Henry Louis Gates Jr.: Head Negro In Charge

Skip Gates joined 95 other blacks admitted to Yale’s Class of 1973. It was a great leap from Piedmont, where most of the black people he knew were related to him. Coming from Appalachia, from a tiny village in the Allegheny Mountains, eager to be accepted by this larger black world, Gates longed to “immerse himself in blackness,” as a friend once described it. His plan was to admit that he didn’t know a whole lot of things. But he would find out what it meant to be black, to be socially responsible to the larger African American community, and yet retain his own personal identity. He would rid himself of racist brainwashing like not finding kinky hair beautiful.

The first year went by like a fast-moving freight train—a rush of political turmoil entailing race politics, rallies, and meetings about the repression of the Black Panthers. It was also a time of “hot buttered soul,” as Isaac Hayes sang. “People all of a sudden had to prove that they were black; you had to wear your bona fides,” Gates says today. “It was as if there were some keeper of blackness who was in a position to say you are black or you are not black. This was unprecedented.”

At Potomac, Gates and his friends had bravely integrated a college hangout called the Swordfish. But at Yale he soon learned he was not cut out for in-your-face revolution. The Black Panthers—”fashion plates of black insurrection,” he called them—made him nervous. They hung out in black berets and leather coats on the corner at Liggett’s Drug Store, near the campus, selling newspapers and collecting for breakfast programs. Dare to ignore them, Gates recalls, and they’d demand, “Where you gonna be when the revolution comes, handkerchief head?”

At Yale, his interest in Africa deepened. Since the age of 10, he had obsessively studied African geography, memorizing the names of the “presidents, leaders, and petty dictators” of the emerging African countries of the early 1960s. At the same time, black kids were joking about “Ubangi lips”—and, as he puts it, “big-dick motherfuckers” who would “swing in trees and shit, living in grass huts.” All the kids watched Ramar of the Jungle on TV every Saturday morning. But Gates was also fascinated by “the idea that black people—Africans—could actually run a whole country or fly airplanes or do electronic technology without some white colonial looking over their shoulder.”

Junior year, Gates took off for Africa, working in a hospital in Tanzania and hitchhiking across the equator. “But I had no more idea what I was getting into than the man in the moon,” he says. “I was a tabula rasa and on me was being inscribed: Mother Africa from the Ground Up. I probably would have said that you were a racist if you thought that Africans still lived in mud huts. So I get there and everybody lives in mud huts. It’s worse than I imagined.”

Excited by the fresh hope he saw in emerging Africa, he was, on subsequent trips, shocked and disturbed by poverty and horrifying social conditions butting up against egregious examples of conspicuous consumption. “But the main thing I learned was how American I am,” he says. “I was of African descent, but not from Africa. I remember writing to somebody, ‘Well, if America is Babylon, then I’m a Babylonian because this is where my home is.'”

When Gates returned to Yale, he began his senior-year project—on Jay Rockefeller’s unsuccessful gubernatorial race in West Virginia, in 1972. As historian of the campaign, he met Sharon Adams, a 22-year-old white campaign worker who had dropped out of a few colleges, and had recently quit a job as a freight dispatcher in Charleston. When a friend offered her a job on the Rockefeller campaign, she jumped at the chance. And soon she was dating Gates, the first black man with whom she’d had a romantic relationship.

“I’d never been anywhere, and here was this young man who’d trekked across Africa,” she says. “God—and he was so funny. There was a lightheartedness about him. He was absolutely brilliant. I just found him completely irresistible.”
When the campaign ended, Adams moved to New Haven with Gates and took a job as a real estate rental agent while he finished school. The landlord liked the fact that they were a somewhat exotic, racially mixed couple. The neighbors did not. But the real problem was Adams’s parents. “When I was 14 or 15,” she recalls, “my mother said to me, ‘The only thing that will ever make me stop loving you is if you get addicted to drugs or if you date a black guy.’ It came out of nowhere. Drugs were not an issue in southern West Virginia—and there were not enough black people around to date.”

Adams had not told her parents that Gates was black, but just before they moved to New Haven the young couple met her mother in a restaurant. “She was pretty flipped out,” Adams says. “So there was this whole thing: You can’t tell your daddy. He’ll have a heart attack.” So her father was kept in the dark.
After graduating from Yale summa cum laude in history in June 1973, Gates headed to England, to Clare College, Cambridge University, on a Mellon Fellowship, the first black to win one. Even so, smarting because he hadn’t won the more prestigious Rhodes Scholarship, Gates was not at his joyous best. But Time magazine hired him to write occasional stories from Europe, and Adams arrived a month later.

During his two years at Cambridge, Gates developed a friendly relationship with Adams’s father over the phone. “It never occurred to Dad that Skip might be black,” she says. “Every time I called home, Skip would get on the phone voluntarily. And it was really awful for us, because neither of us likes to be dishonest. But there I had my mother saying, ‘He’s going to have a heart attack, and if he does, it’s on your head, damn it to hell.’ And she meant it.”

It was not until they returned stateside that the truth came out. “He was an avowed explicit racist,” Gates says, “and I thought the mother made the right decision not to tell him. But Sharon decided one day she was going to tell her father and until he accepted me, she wasn’t going to go home again. And her mother was absolutely correct—the man flipped out.”

Eventually, Gates says, Adams’s father was shamed into accepting him, and years later, after he and Sharon married and their two daughters were born, the Adamses became enthusiastic grandparents. “But you don’t get over something like that,” Gates says. “It never did not happen. You can forgive but you can’t forget. My mother never got over it. I’m trying to find the diplomatic way to say this. My mother never forgave the Adams family. And that’s what happened.”