Henry Louis "Skip" Gates, Jr.

Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr. was born September 16, 1950 as the son of Henry Louis Gates, Sr. and Pauline Augusta Coleman Gates. He is a literary critic, educator, scholar, writer, editor, and public intellectual. Gates currently serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University, where he is Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.

Henry Gates emerged from Mineral, West Virginia, to become one of the leading scholars in the U.S. He was one of the first Black students to attend the newly desegregated public schools of Piedmont following the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. Gates took an interest in local civil rights issues and with three other blacks, known as the "Fearsome Foursome," pressured the Blue Jay restaurant and nightclub to integrate.

He initially enrolled at Potomac State College, transferred as an undergraduate to Yale where he spent a year volunteering at a mission hospital in Tanzania and traveling throughout the African continent in order to complete the year-long “non-academic” requirement of his five-year Bachelor of Arts program; upon his return, Gates wrote a guest column for the Yale Daily News about his experience. Having been appointed a "Scholar of the House" during his final year at Yale and thus relieved of academic coursework requirements, Gates spent his final undergraduate year writing, under the guidance of John Morton Blum, an unpublished book entitled The Making of a Governor, which described John D. Rockefeller IV's gubernatorial campaign in West Virginia. In 1973, Gates graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in history from Yale.

The first Black American to be awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, the day after his undergraduate commencement, Gates set sail on the RMS Queen Elizabeth 2 for the University of Cambridge, where he studied English literature at Clare College. With the assistance of a Ford Foundation Fellowship, he worked toward his MA and Ph.D. in English. While his work in history at Yale had trained him in archival work, Gates' studies at Clare introduced him to English literature and literary theory.

At Clare College, Gates was also able to work with Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian writer denied an appointment in the department because, as Gates later recalled, African literature was at the time deemed "at best, sociology or socio-anthropology, but it was not real literature." Soyinka would later become the first African to be awarded the Nobel Prize; he remained an influential mentor for Gates and became the subject of numerous works by Gates.

Gates was hired as a secretary in the Afro-American Studies department at Yale in October 1975. In July 1976, Gates was promoted to the post of Lecturer in Afro-American Studies with the understanding that he would be promoted to Assistant Professor upon completion of his dissertation. Jointly appointed to assistant professorships in English and Afro-American Studies in 1979, Gates was promoted to Associate Professor in 1984. He left Yale for Cornell in 1985, and stayed until 1989. After a two-year stay at Duke University, he moved to his current position at Harvard University in 1991. At Harvard, Gates teaches undergraduate and graduate courses as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and as Professor of English. Additionally, he serves as the Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.

As a Black intellectual and public figure, Gates has been an outspoken critic of the Eurocentric literary law and has instead insisted that Black literature must be evaluated by the artistic criteria of its culture of origin, not criteria imported from Western or European cultural traditions that express a "tone deafness to the Black cultural voice" and result in "intellectual racism." Gates tried to articulate what might constitute a Black cultural artistic in his major scholarly work The Signifying Monkey, a 1989 American Book Award winner; the work extended the application of the concept of “signifying” to analysis of Black works and thus rooted Black literary criticism in the African vernacular tradition.

While Gates has stressed the need for greater recognition of Black literature and Black culture, Gates does not advocate a "separatist" Black law but, rather, a greater recognition of Black works that would be integrated into the main stream literature. He has affirmed the value of the Western tradition but envisions diverse works integrated by common cultural connections. Moreover, Gates has argued that a separatist, Afrocentric education perpetuates racist stereotypes and maintains that it is "ridiculous" to think that only Blacks should be scholars of African and African-American literature.

As a literary historian committed to the preservation and study of historical texts, Gates has been integral to the Black Periodical Literature Project, an archive of Black newspapers and magazines created with financial assistance from the National Endowment for the Humanities. To build Harvard’s visual, documentary, and literary archives of Black texts, Gates arranged for the purchase of “The Image of the Black in Western Art,” a collection assembled by Dominique de Menil in Houston, Texas. Earlier, as a result of his research as a MacArthur Fellow, Gates had discovered Our Nig, the first novel in the United States written by a Black person, Harriet E. Wilson, in 1859; he followed this discovery with the acquisition of the manuscript of The Bondswoman’s Narrative, another narrative from the same period.

As a prominent Black intellectual, Gates has focused throughout his career not only on his research and teaching but on building academic institutions to study Black culture. Additionally, he has worked to bring about social, educational, and intellectual equality for Black Americans and has written pieces in The New York Times that defend rap music and an article in Sports Illustrated that criticizes Black youth culture for glorifying basketball over education. In 1992, he received a George Polk Award for his social commentary in The New York Times. Gates' prominence in this field led to him being tapped as a witness on behalf of the controversial rap group 2 Live Crew in their obscenity case. He argued the material the government alleged was profane, actually had important roots in dialect, games, and literary traditions and should be protected.

Gates has been the recipient of nearly 50 honorary degrees and numerous academic and social action awards. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1981 and was listed in Time among its “25 Most Influential Americans” in 1997. On October 23, 2006, Gates was appointed the Alphonse Fletcher Jr. University Professor at Harvard University. In January 2008, he co-founded The Root, a website dedicated to African-American perspectives published by The Washington Post Company. Gates currently chairs the Fletcher Foundation, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is on the boards of many notable institutions including the New York Public Library, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Aspen Institute, the Brookings Institution, the Studio Museum of Harlem, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, HEAF (the Harlem Educational Activities Fund), and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, located in Stanford, California.

The popular Harvard-area burger restaurant, Mr. Bartley's Burger Cottage, sells a Professor Skip Gates burger topped with pineapple and teriyaki sauce.

Gates has been the host and co-producer of African American Lives and African American Lives 2 in which the lineage of notable Black Americans is traced using genealogical resources and DNA testing. In the first series, Gates learns of his White ancestry (50%), and in the second installment we learn he is descended from the Irish King, Niall of the Nine Hostages. He also learns that he is descended in part from the Yoruba people of Nigeria. In 2006, Gates was inducted into the Sons of the American Revolution, after he traced his lineage back to John Redman, a Free Negro who fought in the Revolutionary War.

Professor Gates is co-editor, with K. Anthony Appiah, of the encyclopedia Encarta Africana, published on CD-ROM by Microsoft and in book form by Basic Civitas Books under the title Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience. He is the author of Wonders of the African World, the companion book to the six-hour PBS television series of the same name.

In addition, Professor Gates is the author of several works of literary criticism, including Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the 'Racial' Self; The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism, winner of the 1989 American Book Award; and Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars. He is the author of Colored People: A Memoir, which traces his childhood experiences in a small West Virginia town in the 1950s and 1960s; The Future of the Race, co-authored with Cornel West; and Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man.

Professor Gates's publications also include a 1994 cover story for Time magazine on the new Black Renaissance in art, as well as numerous articles for The New Yorker. In addition, he has edited several anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, and The Oxford-Schomburg Library of Nineteenth Century Black Women Writers, and is the co-editor of Transition magazine. Previously for PBS, Professor Gates produced and hosted Wonders of the African World, America Beyond the Color Line, African American Lives and Oprah's Roots.