Gates maintains quest to reveal African-American history
Pioneering feminist Anna J. Cooper once wrote, “black people have to stop imitating white people and white culture.” She went on to say in 1893 that black Americans had to find their own voice, the roots of which are buried in the literature, mythology and folktales and music created by their enslaved ancestors. A century later, when Henry Louis Gates Jr. read her essay, published in “The Southern Workman,” he found her words exceptional.
“It was so brilliantly put and so shocking to find in 1893 that this argument had been laid out so perfectly,” he said in a recent phone interview. “When I read it, I called my editor and said we are reprinting that essay because nobody has read it in over 100 years and I want everybody to read it.”
The essay is featured in one of two books Gates published this fall, “The Annotated African American Folktales,” co-edited with Maria Tatar. His other new release is “100 Amazing Facts About the Negro.” Both books chronicle African-American experience and literature.
After perusing “100 Amazing Facts About the Negro” — an homage to black historians and Gates’ hero Joel A. Rogers, a journalist who in 1934 published “100 Amazing Facts About the Negro with Complete Proof ” — the reader will know that Barack Obama was not the first black president in North America and that Jackie Robinson was once court-martialed. The reader will also learn that 388,000 Africans were taken to the United States during the history of the slave trade — whereas millions of Africans were sent to Brazil, Cuba and the Caribbean islands.
“The achievements of black people should be inextricably intertwined in the narrative of American history and indeed, world history, if you think of our African ancestors, and they’re not. So my never-ending quest is to restore those stories in a way that is accessible, entertaining, well-researched,” Gates said.
“The Annotated African American Folktales,” as Gates attests, is not the first anthology of black folktales, but “it’s certainly the biggest and the best and the most scholarly.”
“So many of the folktales that we collected were created by our enslaved ancestors, and you would think that the last thing in the world that a person who was enslaved would be thinking about is Brer Rabbit and Brer Bear, instead of ‘massa,’ the overseer, and trying to survive, but actually that is what they were thinking about,” Gates said. “They just had to put it in a figurative language. And it shows the complexity of our peoples’ minds that these people who had nothing, they would make time to invent a whole system of figurative language, allegorical stories that really allowed them to comment on themselves and their situation in a code. That’s brilliant, that was a sign of genius, and that’s part of my mission — to help establish the canon of black folktales.”
We talked to Gates, director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University and executive producer and host of the PBS series “Finding Your Roots,” about his work. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Question: What was your favorite tale or fact? Did anything surprise you in your research?
Yes, the fact that there were so many black people who owned slaves. Most probably owned family members to protect them, but some of them turned to slavery to exploit the labor of other black people for profit. I never learned that in black history. And in 1860, more free black people lived in the South than lived in the North. And during the Civil War, those free Negroes who lived there were largely unmolested. I think that’s an astonishing fact — again showing the complexity of race relations and the history of the American South.
In terms of the favorite folktale: Tar Baby. I like that it’s an Akan tale, a tale of Anansi, the trickster spider. All these tales were about survival for our people. Our people are the most optimistic people in the whole history of the world. And what I try to do with my work is pay tribute to that tradition. We’re still fighting battles of intellectual racism, and I see works like mine as part of the weapons in that battle.
Q: Why these books now?
After Reconstruction, we had 11 years of maximum black freedom followed by a white supremacist rollback, which ended up creating de jure segregation and Jim Crow as the law of the land; that’s what we see certain forces in America attempting to do today. I see my role as being political, but in an implicit way. It is a political act to establish a canon of African-American folklore and mythology. It’s a political act to go back to Joel Rogers’ book and retrieve what he got right and expand on new facts, in terms of perpetuating the fact that black people have a long intellectual tradition and that black people have been major contributors to American culture and civilization and Western culture and civilization as well as world culture and civilization from time immemorial. These kinds of gestures help to defeat racism, because the last battle, in terms of the history of racism, will be on the intellectual level. I don’t know what else God put me on Earth for but this one thing.
Q: Is there an aspect in black life that you haven’t explored and want to?
I just worked out a deal with PBS to do three new series on black history. I’m going to do Reconstruction and the birth of Jim Crow. It will be aired, Godwilling, in February 2019. And the reason is, I want to show people that what’s happening now — the attempts to dismantle Barack Obama’s legacies — happened systematically in the 19th century after the North won the Civil War and supposedly black people were free.
By 1896, so many of the rights ensured by the Reconstruction amendments — the 13th, 14th and 15th — had been rolled back. I want to make this film as a cautionary tale to say, wake up, this is what’s happening, this is what they’re trying to do to us, they’re trying to erase Barack’s legacy and the Voting Rights Act and all that. All those things happened with Reconstruction and Jim Crow. And then I want to tell the story about the Great Migration in another series.
And finally, the history of the black church — the way that black people worshipped. How did our people survive and endure? Through the creation of literature, including mythology and folklore and music, the spirituals; but through their spirituality, they found a way to bring their gods with them and transmute those gods and to transmute Christianity when they got here. They made it black, they made it their own.