Henry Louis Gates Jr. > Quotes

“Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.”
― Henry Louis Gates Jr

“The first step toward tolerance is respect and the first step toward respect is knowledge.”
― Henry Louis Gates

“no human culture is inaccessible to someone who makes the effort to understand, to learn, to inhabit another world.”
― Henry Louis Gates Jr.

“Learning to sing one's own songs, to trust the particular cadences of own's voices, is also the goal of any writer.”
― henry louis gates

“Conspiracy theories are an irresistible labor-saving device in the face of complexity.”
― Henry Louis Gates

“Even so,” I said levelly, “you wouldn’t shoot me.” “Wouldn’t I?” He raised an eyebrow. “You don’t have a silencer,” I pointed out, “and the sign says to be quiet in the library.” I knew I had him there.”
― Henry Louis Gates Jr., Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars

“Elizabeth [Alexander] is right, of course. It’s a stirring fact that our slave ancestors left behind not documents of property but an incredible amount of cultural wealth. It is a tragedy that we are only able to imagine their individual contributions to that collective wealth- and the worlds they might have made had they been free.”
― Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Faces of America: How 12 Extraordinary People Discovered their Pasts

“What possible rationale demanded this many debased representations of the recently freed Black people produced in the final third of the nineteenth century? How many ways can one call a woman or a man a "n*****" or a "c***"? How many watermelons does a person have to devour, how many chickens does an individual have to steal, to make the point that Black people are manifestly, by nature, both gluttons and thieves? Why in the world was it necessary to produce tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of these separate and distinct racist images to demean the status of the newly freed slaves in a set of fixed types and motifs, which reached their perverse apex with the characterizations of Black people during Reconstruction in The Birth of a Nation, in the figures of deracinated Black elected officials and, of course, the black male as rapist? The explanation comes in three words: justifying Jim Crow, or, in three different words, disenfranchising Black voters”
― Henry Louis Gates Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow

“...enslaved people "were conjuring out of nothing that manhood that has been stripped away from them for four hundred years, they used the spirituals as a catalyst.”
― Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song

“Reconstruction revealed a fact that had been true but not always acknowledged even before the Civil War: that it was entirely possible for many in the country, even some abolitionists, to detest slavery to the extent that they would be willing to die for its abolition, yet at the same time to detest the enslaved and the formerly enslaved with equal passion. As Frederick Douglass said, “Opposing slavery and hating its victims has become a very common form of abolitionism.”
― Henry Louis Gates Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow

“A firm believer in white supremacy and a racial order that would find peace and harmony in black people being on the bottom and white people paternalistically looking after their best interests, Grady was not deluded, as many Lost Cause apologists were, about the fact that slavery was central to the sectional conflict that resulted in the Civil War. In 1882 he said: “There have been elaborate efforts made by so-called statesmen to cover up the real cause of the war, but there is not a man of common sense in the south to-day who is not aware of the fact that there would have been no war if there had been no slavery.”
― Henry Louis Gates Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow

“Charting how white supremacy evolved during Reconstruction and Redemption is crucial to understanding in what forms it continues to manifest itself today.”
― Henry Louis Gates Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow

“Douglass argued for the fundamental humanity of African American people: “When men oppress their fellow-men, the oppressor ever finds, in the character of the oppressed, a full justification for his oppression.”
― Henry Louis Gates Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow

“For black America needs a politics whose first mission isn’t the reinforcement of the idea of black America; and a discourse of race that isn’t centrally concerned with preserving the idea of race and racial unanimity. We need something we don’t yet have: a way of speaking about black poverty that doesn’t falsify the reality of black advancement; a way of speaking about black advancement that doesn’t distort the enduring realities of black poverty.”
― Henry Louis Gates Jr, The Future of the Race

“the subliminal power of endless repetition.”
― Henry Louis Gates Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow

“The New Negro anthology by Locke in 1925, the Harlem Renaissance was officially launched for the white educated elite to see. Negro writers would liberate the race, at long last, from the demons of Redemption through art and culture, as Victoria Matthews had suggested some thirty years before. There was only one small problem with this: No people, in all of human history, has ever been liberated by the creation of art. None.”
― Henry Louis Gates Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow

“Virtually all of the former Confederate states threw out their Reconstruction-era constitutions—those that black people helped draft and which they voted to ratify—and wrote new ones that included disenfranchisement provisions, antimiscegenation provisions, and separate-but-equal Jim Crow provisions. Though “race neutral” in language, these new constitutions solidified Southern states as governed by legal segregation and discrimination.”
― Henry Louis Gates Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow

“Stories of Ayuba's Muslim religious practices - running away to find private spaces in which to say his daily prayers - led to his imprisonment. During his captivity, Ayuba wrote a letter in Arabic to his father in Africa, explaining the desperation of his situation and pleading for help. The letter made its way into the hands of James Oglethorpe, the founder of Georgia, which began as an antislavery colony.”
― Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song

“It was a heady goal, and these were heady times. Langston Hughes said that Negroes were creating art and literature as if their lives depended on it.”
― Henry Louis Gates Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow

“Black churches viewed education and litercay as paramount to the success of the African American community...."the vast majorities of HBCUs were founded to be seminaries and divinity schools...schools in church basements evolved into HBCUs: Morehouse College arose from the basement of Springfield Baptist Church in Augusta Georgia; Selman College, from the basement of Friendship Baptist Church in Atlanta; and Tuskegee Institute, out of a room near the local AME Zion church.”
― Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song

“The most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history is the transportation of ten million human beings out of the dark beauty of their mother continent into the new-found Eldorado of the West. They descended into Hell; and in the third century they arose from the dead, in the finest effort to achieve democracy for the working millions which this world had ever seen. It was a tragedy that beggared the Greek; it was an upheaval of humanity like the Reformation and the French Revolution. Yet we are blind and led by the blind. We discern in it no part of our labor movement; no part of our industrial triumph; no part of our religious experience. Before the dumb eyes of ten generations of ten million children, it is made mockery of and spit upon; a degradation of the eternal mother; a sneer at human effort; with aspiration and art deliberately and elaborately distorted. And why? Because in a day when the human mind aspired to a science of human action, a history and psychology of the mighty effort of the mightiest century, we fell under the leadership of those who would compromise with truth in the past in order to make peace in the present and guide policy in the future. —W. E. B. DU BOIS, Black Reconstruction in America, 1935”
― Henry Louis Gates Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow

“The eruption of the expression of white supremacist ideology in what increasingly appears to be a determined attempt to roll back the very phenomenon of a black presidency is just one reason that the rise and fall of Reconstruction - and the surge of white supremacy in the former Confederate states fallowing the end of the Civil War - are especially relevant subjects for Americans to reflect upon at this moment in the history of our democracy. In fact, I'd venture that few American historical periods are more relevant to understanding our contemporary racial politics than Reconstruction.”
― Henry Louis Gates Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow

“In the end, it would turn out, just as Bishop Turner seemed to have forecast, that Black America did not need a New Negro; it needed the legal and political means to curtail the institutionalization of antiblack racism perpetuated against the Old Negro at every level in post-Reconstruction American society through an ideology gone rogue, the ideology of white supremacy. One can say that to thrive, the Old and New Negroes needed a New White Man.”
― Henry Louis Gates Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow

“[S]lavery didn’t end in 1865; it just evolved.”
― Henry Louis Gates Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow

“I learned about Reconstruction and its odious alter ego in back-to-back assigned readings in our class.”
― Henry Louis Gates Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow

“Redemption, as the civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson points out, essentially imposed a system of neo-enslavement on the South’s agricultural workers, who were the recently freed African Americans and their children”
― Henry Louis Gates Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow

“Iactually think the great evil of American slavery wasn’t involuntary servitude and forced labor. The true evil of American slavery was the narrative we created to justify it. They made up this ideology of white supremacy that cannot be reconciled with our Constitution, that cannot be reconciled with a commitment to fair and just treatment of all people. They made it up so they could feel comfortable while enslaving other people. . . . [S]lavery didn’t end in 1865; it just evolved. . . . The North won the Civil War, but the South won the narrative war. —BRYAN STEVENSON, Vox magazine interview, May 2017”
― Henry Louis Gates Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow

“found myself wishing, too, that Maggie could have seen my mother when she was young and Mama and I would go to a funeral and she’d stand up to read the dead person’s eulogy. She made the ignorant and ugly sound like scholars and movie stars, turned the mean and evil into saints and angels. She knew what people had meant to be in their hearts, not what the world had forced them to become. She knew the ways in which working too hard for paltry wages could turn you mean and cold, could kill that thing that had made you laugh. She remembered the way you had hoped to”
― Henry Louis Gates Jr., Colored People

“her theology, which Broughton summarized in the 1904 book Women's Work, as Gleaned from the Women of the Bible, offered "biblical precedents for gender equality”
― Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song

“..we find some of the deepest traces of Islam and other traditional African religions in places like Sapelo Island, home of the Gullah Geechee people. Islam's strong roots persisted here in ways that creolized Black Christianity.”
― Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song