve the rich memories of growing up colored in the 1950’s, negro in the early 60’s, and black in the later 60’s in small-town Piedmont, West Virginia, with a family who stressed the importance of education.

“My whole being is from Piedmont, West Virginia,” said Gates. “I wrote a love letter to those people, a love letter to my mother, a love letter to that way of life. Nothing thrills me like seeing the hills of West Virginia.”

He also discussed the necessity for younger generations to understand life in America before the Civil Rights era, commenting on the great disparity between the opportunities he had growing up versus those of his older brother, Paul “Rocky” Gates.

“I’m keenly and acutely aware of the privileged position I have. I think about all those generations of frustrations before me,” said Gates. “They had just as good ideas as mine, if not better, and they could not actualize them. I think that would have killed me, or killed something in me.”

Gates also differentiated between willing association and forced separation, mentioning the significance of being proud to find comfort in cultural rituals and traditions and the importance of maintaining multiple identities.

The presentation proved to be moving as Gates described the profound loss of his mother who he attributes much of his success to.

“I was really touched by the passages he read and how he got very emotional,” said audience member Meredith C. Woods ’83. “As an African American, his book really speaks to me and my own cultural experience. It is so important because it speaks to a lot of people’s American experience no matter what ethnicity you are touching on.”