Ep. 32 – Reconstruction and American Democracy: A Conversation with Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr.

[0:00:07 Peniel] Welcome to Race and Democracy, a podcast on the intersection between race, democracy, public policy, social justice and citizenship.

Welcome. Good evening. I’m so excited to be here this evening. It’s a long time coming and many people have shown support to help this evening come come true. My name is Peniel Joseph. I’m the Barbara Jordan chair in Political Values and ethics at the LBJ School of Public Affairs. And I’m also a professor of history in the College of Liberal Arts, and I’m the founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy here at the University of Texas at Austin and S.R.D. Mission is to promote, engage, research and scholarship focused on the ways, issues of race, democracy and public policy impact the lives of global citizens. And on that score, we’ve convened symposiums, conferences. We have undergraduate and graduate fellows who do engage research, all related to issues of inequality, of racial justice, of intersectional justice. When we think about race, class, gender, sexuality, gender identification and small d democracy, meaning this idea of democratic institutions and democratic political thought and processes that have nothing to do exclusively with political parties. And so we’re very, very pleased tonight to host Dr. Henry Louis Gates Junior as part of the William S. Powers Jr. Speaker series. And I want to read why this series is so important. This series honors the memory of President William S. Powers Jr., former president of University of Texas at Austin, by inviting thought leaders to present research in American politics and public policy and reflection of President Powers steadfast commitment to diversity and inclusion. This series is sponsored by the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs and the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy. I’d also like to thank our entire team at the center that helped to organize this event. Emily Dunklee is our program coordinator who’s done indefatigable, you know, a job to pull this through. Barbara CUFI Martin, Mattie Dunham, Janelle Ajani. All of our staff and really friends of LBJ, including Ellen, Eileen, excuse me, who who helped organize this. I want to I want to definitely thank them. I also want to thank Jeannie and Mickey Kline for their generous support in making this possible. And lastly, I want to thank really all of our students, our faculty, our staff, and really everyone in the Austin community who came out here to the Blanton. And we have more people coming for this evening with Dr. Henry Louis Gates JR. So without further ado, Dr. Henry Louis Gates Junior. I’ll call him Skip because I consider him a dear friend. And mentor is a national treasure. He is the ΑΙphonse Fletcher University professor and director of the Hutchins Center for African and African-American Research at Harvard University. He’s an Emmy and Peabody Award winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic and institution builder. Many of us know him from his PBS series Finding Your Roots. And Professor Gates was at the cutting edge of understanding that genealogical research could be used to build bridges across racial and ethnic divisions, not just at the national level, but globally as well. He has, he has. Made 21 films. And we’re gonna see a clip from his latest Reconstruction America After the Civil War. And Professor Gates, whose work is intimately concerned with the fullness of the black experience. He has been an institution builder at Harvard University as the founding chair of the Department of African-American Studies at Harvard. But he’s also been an institution builder in popularizing African-American studies and African studies globally. Dr. Gates has made the pursuit of learning about the fullness of black humanity a lifelong passion. And he does this not just through not just through scholarship, but he also does this through stories in his bestselling memoir Colored People. He talks about being raised in Piedmont, West Virginia, and the stories that his father told him while growing up. And he became a master storyteller, not just as a literary scholar and as a public intellectual, as a professor, but also as a filmmaker, as a television host, and as somebody who’s really bought the study of the black experience and the Afro-Caribbean Afro-Latino Latin NEC’s African experience to global audiences. So when I think about Skip’s impact, Skip has really been the most influential intellectual, as far as I’m concerned, of the black experience and really of race and democracy in the 20th and the 21st century, really ranking alongside of people like W.E.B. Dubois as an institution builder. So whether you whether you may agree or disagree with with what the black experience actually means, Skip has made an argument that there are a million ways of being black and we should really investigate and take those different ways seriously. So in that he’s challenged all kinds of orthodoxies across ideological spectrums. And for that, we we should be grateful. The recipient of fifty five honorary degrees and numerous prizes. Dr. Gates was a member of the first class of MacArthur Genius Grants awarded by the MacArthur Foundation in nineteen eighty one. In 1998, he became the first African-American scholar to be awarded the National Humanities Medal. He was named to Time’s 25 Most Influential Americans list in 1997 to Ebony’s Power 150 list in 2009. He earned his B.A. in English and Literature summa cum laude from Yale University and his M.A. MPH Ph.D. in English literature from Clere College at the University of Cambridge. Professor Gates has directed the W.E.B. What is now the Hutchins Center since arriving at Harvard in 1991. And during his last 15 years on campus, he chaired his first 15 years on campus. He chaired the Department of African and Afro-American Studies as it as it expanded into a full fledged doctoral program. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and serves on a wide array of boards, including the New York Public Library, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Aspen Institute, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art Library of America and the Brookings Institution. I think one of the most coolest aspects of Professor Gates, his legacy is that he’s got his portrait hung up in the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian, but also for those of us like myself who are really interested in pop culture. Skit makes a fantastic appearance in Watchmen. And Watchmen is with such a great, great series that talked about race. They talked about Tulsa and he made an appearance as a secretary of treasury. So, you know, we had our first African-American secretary of treasury right here with Dr. Gates. So. We are going to see a clip right now of Reconstruction America after the Civil War, which is Dr. Gates, his latest film. And then we are going to hear from Professor Gates himself. Thank you.

[film audio]

[0:09:17 Henry] Thank you so much Peniel, thank you for that very kind and generous introduction, but you left out the most important thing, brother, which is that I am your daughter’s godfather. How about that, huh? That’s.

[0:09:39 Peniel] I want to talk to you about reconstruction, but also just race and democracy. The 16 19 project, the 2020 election. What what can we. Because you’re right now you’re you’re not like I said in the introduction, I think what’s extraordinary about you is really your intellectual curiosity and that you and not just about things, but also about people, about ideas. Whoever you meet you, you make them feel like they’re the only person in the room that they really matter. Which I really appreciate. When you think about reconstruction and I think you’re right that it’s a narrative that most people don’t know and I love the fact that your films reach millions of people. And so we’re we’re really you’re sort of a general in that narrative of war. Bryan Stevenson is as well. And we had Sherrilyn Eifel and she’s part of that narrative war, too. Yeah, brilliant.

[0:10:30 Henry] I’m on her board.

[0:10:31 Peniel] You’re on her board. Absolutely. When we think about reconstruction and racial slavery. New York Times had the 16 19 project cholo. Mom was part of it. Nicole Hannah-Jones, all these great people, a lot of ways. I always thought about your work vis-a-vis that because I think your work has been trailblazing in terms of making us look at not just racial slavery, but even even ancient African history all the way to the present. Right. Right. Both in art and culture and politics. This narrative war that you’re talking about, what can we do now? All of us here in this room. People come to to hear you speak in the context of twenty, twenty and even beyond. And how can that impact us in terms of trying to transform citizenship and demand?

[0:11:17 Henry] Great question. My my motivation. Thank you very much for the compliments that you gave me. I love people. It’s something you can’t fake. You know, I love a good story and I love people and everybody’s got a good story. Oh, how close are you? Oh, I’m sorry. Want me to say it again. I love people. I love a good story. My father was a great storyteller. And my mother my mother was the first covered secretary of the PTA in Piedmont, West Virginia, as we would have said back then. And all the black people in my town would go to the monthly meeting to see my mother stand up and read the minutes. And momma would write the obituary for all the black people in the Potomac Valley where I grew up. Remember where I grew up halfway between Pittsburgh and Washington on the Potomac River to thousands of people. And she was just the obituary writer for people would call me Pauline. You know, my mother died. Would you write something? And it would be in the paper and then she would go to church and stand up and read that obituary. So I first image of a writer was my own beautiful mother and my father was this so funny. My father made Red Fox look like an undertaker. When we would be coming back from the church, I would go to all these performances as far as I was concerned before I started first grade and my father and mother would be walking, they’d be holding hands and I’d be holding their hands. And my father would say my mother’s name was Pauline. Pauline Agusta Coleman. Say, Pauline, you did such a good job today. I started to get up and open the casket to see if that son of a [INAUDIBLE] was still buried in there. Now, how could I not love stories as I was raised with humor? My goal has been to be multilingual. I the book I got tenure on was Signified Monkey, which is all about post structuralism, a deconstruction. My brother is an oral surgeon who just retired. And I remember he said to me, when you go to write a book that mom and daddy could read. And I sat down with colored people. Yeah. And while my mom died and my daughters were little kids and I wanted them to remember the colored world of the 50s and really my mother. And so and the reaction that book was really great being made, a lot of bestseller lists. And then the same year, a woman from England wrote me a letter and she had seen me on a book, A Late Night. It’s like The Tonight Show in England. Yeah, but for books. And I was on it talking about the canon wars of the 1990s, trying to get the Norton Anthology, put Zora Neale Hurston, then Frederick Douglass and Jean Tuber in them. You know, and I was part of that war with which we won. And she wrote to me and she said, I was in bed. I watched you and I could put you in front of a camera. You couldn’t be a host or a narrow, you know, a presenter. They call it in England. And you know what, ladies and gentlemen, I had never told anybody. Never. But when I first saw Kenneth Clark civilization, which you too will remember and which is about the history of Western art. And then Jacob Bronowski Zeist sent a band nineteen sixty nine. I can’t remember. They sent a man early 70s where there’s an academic in front of the camera talking you and walking you through a thing. I was raised to be a medical doctor. But I was at Yale and I watch these documentaries and I thought, man, that I really would like a chance to do that, but it was so unlikely. You know, I was going to be a medical doctor. I even took a year off of the program, kind of like the Peace Corps that Yale had. That was called five year B.A. It was such a cool program. You took a year off between a gap year in the middle of your education, between your sophomore and junior. And you went to the so-called third world, the developing world. They only pick twelve kids, very competitive. I applied and I always wanted to go to Africa and I went to Tanzania and worked in the I worked in a mission hospital. And how were you 19 when you did it? Yeah, I turned twenty in the village of Kilmartin. And anyway, this woman wrote me a letter and just named my secret desire. I mean, I can’t tell you what a miracle this. And I was so stunned. I threw it in the trash. You know, like I didn’t want to get my hopes. And she wrote began and she wrote me again, no Internet. And it was just like the mail. And finally, she flew all the way over from London. She had her own production company. And to have breakfast with me in Cleveland, where we give the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. Multiculture. Pulitzer Prize. And I go, what do you want with me? And she goes, I want to make you a star. You just don’t know it. You know? And she goes, I’m going to raise the money. And so the first documentary I did was for the BBC series called The Great Rail Journeys. And as well-known person spends three weeks riding with the film crew on trains somewhere in the world. And they wanted me to do it in Japan or South America. I go, no, but I’ll do it in Africa. And I would do it only under two conditions. If you let me take my daughters who were mixed race, one was twelve one was 14. And so the conceit was the professor of African and African-American studies trying to get his mixed race children to find their roots in Africa. Right. And I said the other condition was that the route the the three weeks would end in the village in central Tanzania where I had lived, that was a 19 and had my 20th birthday. So they said, deal on Africa, take two adolescence to F. Are you crazy? You know, adolescents are totally out of control. That’s it. OK. I’m not going to do with it. And they said, all right, we’ll send a producer over to have dinner with your family to see if your kids, you know, can handle this. So I set my daughters down, I said, if you blow this tonight, call me sir. Yes, Daddy. And so it worked. And they were perfect. And the reason that the film worked, there were two reasons. One, I was so pompous and I was so nervous. I wanted this so bad. I wanted to do such a good job. I had no training. And so I would give them a little lectures and they would roll their eyes. So in effect, the conceit, as I said, was that I was trying to get them to find their African roots and their response was our African roots are in Lexington, Massachusetts. Thank you very much. Now, when can I get. When can I get a Big Mac? I just want to get out of here. And then I had a cameraman who taught me those things when I look at the camera. They’re called piece of the camera or stand-ups. You see them on the evening news. They’re very hard to do. And he taught me how to do it. And so that was the beginning of my career.

[0:19:02 Peniel] All right. I’m going to I’m going to I want to get a couple of questions in here. So I’m gonna-

[0:19:08 Henry] No what do you want. He wants me to do his podcast, if you all leave. All right.

[0:19:16 Peniel] So, you know. So we’re gonna use this, if anything. So reconstruction. Twenty twenty election. Why is it important? And I’m going to brief briefly and then I’m going to ask another question about the new documentary today.

[0:19:30 Henry] Yes. That’s great. Twenty twenty election. What time is it? You know, it’s the polls will be closing and we’ll know tonight.

[0:19:40 Peniel] But voting rights March 7th is going to be 55 years since Edmund Pettus Bridge. You just talked about John Lewis, who I’ve met, too. I love voter suppression. Voter suppression is rampant. And so how do we connect reconstruction to that?

[0:19:52 Henry] We just did. Yeah. I mean, we tell us we have to fight against voter suppression. We have to fight against the rollback of women’s rights, rights to have an abortion. You know that we have to be vigilant. We have a conservative Supreme Court that’s hell bent on rolling back affirmative action. I don’t know. But your generation. But I wouldn’t. I went to Yale, as you know, in September 69. I was one of 96 black kids who hit Yale in September 6, I know was in my class. Sheila Sheila Jackson-Lee over in Houston. Yes, I met Sheila at a party other Saturday night. Yeah. Kurt Schmoke, the first black mayor of Baltimore. Yes. See, there was a little nerdy guy. He was pre-med. I always forget in. Oh, man, that was my job. I thought you were a kid. No, no, no. And Candy Carson, his wife, who was in the class behind him. We never could. And we were the children of affirmative action. Why do I say that? Because the class of 66 at Yale had six black guys. The Graduate. What was their genetic blip in the race? And all the sudden there were 90 more smart black fifty point sixty nine. They were coarse about. There was a racist quota on the number of black people. Who could go to Yale. There was a quota on the number of Jews who could get in a quota. Even till 63 on a number of Irish people who could get it. So we have to fight against the rollback of affirmative action, women’s rights, the right to vote. It’s the future of our democracy is at stake and it affects all of us. Black, white, male, female, gay, straight. It is the most urgent problem confronting our democracy today. Absolutely.

[0:21:43 Peniel] What I want to ask you about the new film that you’re you’re currently in the process of making.

[0:21:48 Henry] The one you asked me if you could star in back there.

[0:21:54 Peniel] I don’t know if I really did, but yeah, I’d like to. Even if I if I didn’t say that. Yeah. Thank you.

[0:22:02 Henry] Well, you know, most of us think that the great during the Great Migration, all the black people that s left and went north, but everybody in the south knows that’s not true. The black middle class and move. Martin Luther King, jr.’s grandfather’s third generation minister at Ebony’s or Martin Luther King only left the south. He went to Morehouse. He only left the south to go to be you to get a PHC, and then went back to the south. And the young’s father was a dentist in New Orleans. I want to make I wanted to do what Dr. Dubois called lifting the veil, said black Negro world was a world behind the veil. I want to live that world and see what black people did once Jim Crow was imposed in the segregated. But it’s going to be called making black America the segregated north and the segregated South.

[0:22:55 Peniel] Yeah, and I like that you’re saying segregated North because the narrative and you’ve been talking about narratives this evening says that somehow black people had it easier in quotes in the north, that it wasn’t as segregated, it wasn’t as bad. And what’s the reality?

[0:23:11 Henry] Well, the reality is black people could vote in the north, as you well know. And and many not all schools were integrate. As you know better, they buy in this room. Malcolm X went to a white school. Yes, right. In Michigan. In Michigan. And if you haven’t read Peniel’s book on Malcolm and Martin, you should put Neal as a great scholar. And he is. He’s brilliant. A great communicator. Don’t step on your applause line. So no. So no one has told that story. And I want to show how healthy black culture was, how black people, when they were denied access to white institutions, form their own institutions. So on the one hand, Malcolm X went to a white school in the eighth grade or whatever it was, but Yale had a quota of black kids filled 1969. You know, there were. So that’s why Thurgood Marshall met Charles Hamilton Hughes to Houston, who would graduate Harvard Law School at Howard. I would. Without affirmative action, I would have gone to college. Three generations of my family, my first member of my family graduated from a woman, my great aunt from Howard Nursing School. What became the nursing school in 1909? And then three generals of dentists and doctors have graduated from Howard. So I would have gone to Howard or Morehouse, but I wouldn’t have gone to Yale. And that’s what affirmative action did. And to ban because of affirmative action, black middle class doubled in the black, upper middle class quadrupled since the day Martin Luther King was killed. But the percentage of black children and police poverty line is still remarkably close to what it was when Martin Luther King was alive. So that affirmative action created a class divide within the black community.

[0:25:05 Peniel] And you talked about the segregated South as well. What are some interesting complexities that you’re uncovering?

[0:25:11 Henry] Well, there is a huge black middle class in the south that continued to thrive. Look at Vernon Jordan. You know, his mother was in the black middle class. She was a caterer. And all these people that the the it started with the free Negro community. If you look at the 1860 federal census, I know you are going to do this when you go home. Look it up. They were fine in eighty eight thousand free black people in 1860 and there were 3.9 million enslaved black people of that four hundred eighty eight thousand black people. Two hundred sixty two thousand lived in the south. It’s counter-intuitive to it in twenty two thousand lived in the Norton.

[0:25:50 Peniel] It is counterintuitive, you would think that they lived outside the south.

[0:25:53 Henry] We were taught that you would like Frederick Douglass soon as you could. You ran away. Yes, right. But once in my my case, when one set of my fourth great grandparents were freed, we have Abraham Van Meter’s well in the Hardee County, Virginia. Now West Virginia, again, 30 miles away. I was born and he gave them a thousand acres of land. So if you’re free, what do you do? Leave a thousand acres of land and do what? Go to New York, be homeless. You don’t live there or you don’t know anybody? Of course not. So people were freed. Freeing the slaves was punitive. You had to give them something to survive. And people stayed in the south and they built churches and schools, which are excellent. And if you were college educated, you couldn’t get a job in a white institution. So you went back and you taught to the black high school like Dunbar High School in Washington or M Street High School, which was as good as Exeter or Andover, you know. So and then the Elks and the odd fellows and all those fraternal organizations wouldn’t integrate. So you, unlike the prince, all masons at the bases were integrated. So you started your own masons. They created a world within a world. And I want to tell that story. It’s a marvelous story. And in some ways, some things were lost when under desegregation and other things weren’t, you know.

[0:27:17 Peniel] What are some of the things that were lost under desegregation? Well, that sense of community. I don’t want to over romanticize it. But because of residential segregation, you had a multiclass neighborhood. The doctor and the dentist, the undertaker, the lawyer lived not too far away from a janitor or a maid or, you know, a factory worker. So there was more of a sense of community. And of course, as soon as you could, as soon as rezoned residential segregation ended, you wanted to live or people in your economic class lived. So one way, William Julius Wilson, as you know, is an expert on this. When work disappears, so people move to the suburbs. And then that left a black, you know, disenfranchised, disenfranchised economic class on its own with no role models in the inner city.

[0:28:12 Peniel] OK. Final question. I want to one. I mean, thank you for for what you’ve done here tonight and really for all the work you do. But I want you to leave us with a charge, really, in the sense of you talked about this narrative war. Right. And this this idea, you’re doing the work. How can all of us, one, support the work you’re doing? But really, right here in Austin, Texas, beside. Absolutely watching, finding your roots, you know, on the weekly.

[0:28:42 Henry] Oh, I would never do that.

[0:28:43 Peniel] And and all your films. What can we what can we do to participate and contribute to this narrative?

[0:28:52 Henry] It’s a great question. You know what? I think the most powerful two things you could do, register and vote. And finally, when ever white supremacy rears its ugly head in any of its pernicious manifestations, anti-Semitism, anti-black racism anti immigrant feeling, xenophobia, homophobia when ever white supremacy rears its ugly head. We have to join together in interracial coalitions and crush it till it’s dead.

[0:29:41 Peniel] All right. That’s that’s the mike drop. That’s it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you. Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., thank you for all of you for coming out tonight. This is an extraordinary evening. Thank you so much.

Thanks for listening to this episode and you can check out related content on Twitter at Peniel Joseph. That’s P-e-n-i-e-l  J-o-s-e-p-h and our Web site, CSRD.LBJ.utexas.edu and the Center for Study of Race and Democracy is on Facebook as well. This podcast was recorded at the Liberal Arts Development Studio at the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. Thank you.