David Remnick, Photo: Andres Serrano/The New Yorker, The New Yorker, February 19, 2022
It’s important to say it up front: I can’t claim to approach Henry Louis Gates, Jr.—or Skip, as he’s known—as a subject of objective journalistic inquiry. We’ve known each other first as colleagues at The New Yorker, where he wrote the Profiles that make up his collection “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man,” and then as friends. Still, I don’t think it requires the prejudice of friendship to believe that Gates, who is now seventy-one, has left a lasting, multiform imprint on the culture.
Gates was born in 1950 and grew up in Piedmont, West Virginia, where his family has deep roots. His father worked in a paper mill. Town picnics were still segregated but, with the advent of Brown v. Board of Education, the schools were not. After a year at Potomac State College, Gates transferred to Yale, which was starting to open up to a sizable number of Black students. In New Haven, he began to explore the depths of African American literature and history. His awakening did not take place only in the classroom and university meeting hall. Gates was also fascinated by the trial of Bobby Seale and other members of the Black Panthers at a courthouse near campus, and joined in the student strike in solidarity.
After graduating from Yale, he went, on a fellowship, to study at the University of Cambridge, where his most important mentor was Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian playwright, essayist, and novelist. The English faculty at Cambridge did not take African literature seriously, according to Gates, relegating it to anthropology. Soyinka, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1986, helped convince Gates to study African and African American literature.
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