Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Director of the Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University, discusses his book entitled Colored People, a memoir which weaves extraordinary personal narrative together with social history of the 1950’s when black culture flourished within the bounds of segregation and racism.
In his coming-of-age story, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., recounts his childhood in the mill town of Piedmont, West Virginia, in the 1950s and 1960s and ushers readers into a gossip of lye-and-mashed-potato “processes,” and of slyly stubborn resistance to the indignities of segregation.
A winner of the Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Award and the Lillian Smith Prize, Colored People is a masterpiece of recollection, a work that deepens our sense of African American history even as it entrances us with its bravura storytelling
Recorded in 1992 at Cambridge Forum
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, and journalist, Professor Gates’s most recent books are Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow and The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song.