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 [an error occurred while processing this directive] Combine the braininess of the legendary black scholar W.E.B. DuBois and the chutzpah of P.T. Barnum, and the result is Henry Louis Gates Jr. At 46, the chairman of Harvard's Afro-American-studies department has emerged as a prolific author, a whirlwind academic impresario and the de facto leader of a movement to transform black studies from a politically correct, academic backwater into a respected discipline on campuses across the U.S. Says Gerald Early, director of African and Afro-American studies at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri: "Skip Gates has legitimized black studies in the mainstream." This year alone, two landmark scholarly works that Gates co-edited--the Norton Anthology of African American Literature and The Dictionary of Global Culture--have been published, along with Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, a collection of essays. At the same time, Gates has continued to attract new talent like UCLA sociologist Lawrence Bobo to the collection of intellectual superstars who have made the once nearly defunct "Afro studies" one of Harvard's most popular--and glamorous--departments. It now includes such luminaries as philosopher Cornel West, legal theorist A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. and urban sociologist William Julius Wilson. Other universities are scrambling to keep pace with Gates' recruiting, driving up salaries for highly sought-after scholars. Gates will next edit the Encyclopedia Africana, a project first envisioned by DuBois. "In the past, each generation of black intellectuals has had to reinvent the wheel because we didn't have a set of definitive reference books to build on," says Gates. The encyclopedia "will give us a base of knowledge about black people around the world so strong no one can ever say we have no culture, no civilization, no history."
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