♪ ♪ (theme music plays) RUBENSTEIN: Hello, I'm David Rubenstein, I'm here in conversation today with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Better known as Skip Gates, to his friends and to so many of his admirers.
Uh, Skip Gates, is a scholar trustee of the New York Historical Society, which produces this series, however he is here today at my invitation, not because of his role with New-York Historical Society.
Uh, Skip Gates is a person who is an extraordinary, intellectual university professor at Harvard, the head of the Hutchins Center on African and African American Research.
Also, he's a person who is a Emmy Award winning broadcaster, literary critic, writer of enormous number of leading books in the African American History area, and also a person who has received more than 50 honorary degrees from the nation's leading universities.
So Skip, thank you very much for coming today.
GATES: Thank you very much for having me on your show.
RUBENSTEIN: So, let's talk about one book that you've written "Stony the Road", let's talk about Reconstruction.
GATES: Okay.
RUBENSTEIN: Uh, it's generally the view that had Abraham Lincoln lived, Reconstruction would have worked better for at least the point of view of people in the north, maybe not the South.
What is your view?
If, if had Lincoln lived?
Would it made a difference in Reconstruction becoming more successful than it was?
GATES: Well, one of the things that people forget, is that um, one of, one of the uh, crucial elements in the rollback to Reconstruction was a conservative Supreme Court.
And many of those justices had been appointed by Abraham Lincoln.
And that is almost never talked about.
And there were a series of Supreme Court cases that severely restricted the applicability of the 14th amendment, the um, equal protection clause, to the rights of, of black Americans and I'm thinking of Cruickshank of, in 1876.
And they quite disastrously brought a group together as civil rights cases of 1883, which declared unconstitutional, the Civil Rights Act of 1875.
That was the last thing that Charles, the great Charles Sumner, one of my genuine heroes, wanted to see passed by the Congress before he died in 1874.
It was passed in 1875, and it guaranteed um, equal rights, equal accommodations, et cetera, et cetera.
And it would take 100 years almost for us to get those rights back again, that had been guaranteed by, in 1875.
So, it was the conservative court, that among other things, that helped to undermine the impact of the 14th amendment and then the 15th amendment... And we know that the court in Plessy v. Ferguson, made or at least, um, sanctified, separate but equal as the law of the land in, in 1896.
And Reconstruction was ended because the Supreme Court, because of the Hayes Tilden compromise in 1877, because of a series of court cases, by a conservative um, Supreme Court, and by the, the first Great Depression, which was now called the Great Panic of 1873.
But it was, until the Great Depression as we know it, it was called the Great Depression.
And then after 1890, when each of the Confederate States held new state constitutional conventions, rewrote their constitutions without ever using the word Negro or black uh, rewrote their constitutions in a way that would undercut the 15th Amendment, which gave black men the right to vote.
And if you wanna know how effective that was, in Louisiana, which was a majority black state, there were 130,000 black men registered vote in 1898.
By 1904, that number had been reduced in Louisiana, precisely to 1,342.
South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana were majority black states, Georgia, Alabama, and Florida were in the 40%, the high 40s.
So, there were six states that together constituted a mini black republic.
And in black men in the former Confederacy, got the right to vote, three years before black men nationally did through the 15th Amendment, which was ratified in the 1870s.
And they did because of the Reconstruction amendments, which they ratified in March in 1867, which gave black men in the Confederacy, the former Confederacy, the right to vote.
So, the summer of 1867, this is a great story.
There was, it's the first Freedom Summer, there was a massive attempt through black churches and by the former abolitionist to register all of these formerly enslaved black men plus the free black men in the south.
Um, to register them 80% of the eligible black male voters registered to vote, and in 1868, 500,000 of them cast their ballots for Ulysses S. Grant.
Grant won the presidency overwhelmingly in the Electoral College, but only by 300,000 odd votes in, in the um, the popular vote.
So, in effect, black man had elected a president.
And David, this scared the daylights out of obviously the, the representatives of the former Confederacy, but also of white, so called liberal people in the north.
This was too much black power.
And that's why, eventually, the black males in the south were disenfranchised.
And you could say, actually, that Biden, Joe Biden's defeat of Donald Trump was the, the third Reconstruction defeating the third Redemption.
(laughs).
Donald Trump was redeeming the, the country from the reconstruction politics of Barrack Obama and Joe Biden through the black vote, the black vote and the black church were crucial to Biden's victory as you know, 'cause when Biden came out of New Hampshire, nobody thought that he would be sitting in the White House until Jim Cliburn pushed the button and mobilized the black vote in South Carolina.
And then that created a domino effect really, and Biden emerged as the, as the victor.
And this shows the, the inherent power of the black church still to this day.
RUBENSTEIN: Well, let me go back for one second, the general view is that Lincoln would have had a better Reconstruction for blacks.
Andrew Johnson was very anti-black.
Had Andrew Johnson been more sympathetic to the black position would it have made a difference or because of the court, it wouldn't have made a difference?
GATES: Well, Andrew Johnson was a nightmare.
I mean, he took away, um, 40 acres and a mule, which General Sherman had issued "Special Field Order Number 15", in January of 1865, which redistributed um, land from the Georgia sea islands down to Florida, to the formerly enslaved people who live there.
And they, starting in the spring, this is detailed in Willie Lee Rose book, "Rehearsal for Reconstruction", among other places, which we all had to read when I was an undergraduate.
These formerly enslaved people were given the redistributed land from their former masters.
And they lived on it and worked it for months.
And Andrew Johnson sent General O.O Howard, Otis Howard, for whom Howard University is named, who's a white man, down to tell these poor people face to face that they had to give that land back in the fall of 1865.
So, there was no hope.
Andrew Johnson was and he was impeached, he was a racist.
He wanted to rollback, he um, wanted to rollback Reconstruction as quickly as he could.
And that's why they had to impeach him so that there could be radical Reconstruction by the Republican congress.
RUBENSTEIN: So, ultimately, when Johnson stays in office, he's not reelected, of course.
But beginning in the, what, 1870s, uh, people who were powerful whites in the south said, we can regain our power by disenfranchising blacks.
And that went on for a long time.
But when did the idea of Jim Crow laws come along, where you can just take away a lot of other rights as well, and what was where the name Jim Crow come from?
GATES: Well, um, one more point about Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln was actually assassinated because he advocated the right to vote for black men, as, as you well know.
He gave a speech on the grounds of the White House, stood listening a man named John Wilkes Booth.
And when Lincoln said he was for limited franchise for black men, he said for his black warriors, you know, his black soldiers, and he really thought that the main reason for the Union victory was the fact that the Emancipation Proclamation included the provision that black men could carry arms and fight.
Um, that was quite radical and the fact that black men, he authorized black men to kill white men, if they were in the Union army.
That was unheard of.
But in that speech, he said, men who had served the cause of the Union in the Civil War.
Plus, he said the very intelligent Negro's.
So he was not for giving all black men the right to vote.
And he wanted to start with that limited group of people.
I don't know.
I, I'm sure that, you know, Lincoln was a very cautious politician, and he knew it was a radical idea.
And without the radical Republican Congress, it never would have been ratified.
Here's something people don't realize, formally enslaved black men got the right to vote before people, black men who had been whose families have been free for a century in the north.
In the north until ratification on the 15th amendment, black men could only vote in five of the six New England states, not in Connecticut, and in the state of New York if you satisfied a $250 property requirement.
So ironically, formerly enslaved black men in the south, because of Reconstruction acts got the right to vote three years before black men in the north.
And to answer your question, Jim Crow became formalized after the Mississippi plan um, caught fire starting in 1890, which was the State Constitutional Convention Movement which disenfranchised black people.
RUBENSTEIN: Who was Jim Crow?
What was that name from?
GATES: Jim Crow was a white man, a minstrel, uh, who was very popular in the, um, that was his stage name in the 1830s.
And there was a dance that he confected, called jumping Jim Crow.
So, and minstrelsy was one of the most popular forms of entertainment in America, even through the Civil War, if not the most popular form of entertainment, black face minstrelsy.
So, he was a minstrel character and that name for reasons that no one knows, affixed itself on to what the Supreme Court called separate but equal.
RUBENSTEIN: Now the whites, they were trying to regain their power in the south, they passed Jim Crow laws.
And a lot of blacks began to leave and go to the north, and so forth.
And they discovered in the north, that life wasn't all that much better than they thought it was gonna be?
GATES: 90% of the black community, and we tend to forget this, until 1910, 90% of the black community lived in the south.
And that changed with a great migration.
And the Great Migration continued until 1970, when reverse migration took effect.
In fact, one of the uh, series I hope to do on PBS, I wanna do one on, on the Great Migration, but it would be called the Great Migrations, because there was the first movement from the black people from the south, to the north, starting at the turn of the century, really starting in 1910.
But then, in 1970, there was a reverse migration.
And more and more black people moved from the north to the south than the other way around.
And Charles Blow, the distinguished New York Times columnist, has a new book out which calls for black people reclaiming their entitlements to the south, moving back to the south.
RUBENSTEIN: You point out in your book "Stony the Road", that the I would say Negro Intelligentsia, the upper class of the black population, began to say, "Well, you know what, they're making fun of us.
They're calling us minstrels, or we're not very smart.
We actually are better than the average Negro.
We are the new Negro."
Can you explain what that meant?
GATES: Right.
That was um, the black elite.
And remember, there had been a um, prominent free black communities in um, um, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston as well, interestingly enough as New Orleans and Charleston.
Charleston had a huge free black community.
In 1860, there were more free black people living in the slave states, than in the north.
There were 262,000 living in the slave states and 222,000 living in the north, which is always surprises my students, and the reason is, you can take my family as an example.
John and Sarah Bruce, two of my fourth great grandparents were freed in 1823 in Harney County Virginia, they were given 1,000 acres of land, what are they gonna do give up that land?
And what become homeless in Boston?
That would have been stupid.
So, the old black elite in the north, when the Great Migration began, "Classed off", as Zora Neale Hurston put it, classed themselves off from these former sharecroppers, you know, these were agrarian, rural people moving up from the south, and as opposed to the black people who have had a long history of free ancestry, were very well educated, very well spoken.
And they invented, starting in the 1890s, a metaphor, a trope, of an image of themselves as a new Negros.
We are the new Negros, not the old Negros.
The old Negroes were the sharecroppers.
The, the recent descendant of slaves.
We are the descendants of free people.
And we have more in common with the white elite than we do with the black poor, or the black working class.
RUBENSTEIN: The new Negros as they move forward, they became reasonably prosperous middle class and so forth.
But when the civil rights movement came along in the 1960s, the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement said, I, from your book, that you are Uncle Tom's in effect, because you're not really trying to help your fellow African Americans.
Is that essentially right?
GATES: Here's what happened.
The, the idea that one class of black people, an old aristocracy, would be treated differently um, under the law, that they could create a class within the race, that would be given equal access to the right to vote and economic opportunities, as opposed to recent migrants or people in the working class, that was dispelled by Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896.
If you have a law that says all black shall or all black shan't, it doesn't matter if you've been freed for 200 years, or if you've been freed for 50 years.
It doesn't matter if your grandparents, or your fourth great grandfather fought in the American Revolution as mine did.
Or if they um, were living in um, Africa and came here, before the slave trade ended just before it ended in 1808.
All black people, whether you had a PhD, or could barely read and write were equal or unequal before the law.
So, this created one big class of people, but we always have had classes within the race, like every other group.
Before the law, before large, the larger white society, we were all of one class.
So, this contradiction always exists.
It's a paradox, but it always existed.
Behind the color curtain, black people had upper class people, uh, middle class people, working class people and lower class people.
Du Bois, in fact, in his very important seminal study um, "The Philadelphia Negro", published in 1899, identified five classes within the African American people.
As you also know, sometimes it was confused with color.
If you were mulatto, if you were light complexion, if you had straight hair, that puts you in a higher class.
And if you were, you had more, quote unquote African features.
It was a nightmare, really.
Yeah, it was, but that began to change.
No one thought the Civil Rights Movement would begin in the south.
Now there was always a history of protest in the north starting with the abolitionist movement.
And they were great leaders of the race like Adam Clayton Powell Jr, who was the pastor at Abyssinian Baptist Church, had 12,000 members.
He was educated at Colgate.
He was the leader really of the Civil Rights Movement until Martin Luther King came along and he also was a United States Congressman.
But when Martin Luther King, who only, who was third generation pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church, third generation, he only left the south to go to Boston University to get a PhD and then hurried back to, to the south.
He starts the scene and Rosa Parks starts the Civil Rights Movement, emerges from the heart of the Confederacy.
Montgomery, with a Montgomery Bus Boycott, that shocked everybody.
And so the um, upper class black people from the north all have to go south, to help their brothers and sisters in the south fight, that's in the belly of the beast man.
'Cause as you know, those guys weren't joking.
They were really, they were stone, cold racists.
And they would, George Wallace stood at that door and said he would never, never embrace the desegregation of the University of Alabama.
Orval Faubus said the same thing with Central High School and you know the story as well as I do.
RUBENSTEIN: In the time we have remaining I'd like to go into uh, one, from one moment how you came into genealogy.
A number of years ago, you began looking at the ancestry of African Americans.
How did that lead to a TV series an Emmy Award winning TV series?
And what did you learn from that?
GATES: Well, I was always interested in my own family tree.
Um, one because of this mystery of "Who fathered Jayne Gates' children?"
My Y-DNA is the (inaudible) haplotype, which about 8% of the men in Dublin also have.
And we knew uh, that Jane Gates, my great, great grandmother, had, had a relationship with a white man who fathered her children, five children, and one of whom became a doctor, actually.
And so, but we didn't know who he was.
She took this the secret of his identity to her grave.
She only told her children that they were fathered by the same man.
It was something that the Gates' talked about all the time, and they were sure that it was one of the um, members of the Brady family, which was one of the prominent white families in Cumberland, Maryland.
So my father's father was Edward St. Lawrence Gates and he died in July of 1960.
And when we buried him, we came back to the Gates' family home.
And Jane Gates had purchased a home and essentially a white neighborhood in 1870.
And she paid cash for this house.
Um, and remember, she had five children, they all looked white, so you don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out where that $1200 came from, right?
And my father took my brother in me upstairs in the Gates' family home and showed us the scrapbooks that his father had kept.
We had no idea that he had kept them and he was looking through all these scrapbooks, David and he came upon five or six volumes.
They were old bank ledgers 'cause my grandfather was a janitor in the First National Bank in Cumberland, Maryland, and he was stealing these bank Ledger's and using them as scrapbooks.
My father was on the floor, surrounded by these scrapbooks.
We looked over his shoulder.
It was an obituary.
It was dated January 6, 1888 and it said, "Died this day in Cumberland, Maryland, Jane Gates, an estimable, colored woman."
And then he pulled out a picture of this woman, Jane Gates and she was a midwife, and she was in her midwifery um, uniform.
And he said, "this is the oldest Gates that we've ever been able to trace.
I never want you to forget her face and her name."
And on the way home, I asked my father if we could stop at Red Bull's News Stand was like a convenience store today.
And he bought me a composition book.
And that night in front of our little 12 inch black and white TV, I interviewed my parents about what only later I would call, I would learn is called our genealogy or a family tree.
Because I'm wanted to know how in was connected to this odd looking black woman who died 1888.
And I wanted to know how my grandfather could look like a white man and my father could have passed for white as well.
And I didn't have the words for all of this as I do today.
But the thought was there.
The feeling was there.
And so I did my family tree that night on and I went back to my great- great-grandmother on my father's side and my great-great grandparents on my mother's side, but it was only two vectors of the tree.
Well, then cut to 1977 when "Roots" aired like everybody in the whole world I watched "Roots".
Then in the year 2000, a black geneticist at Howard wrote to me and said he was looking for volunteers because their geneticists had developed a procedure through which one could actually trace on your mother's mother's-mother's line using mitochondrial DNA, your ancestry back to Africa.
And he had no idea that I'd had this passionate interest in genealogy since I was nine years old.
So, I called him and asked him, I told him, I would pay for him to fly up to Boston to leave his lab at Howard, come the next day, and take my blood.
And they, they analyzed my DNA.
And shortly thereafter, I got up in the middle of the night and I just got this idea, it was gift from God, that I can combine these twin passion, these twin passions I had of tracing a family trees using the paper records, archival records, with this new science of ancestry tracing through DNA, and I can do a TV show.
And I'd already begun to make documentaries which is like, go figure.
And I've made I don't know half a dozen maybe on PBS, And I knew it was a good idea.
I stood there literally with tears streaming down my face.
And it was like a bolt of lightning.
I swear to God that it just came from out of nowhere.
I hadn't thought about it before I just got up in the middle of night, I got the idea.
RUBENSTEIN: Skip, I want to thank you very much for a very interesting conversation.
GATES: Well, thank you.
And I love David, Among the many things that I admire about you and nothing is more admirable than your love of history, your love of scholarship.
And I, I, thank you very much for having me on your show.
RUBENSTEIN: My pleasure.
Thanks very much Skip.
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