Henry Louis Gates Jr.: Head Negro In Charge

In April 1987, Gates’s mother died of a heart attack, and his father came to live with Sharon and Skip. When Gates was still a child, his mother had gone through a severe depression during menopause from which she never fully recovered. “It was devastating to me,” he says. “It gave me a fear of people leaving, going away.”

Suddenly, Gates was bereft. “The cliched thing to say is that it makes you aware of the transitory nature of all human relationships,” he says. “But it made me a fanatically loyal person. In the end you only have a handful of real relationships, and I am fanatical about those relationships. I take a long time before I trust someone enough to want them in my world or to be in their world. And once they are there, I don’t want them to go.”

Meanwhile, his career was taking off. Gates soon published two books about black identity and literary criticism, the second of which, Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism, won an American Book Award in 1989. In academia, the scarcity of black scholars put his services at a premium. He fended off offers from Columbia, Stanford, and Duke. Cornell ceded him unprecedented authority to hire new black faculty members. He acquired a New York literary agent and drove a Mercedes with a cell phone. He was becoming the prototype for a new kind of academic superstar.

In 1990, after more than two years of negotiations, Gates finally moved to Durham, North Carolina, where he would attempt to breathe life into Duke’s moribund black studies program. Part of the allure for Gates was that he was able to bring Appiah as a philosophy professor, not to mention Henry Finder and Transition magazine, and the Black Periodical Literature Project he’d started at Yale. In the sporting world, three-player deals are not particularly unusual. But in academia, this was news, and a measure of Gates’s growing power. The New York Times Magazine consecrated the deal with a cover story that heralded Gates as “Black Studies’ New Star.”

After such a long and seductive courtship, Gates expected a generous welcome from Duke. But his growing fame did not serve him well in Durham. He, Appiah, and Finder all drove Mercedes, which raised eyebrows. Colleagues gossiped when Gates and his wife bought the largest old Victorian house in town. And being an interracial couple in the land of Jesse Helms was far from fun.
“It was, Where’d that nigger get that Cadillac?” Gates recalls. “It was pure, unadulterated racism. I had never experienced that kind of thing before. It is one thing for some kid in a working-class neighborhood to see you driving by and call you nigger; it’s another thing when Ph.D.’s act like that. The effect was devastating.”

In October 1990, Gates testified on behalf of the First-Amendment rights of 2 Live Crew, a black rap group charged with obscenity in Florida. Soon after that he became the target of conservative professors and the student newspaper. His moderate political views notwithstanding, he was even labeled a Marxist. Nor did Gates get the support he wanted from the black faculty.

“I hate to say it, but some of the black faculty members at Duke knew their place,” Sharon says. “They just did not make trouble. But Skip was going to make trouble. He was going to be opinionated and loud. He was going to bring people there who were opinionated and loud, and they didn’t want it.”
For the first time in years, though, Sharon found steady, fulfilling work.

Culturally, she felt at home in the South; she had her own professional identity, teaching ceramics, and she had lots of friends. The girls were happy attending a Quaker school, though Skip thought it was “too crunchy,” not academic enough. But by then, Princeton and Harvard were beckoning him.

In early 1991, when Harvard finally made Gates a generous offer, all hell broke loose. Bob Wilson, a columnist for the Durham Herald-Sun, asserted that Gates did not show “any loyalty beyond the paycheck,” adding: “Now Harvard is falling over itself to give Gates the sun, the moon and the stars—the latter especially to his liking—while Duke ends up with pixie dust.” A David Letterman-style “Top Ten” flier circulated on the campus, listing money twice among the reasons for Gates’s departure. A student-newspaper editorial, “Skipping away again,” asserted that “since coming here in 1989, Gates has done almost nothing for the University.”

Gates felt like Custer at Little Big Horn. “I wanted to get the hell out of there,” he says.