 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.
BACK TO HISTORY HOMEPAGE |
|
