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Gates, Henry Louis
TopBlacks Member 2001
Notable Scholar of African American Studies
On September 16, 1950, Henry Louis Gates was born in Keyser, West Virginia.
He graduated Summa Cum Laude with a degree in History from Yale in 1973. When he was 30 years old he won a MacArthur foundation genius grant. He was a junior professor at Yale at the time. He was given tenure at Cornell University at the age of 33.
Gates earned his Masters and Doctorate in English Literature from Clare College at the University of Cambridge. He was the first African-American to receive a Ph.D from Cambridge.He taught English literature and Afro-American studies at Yale and Cornell before joining Harvard in 1991. Dr. Gates now serves as the W.E.B. DuBois Professor of the Humanities at Harvard and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research.
He has been awarded five honorary degrees and many awards. Among them are: The Zora Neale Hurston Society Award for Cultural Scholarship, The Candle Award of Morehouse College, The Norman Rabb Award of the American Jewish committee, The Golden Plate Achievement Award, The George Polk Award for Social Commentary, The Tikkun National Ethics Award, A MacArthur Foundation "genius grant", and the 1998 National Humanities Medal conferred by President Clinton at the Whitehouse.
Dr. Gates is a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board. In 1997, he was voted one of Time Magazine's "25 Most Influential Americans". Dr. Gates has authored many books including: Wonders of the African World, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, The Future of the Race, Speaking of Race, Speaking of Sex: Hate Speech, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties, Colored People: A Memoir, Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism, and Figures in the Black: Words, Signs, and the "Racial" Self.
He is general editor of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, co-editor of Transition magazine, a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of essays, reviews and profiles in many other publications.
In addition to authoring several books and hundreds of articles in the popular as well as academic press, Dr. Gates assembled a "brain team" of intellectuals that spent 12 months in 12 different African countries examining evidence that proves refined culture has existed in Africa for thousands of years. He took his team to Africa and spent 12 months in 12 different African countries. He showed the world that Africans had been creators of culture for thousands of years.
His six hour television mini series on PBS proved what he knew all along; Ancient Africans were highly intelligent and extremely sophisticated.