Henry Louis Gates Jr.: Head Negro In Charge



As the Dream Team took shape,
Gates assembled the rest of his empire with astonishing speed. His new projects at Harvard included the first major collection of information on the trans-Atlantic slave trade and The Harvard Guide to African-American History. Noted art collectors Jean and Dominique de Menil donated their acclaimed photo archive of blacks in western art to the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute. He brought glamour to the department by bringing in as guest lecturers jazz musician and pop music producer Quincy Jones, director Spike Lee, actress and playwright Anna Deavere Smith, and others. A fundraiser of legendary proportions, he brought in $8 million for the department.

Gates wrote three books himself and coauthored two more. He edited encyclopedias and anthologies. He and his family starred in the African episode of a PBS series on great railway journeys. He hosted his Africa series for the BBC, and for PBS the Frontline documentary The Two Nations of Black America, about the growing gap between lower- and middle-class blacks. He turned out major pieces for The New Yorker: on O. J. Simpson, Colin Powell, Louis Farrakhan, and Hillary Rodham Clinton, among others; and, most recently, an article on loyalty and changing mores in Washington, D.C., in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

In 1997, Gates and Appiah teamed up with Quincy Jones and lawyer Marty Payson to start Afropedia, a company that would produce the Encyclopedia Africana. Modeled on Microsoft’s popular CD-ROM encylopedia Encarta—and backed by the software monolith—Africana would be a high-tech version of W.E.B. Du Bois’s dream, an encyclopedia of the black world on CD-ROM.

Great academic entrepreneurs were nothing new to Harvard. But for generations most of them had relied largely on the Bos-Wash corridor as their route to power, networking at Harvard-based think tanks before surfacing as presidential advisers, cabinet secretaries, or in other high-level posts in Washington. Gates’s path was different, however, modeled not so much on Henry Kissinger as Quincy Jones.

It was not just Jones’s talents as a musician that Gates admired. Once, after Gates had referred to Jones as an executive at Time Warner, the latter corrected him, pointing out that he owned his own company under the Time Warner corporate umbrella. “Quincy was always aware of who owns the property,” says Gates. “He’s been controlling his own property since 1952, when other guys weren’t even thinking about it.”

The distinction was not lost on Gates. In addition to being paid a reported $100,000 consulting fee on the Africana project, Gates negotiated equity for himself in both the Microsoft encyclopedia itself, and in Civitas Books, the publishing house that will produce a multivolume print version of it.

 

Gates’s relationship with The New Yorker was also proving to be particularly fortuitous. Through it, he had instantly cobbled together an enviable journalistic career, making it on several occasions to the finals of the National Magazine Awards, the magazine industry’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. Nor did it hurt his career in 1994, when Henry Finder left Transition for The New Yorker, where he edits Gates, among others.

More to the point, under the aegis of the nation’s most glamorous editor, Tina Brown, The New Yorker had effectively anointed Gates not only as the premier black intellectual in the United States, but as the chief interpreter of the black experience for white America. This was not an alliance to be taken lightly. Gates endowed Brown’s newly glitzy version of The New Yorker with intellectual credibility, and in return the magazine gave Gates’s enterprise commercial appeal. It was a marriage made in heaven. Now he had the heavyweight promotional machinery of The New Yorker behind him.

By the spring of 1996, Gates’s fame had reached critical mass. In April, The New Yorker published its “Black in America” issue, guest-edited by Gates, and publicized the event with an extraordinary party at Harvard. Two articles in the issue, neither of which was actually commissioned by Gates, nonetheless did an admirable job of serving his ends and, in the case of an editor with fewer political skills, might well have been interpreted as possible conflicts of interest. One was a laudatory profile of sociologist William Julius Wilson, whom Gates had just lured to Harvard; the other was a portrait of wunderkind stock trader Alphonse “Buddy” Fletcher, who was endowing a $3 million professorship at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute.

But in the celebratory atmosphere of that balmy April night, no one was paying attention to any such controversies. Hundreds of light bulbs in the huge chandeliers at Harvard’s Eliot House had been changed to give the room a warm amber glow, and countless cherry blossoms had been trucked in for the occasion. The 400 guests included the brightest lights of New York’s glitterati, from Tina Brown to Norman Mailer, and Cambridge-Boston luminaries such as Doris Kearns Goodwin and her husband, Richard Goodwin; John Kenneth Galbraith; Alan Dershowitz; WBUR’s Christopher Lydon; and community activist Reverend Eugene Rivers.

As the party got under way, Tina Brown introduced Gates to the throng. “What he’s creating here at the department of Afro-American studies is so thrilling and important,” she said, “it makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck.”

 

By 1996, the Gateses had moved into a $890,000 house on tony Francis Avenue. Coyly dubbed the Writer’s Block, or Smart Street, it is home to Cambridge’s haute literary intelligentsia. Among Gates’s new neighbors were Julia Child, John Kenneth Galbraith, and historian Justin Kaplan and his wife, novelist Anne Bernays. Even within the privileged confines of Harvard, Gates was atop the crème de la crème brulee.

Sharon was thrilled to escape the suburbs. After an inflammatory condition forced her to give up her pottery career, she had started her own business as a landscape designer and made new friends. The girls, Maggie and Liza, were now safely ensconced in private schools. Summers were spent on Martha’s Vineyard. Over spring break, the family vacationed in the Caribbean. Life chez Gates was a far cry from grimy Piedmont.

As an intellectual superstar, Gates was said to be earning as much as a million dollars a year from his various projects, an astronomical figure for an academic, several times as much as the salary of Harvard president Neil Rudenstine—and even more than that educational entrepreneur across the river, John Silber, made during his heyday.

Gates’s life had become more like that of a movie star than an academic. He earned his frequent flier miles on the Concorde and stayed at the exclusive and stately Berkeley Hotel when he was in London for the BBC. In Hollywood, it was lunch with Jodie Foster, his former student at Yale. Then, perhaps, it was off to Washington, D.C., for the premiere of Spielberg’s Amistad, or to Chicago for the opening night of his friend Anthony Davis’s operatic version of the Amistad story.

Gates still delights in his celebrity and all its perks to a degree some colleagues find unseemly—”an endless and irritating childlike wonder,” one calls it. “He’s always the wide-eyed kid at the candy store. Wouldn’t you think he’d get used to this stuff? But, no, that lunch with Jodie is still a huge, huge thing for him.”
It is a testament to Gates’s power that most of his critics speak either off the record or anonymously. “Call me after I get my Ph.D.,” one suggests. One critique, of course, is that he is overextended. And, given his busy work schedule, it is not surprising that acolytes who had enlisted to work for him complained they often ended up dealing with his autocratic minions instead of Gates himself.

A few colleagues, such as Martin L. Kilson, the 66-year-old political scientist and government professor who was the first black to become a full professor at Harvard, are bitterly disappointed in the Dream Team and what Gates has done with black studies. “Skip runs it as a classical black academic autocrat,” he says. “That’s how he runs the bloody thing.” But Kilson is seen as somewhat eccentric and isolated these days.

Perhaps most notable among the outsiders who dare to take Gates on openly is the Boston Globe‘s Alex Beam, who in an October 1997 column asserted that Gates was nothing more than an overrated literary con man, a brilliant politician who was powerful because he had managed to lure potential rivals like Cornel West into his camp. Taking Gates to task for tossing out softball questions while doing his Frontline documentary, Beam wrote, “Why this comes as a surprise to anyone over at one Western Avenue [WGBH headquarters] is beyond me. Skip Gates isn’t a journalist. He just plays one in the pages of The New Yorker. The enduring nature of Gates’s reputation as a writer-journalist (to say nothing of ‘scholar’) is one of life’s mysteries … How does Skip get away with it?”

It is a critique that does not go down very well in New York, particularly in the offices of Erroll McDonald, a Yale classmate of Gates’s who is now vice president and executive editor at Pantheon Books, and one of the few highly placed blacks in publishing. “Boston is a notoriously racist town,” says McDonald, “and now the Globe is dealing with some Negroes across the river doing some thinking, and these Negroes are getting paid a lot of money. The minute anybody’s Negro ascends to celebrity, somebody is gunning for him, trying to figure out why not all is good. I’ve never seen such attacks on Skip before, except from Eugene Rivers.”

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