Reached by phone in California, Gates credits his inspiration to two sources.
One was Yale historian John Blassingame, who introduced him to the outpouring of quirky black biographical dictionaries of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Largely efforts to refute the most damaging lie of all about black people -- that they were intellectually inferior to whites -- these works tended toward hagiography but preserved many names that might otherwise have been lost.
The other inspiration, Gates says, was one of his heroes, "the smartest black intellectual in the first half of the 19th century." James McCune Smith was the first professionally trained black physician in the United States, the nation's first black candidate for political office and an influential abolitionist. Seven years ago, Gates looked for Smith in the premier American biographical dictionary, Oxford's American National Biography.
He wasn't there. Nor were most of the names on a list of maybe 25 prominent blacks Higginbotham assembled after Gates told her of the gaps he was finding.
Gates called Casper Grathwohl, who headed Oxford's reference division, and told him he needed to publish a stand-alone African American reference work.
"Do you think you can fill it up?" Gates recalls Grathwohl asking.
Not a problem.
An initial database, compiled at the Gates-run W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, ran to more than 12,000 names. Many, brought to light by burgeoning research efforts in African American history over the last quarter century, remained virtually unknown outside the academy.
Gates and Higginbotham set out to turn that database into what Gates calls "the grandest history of the African American people ever written."
Members of the staff they assembled began work in 2002, based in the Du Bois Institute. By 2004, they had produced a handsome 600-entry volume called African American Lives that served as a kind of advertisement for the full biography. But soon after this, the editors began to fear that the larger project would never get done.
Indeed, Gates is a man who, asked what he's working on now, has trouble recalling the full list. His sabbatical project is "a book on race and the Enlightenment." Another book, "In Search of Our Roots," will be out in April. He's just gotten approval from Oxford University Press for a huge African biography project. There's a PBS show airing next month, the second to be based on African American Lives. Oh, and he's forgotten to mention "the big project I'm gearing up to do": an eight-hour PBS series on the history of the African American people -- "the whole sweep, from the slave trade to Barack Obama."
