Paying heed

It was in the late 1960s and early ‘70s that black studies was born as an academic discipline. On some campuses, black studies departments were organized hastily, more to appease white guilt in the wake of the 1968 assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. than from any conviction that U.S. intellectual life would benefit from a sustained and rigorous study of the presence of blacks in America. Many such programs became victims of their ill-conceived beginnings.

Harvard University’s black studies program was failing until it hired Henry Louis Gates Jr. as chairman. Although his academic training was in literature, Gates developed a vision of what black studies should do: “record, codify, and disseminate” knowledge about African and African American cultures. Doing so, he believed, would institutionalize that knowledge and make it in an integral part of American and Western history.

Building on the work and vision of earlier black intellectuals like W.E.B. Du Bois and Carter Woodson, Gates has used his positions as Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois professor of humanities and director of its Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research to inspire and mobilize a generation of black and white scholars to unearth the hidden histories of African and American blacks.

“African American Lives” is the successor volume to “Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience,” which Gates co-edited with Kwame Anthony Appiah in 1999. That 600-page volume brought together in one place information about the cultural, political, economic and social dimensions of the Pan-African experience from Africa, the Caribbean and the United States.

The focus of this second book is individuals. It offers 611 biographies in more than 1,000 pages of what eventually will be eight volumes of about 6,000 biographies. Familiar and unfamiliar names are included, reflecting Gates’ and co-editor Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s belief that “[l]arge events and small ones are brought about by ordinary people ... while the least of us ... may have a profound effect on the course of world events.”

Almost any prominent black person one could think of is here, including reformers and activists Du Bois, King, Booker T. Washington and Stokely Carmichael; athletes Tiger Woods, Jackie Robinson and Florence Griffith-Joyner; writers James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker; and entertainers Bill Cosby, Oprah Winfrey, John Coltrane, Duke Ellington and Josephine Baker.

The lives and accomplishments of many others are brought here to wide attention for the first time. There is the slave Cesar, born in 1682, who was known for his “pharmaceutical prowess” and was mentioned in the 1749 journal of the South Carolina Commons House of Assembly for having “cured several of the Inhabitants of this Province who had been poisoned by Slaves.” Also profiled are Alice Coachman, who set the world record in the women’s high jump at the 1948 Olympic Games and became the first black woman to win an Olympic gold medal; Major Taylor, a cyclist during the first decade of the 20th century who became the first black athletic superstar; Onesimus, a slave who taught his master, Puritan minister Cotton Mather, how to inoculate people against smallpox; Louisiana shoemaker Homer Plessy of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision Plessy vs. Ferguson that promulgated the doctrine of “separate but equal” in 1896; fur trapper Edward Rose, one of the first black frontiersmen; and English professor Jo Ann Robinson, whose crucial role in organizing the 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala., is not as widely known and remembered as it should be.

Decisions about whom to include are subjective, but in the main, the majority of people who should be included in such a volume are. One who should not have been omitted is legendary Mississippi blues man Eddie James “Son” House, although he is referred to briefly in the book’s treatments of Charley Patton, Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters.

The biographies are not sketches but substantive essays, some written by scholars. The pieces on King, his associate Ralph Abernathy and Malcolm X were written by Clayborne Carson, editor of King’s papers. Kathleen N. Cleaver, a former leader in the Black Panther Party, writes a surprisingly balanced account of the life of party co-founder Huey P. Newton. Essayist Gerald Early writes about Muhammad Ali and baseball greats Curt Flood and Rube Foster; historian John Hope Franklin writes about 19th century historian George Washington Williams; historian and biographer Nell Irvin Painter writes about Sojourner Truth; biographer Hazel Rowley writes about Richard Wright; and author Stephen J. Whitfield contributed the essay on Emmett Till.

A definitive volume on the lives of African Americans must be free of errors, and in a reference work no mistake is small. Unfortunately there are errors. In the piece on Black Power activist Carmichael, Dennis Wepman writes that the “Black Panther Party took its name from the symbol Carmichael had used in Mississippi.” Yet Cleaver states correctly that the Panthers adopted “the symbol of the all-black political party in Lowndes County, Alabama ... [that] Carmichael helped organize.” Writer Ishmael Reed’s wife is named Carla Blank, not “Carla Bank.” The biography of social activist Septima P. Clark says that Tennessee’s Highlander Folk School, where she taught, closed in 1959. I worked at Highlander in 1960-61, leaving shortly before it closed in the fall of that year. In the essay on Muddy Waters, the maiden name of Geneva, his third wife, is said to be “unknown.” However, Sandra B. Tooze’s 1996 biography, “Muddy Waters: The Mojo Man,” gives Geneva’s maiden name as Wade.

There also are times when the photos and writing create confusion. The essay on actress and comedian Whoopi Goldberg says she first chose “Whoopi Cushion” as her professional name “then dropped Cushion for Goldberg, after her Jewish relatives.” One searches in vain for Goldberg making any public mention of these Jewish relatives. Alice Walker’s former husband Mel Leventhal is described as a “white Jewish lawyer”; murdered civil rights workers Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner are referred to as white in the biography of civil rights leader Robert Moses, though they were also Jewish. A photograph of a woman identified as Fannie Lou Hamer, the soul of Mississippi’s civil rights movement, in Mississippi, appears to be of Annie Devine, another leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Another photograph shows singer Lena Horne with martyred civil rights leader Medgar Evers but doesn’t identify him. And in a list, diplomat Ralph Bunche’s name is spelled “Bunfche.” Such errors make me wonder about the accuracy of facts about other people in the book.

More distressing is that many of the biographies depart from objectively reporting the pertinent facts of lives. Singer Little Richard is described by Eric Weisbard as “a kind of rock-and-roll cartoon” who has not “figured out what his accomplishment meant or reconciled his values, desires and aspirations.” Writer and music critic Albert Murray is criticized for “focusing so exclusively on early-twentieth-century African American culture [that] he ignores the even greater global resonance of later black musical forms, notably soul ... and hip hop.” We are informed that artist Horace Pippin’s last years “were personally unhappy” and that “having grown more and more lonely, Pippin died ... from a stroke in his sleep,” while Alabama civil rights leader E.D. Nixon “slipped into a deeply embittered obscurity.” Alice Walker is described as “the Californian, bisexual, pagan, womanist” who “not only was confident in her role as writer and medium but also was recognized as an elder and spiritual guide for generations to come.” Subjective evaluations and worshipful hyperbole are not characteristic of reference works and are out of place, especially when most of the writers giving the evaluations and indulging themselves in overwriting are not recognized authorities on their subjects. It is a serious oversight not to provide information about the biographers’ credentials.

Despite its flaws, “African American Lives” is still a definitive book. Let’s hope the eight-volume set, when completed, will be mistake-free. African American lives deserve nothing less. *