So, Professor, you

grew up in Piedmont, West Virginia. You were born in the early 1950s. How did growing up in this place at this time influence you?

Well, Piedmont, West Virginia is an Irish Italian paper mill town located on the Potomac River in the Allegheny Mountains, halfway between Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C., and a lot of people from D.C., and Baltimore area come up there and own homes there. I was born in 1950 when there were 2,500 people, if I'm remembering correctly, and about 350 or so were Black. In 1955, a year after Brown v. Board, the good citizens of Mineral County, West Virginia, voted to integrate the schools with no Rosa Parks, with no Martin Luther King. Wow. So, I started school on the last day of August 1956 in what we call the White School, and I went to an integrated school for 12 years. And I was treated like a little prince.

So, listen, a lot of other Black kids who were among the first to go to these integrated schools had a very different experience, a very negative experience, where they faced a lot of hostility. Why do you think your experience was like

this? Two reasons. My brother, Paul, is five years older, and he had been in the White School a year before I started school. Okay. And he's brilliant, and he was just knocking it out of the park. So they knew that I was from a smart family, but even more important was everybody in that town knew everybody else. And my parents were widely, deeply respected. My mother was very active in the PTA. As soon as that school integrated, she was there, and in 1957, in second grade, she was elected the first colored secretary of the P-Bunt PTA. Wow. And that was like a moment in civil rights history in Piedmont, West Virginia, you know, and all the Black people in town, mostly the women, would, on the evening of the PTA meeting, they would all get dressed up and they would go over to the high school just to watch my mother read the minutes. Wow. You see, my father worked two jobs, and he worked in the paper mill in the day, West Faco, and then he was a janitor at the telephone company, and then he'd be home at 730. And he did that for the extra income, and he did that so that my mother wouldn't have to work because that was the goal for a middle-class man, and certainly that was true in the white community. It was perhaps even truer in the African-American community. So we were in the upper class, as it were, as ironic as that might sound, among the working class white and black kids in my school. But the final thing I want to say, so as not to make the Piedmont sound superficial, is that they had a deep sense of character and fairness and an even playing field. They thought, if you worked hard and you deferred gratification, you saved your money, you comported yourself in a dignified way, then you were entitled to a certain status in the community. These were mostly, I would say, second-generation Italian and Irish immigrants who had come there at the turn of the century to work at the mill, and the black people, most of them, had migrated from Virginia also to work at the paper mill. But look, there were racist strictures. We couldn't sit down in the local hangout, called the cut rate. The white kids could sit down. We had to order at the counter. We got our food in takeaway plastic cups and paper plates and it would jovis nuts. And we couldn't date white girls. That was a big thing that we were told the black girls couldn't date white boys and the black boys couldn't date white girls. So what that meant when you hit puberty is that all the white girls thought about black boys and all the black boys thought about white girls. So

you were really growing up in the midst of some of the most consequential moments of the civil rights movement. How much did you know that you were growing up at this really pivotal moment for black Americans?

Keenly aware, we got Jet Magazine and when Emmett Till was beaten and John Johnson chose to put his deformed body on the cover, we looked at that. And I mean, we were showing that and we talked about that. The news at that time only lasted 15 minutes. That was the evening news. But we watched it as a family together. And so 1957 when I was seven, Central High School, Little Rock. And my parents were Republicans until JFK. And I remember them being so proud of Eisenhower for sending troops to Little Rock to integrate Central High School. And names like Arthurine Lucy who integrated the University of Alabama. And then by the time JFK's elected, I remember like it was yesterday, the four of us gathered around the television set. The civil rights movement was unfolding like a panorama right outside our house or outside virtually. And so we talked about it all the time. And then of course when JFK was killed, that was just horrible for us as black people and us as citizens of Minnowah County. I mean, everybody loved JFK. And then by the time my senior year, April 4th, 1968 when Dr. King was so brutally murdered, I remember my three best buddies who were black coming to our house and watching every second of the coverage. And so we boycotted classes and we all got into trouble. But we talked about civil rights all the time because I was reading Ebony magazine and there would be book reviews like of the autobiography Malcolm X or Manchild in the Promence Land or any of James Baldwin's work. And I would order these books through the book Club of America. And I would get them. I would read them. My dad would read them. And then my buddies would read them because these were not in our school library

by and large. You know, a lot of people who watched the civil rights movement unfold as you did and wanted to participate in this new world that was being born. They became lawyers or they became advocates or activists or journalists or politicians. Why did you decide on academia as sort of your path forward?

Well, I was raised to be a doctor. Pauline Augusta Coleman Gates was going to be the mother of two doctors. And that's the way it was for my birthday and Christmas, I get dissecting kids, stethoscopes, you know, whatever. And when I was at Yale, I majored in history. And then I got a fellowship to go to the University of Cambridge. And I met two people who changed my life. I wanted to take a course in African mythology. And I asked one of the English professors and they said, oh, there's a Nigerian playwright here in exile from Nigeria. Why don't you go see him? And I did. And his name was Wally Shoyinka. And that was 1973. 13 years later, he became the first African to win the Nobel Prize in literature. But Cambridge English department was so conservative that they wouldn't give him an appointment. Wow. It was an social anthropology because they said African literature is not really literature. So I studied with him through the social anthropology department. Can you imagine being in tutorials with a guy who 13 years later is going to get the Nobel Prize? It was like dying and going to heaven. And the other person I met at the same time was Anthony Opia. And you know who he is, Kwame Anthony Opia. This is the brilliant philosopher, professor at NYU. And who writes the Ethicists column in the Sunday Times magazine each week. And so they took me to dinner. It was in October of 73. And Shoyinka is an Eno file. So we were drinking bottles of wine. And I've never even drunk a lot of wine before. So I'm getting smashed and showing compounds on the table and says, right, we brought you here for a reason. We're here from your future. We are visiting you from your future. You are not going to be a medical doctor. That's the stupidest thing we ever heard of. You were put on earth to be a professor of African and African American studies. You're going to get a PhD here.

And I had not even dreamed about getting a PhD. And you ended up being the first African American to get a PhD in English literature from Cambridge, right?

Yeah, the first to get a PhD in English literature. There was one other black person who got a PhD. I think it was in mechanical engineering. And he taught down the road here at MIT. But Charlie, you know what? I started to cry because they had named something that I really wanted and couldn't even name myself. So I realized at Cambridge that that's what I really wanted to do. Then I became terrified that I would never be able to pull it

off. So clearly it worked out because in 1991, you were hired by Harvard as chair of the African American studies department and W.E.B. Dubois, professor of the humanities. And then many years after that, I took your introduction to African American studies class at Harvard, an absolutely famous class. I was in your class in the fall of 2008 when Barack Obama was elected as the first black president of the United States. Since then, so much has happened. Black Lives Matter, Trump's election, the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. How do you incorporate some of these more current events into the study of black history?

Well you remember that the class was structured around debates. Yeah. Debates that black people had in the tradition. So starting with Barack, there were a lot of black thinkers who said Obama's election represented the end of race, which is the end of racism, which is totally ridiculous. Right. I thought it was ridiculous even then. So we have a black man in the White House, beautiful black family. All of the world can see that we are intelligent and poised and composed and full of class. Is this the end of race or not? So that's one debate. Reparations. We didn't deal with reparations. Maybe we touched on it 15 years ago, but people want to talk about that now. Yeah. Abolish the police, which I think is a totally stupid idea. But that was a hot idea, a hot topic right after George Floyd.