| |
May/June 2001
HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR., and REV. EUGENE RIVERS
Every month, the Harvard Graduate School of Education invites educators,
researchers, community activists, and policymakers from across the country to
talk about key issues in schools and school reform. We are pleased to be able
to provide you with an edited transcript of some of these forums. Below is an
edited transcript of a talk given at the Harvard Graduate School of Education,
April 9, 2001.
For easier reading, we have divided the transcript into the following
sections:
Welcome by Dorothea Engler, director of public
affairs, Harvard Graduate School Of Education
Remarks
by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Remarks by Rev. Eugene
Rivers
You can also scroll right through the transcript without clicking on the
above links.
HGSE
Forums Home Page
Transcripts of Past HGSE
Forums
WELCOME BY DOROTHEA ENGLER
"Skip" Gates and Eugene Rivers are extraordinary people, intellectual
and spiritual leaders with passion for their work and no small amount of
political savvy. They are thinkers and doers; they are change agents. Initially
we had asked Professor Gates to speak about his latest book, co-authored with
Cornel West, called The African American Century: How Black Americans Have
Shaped Our Country. However, after some discussion, Professor Gates said
that what he really wanted to talk about was the digital divide. Since we're
happy to have Skip here to talk about anything, the topic has taken a turn.
Reading The African American Century, I was humbled by the number
of people I did not know about. It brought to mind an exchange between Wynton
Marsalis and an audience member earlier this fall when Wynton spoke here. When
a young black man angrily asked him why jazz had not had the breakthrough to
the white community here in the United States as it had in Europe. Wynton's
response was, "What a great loss for the white community." For all of us who
grew up with a skewed vision of history, this book is a must read. It's one of
the many steps Skip has taken to challenge and transform our worldview, to
correct the lapses and losses in our education.
As you know Henry Louis Gates is the W.E.B Du Bois Professor of the
Humanities at Harvard University. He is chair of African American Studies and
director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African American Research. He has
been called—and he'll laugh at this, but I'll say it anyway—the most
influential African American in the country. Among his recent projects are the
wonderful Africana: The Encyclopedia of African and African American
Experience (Basic Civitas Books, 1999) and his PBS special, Wonders of
the African World.
Tonight he's brought along with him a very rambunctious friend
[laughter], Rev. Eugene Rivers, who is the cofounder of the internationally
recognized Boston Ten Point Coalition, a movement begun in Boston to eliminate
gang homicides. Rev. Rivers can be found in the thick of most controversial
conversations these days, whether it's about AIDS education or President Bush's
proposal for federal aid for faith-based social service organizations. He's
also very involved with working on the education of poor urban and rural
students.
We're delighted to welcome Henry Louis Gates and Rev. Eugene Rivers to
talk about the digital divide.
REMARKS BY HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR
Thank you very much. It's great to be here. . . . Gene and I are very
good friends. We've done a project together here in Boston that's been very
successful, and we want to tell you about. The project is designed to affect
directly the "digital divide," to bring access to technological skills, to
technological training to inner-city youth, as well as knowledge of African and
African American studies.
Users' eyeballs, as they say in "dot-com" land, follow content. How many
black people would have adopted the new technology of [phonograph] records in
the 1920s if all they had to buy was records by [Enrico] Caruso and Kate Smith?
So Columbia Records started "race records"—Black Swan Records, and
others—and they started releasing music by Duke Ellington's jungle band
and Bessie Smith. Black people, who could hardly pay their rent in Harlem,
would stand for miles around the block waiting for the latest Duke Ellington or
Bessie Smith record. It's the same principle, and that's why we did Encarta
Africana on CD-ROM [Editor's note: This is the companion work to
Africana, the encyclopedia].
First, I want to tell you a little bit about the encyclopedia's history.
In 1909, W.E.B. Du Bois, the greatest black intellectual of all time, woke up
one day, seemingly out of the blue, and announced that he had a vision that the
most efficacious way to fight white racism would be the editing of a
comprehensive encyclopedia about the entire black world, the equivalent of a
black Encyclopedia Britannica.
Du Bois was a genius so he didn't need an antecedent for this idea. But
about a year ago, I read a review in the Times Literary Supplement of
the CD-ROM version of the Encyclopedia Judaica, and it said the
Judaica was published in 1907. So you don't need to be Sherlock Holmes
to figure out where Du Bois got the idea two years later.
Now Du Bois was a star by this time. He had probably sold The [Souls
of] Black Folk in 1903. In 1900, he had written what had turned out to be
one of the most prophetic and famous sentences in the entire 20th
century—that the problem of the 20th century would be the problem of the
color line. In 1905, he had cofounded the Niagara Movement, which metamorphosed
into [the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or] the
NAACP. And of course, between 1890 and 1895, he had taken three degrees from
Harvard, becoming the first person of African decent to get a Ph.D. from this
great university. I don't know if it was so great then, but it's great now
[laughter]. It certainly was racist then.
So Du Bois was star, but he had no money. He had just enough money to
print about 100 pieces of stationery announcing this new project, the
Encyclopedia Africana. He wrote to perhaps sixty great scholars
throughout the world: Sir Harry Johnston in England, Franz Boas, with whom he
had studied in Berlin, George Santana, the great philosopher with whom he had
read the Critique of Pure Reason in an upper room in Harvard Yard,
Albert Bushnell Hart, the historian who directed his Ph.D. thesis on the
suppression of the African slave trade, William James, father of American
psychology, and President Charles Eliot himself of Harvard.
Everybody wrote back and said they would join Du Bois's board of
editors, except President Eliot, who said he was too busy trying to transform
his provincial liberal arts college—a gentlemen's finishing
school—into a grand, cosmopolitan, international, elite institution of
higher learning. But he wanted to give young Du Bois a bit of advice. "Don't
ignore the presence of Islamic culture in subsaharan Africa," Eliot said, which
in 1909 was pretty amazing advice. I didn't think President Eliot knew that
much, either about Africa or about Islam, to tell you the truth, and my respect
for him went up considerably. Secondly he said, "Don't embark on this project
unless you have the money." That, as you'll see, quickly turns out to have been
prophetic advice.
Du Bois went on to cofound the NAACP in 1910. He was the only black
member of the board of the NAACP initially. We think of it now as an all-black
organization, but it wasn't then. It was a liberal, left-of-center
organization. He was busy trying to get a federal anti-lynching law passed,
which he never succeeded in doing. He also edited The Crisis magazine,
which was then and remains the official organ of the NAACP, from 1910 to 1934,
and he was a brilliant editor.
Cut to 1931. Anson Phelps Stokes, a liberal white American, announced
that he had had a vision that the most efficacious way to fight white racism
would be the editing of a comprehensive encyclopedia about the whole black
world. He invited twenty black scholars to join him on the campus of Harvard
University on November 7, 1931. He invited all the great black scholars, except
for two: W.E.B. Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson. Woodson was the second African
American to get a Ph.D. in history from Harvard. He was the founder of Negro
History Week, which became Negro History Month, which became Black History
Month, which became Afro-American History Month, which became African American
History Month, and which, in twenty years I predict, will be Neo-Nubian History
Month [laughter]. But I'm not changing my name any more. This is one Negro
who's going to his grave as an African American [laughter].
Du Bois heard of this meeting and went crazy. He wrote to Anson Phelps
Stokes, who was mortified. Nobody wanted to take on the great Du Bois. So
Stokes quickly convened a second meeting of the board of editors on January 9,
1932, at Howard University. Du Bois, with the greatest reluctance, allowed
himself to be persuaded to attend. Carter G. Woodson said he didn't accept
gifts from Greeks and would not go.
At the meeting, Du Bois was unanimously elected the editor in chief of
the encyclopedia of the Negro, in which capacity he served between 1932 and
1946. After 1934, he had a lot more time to do so because he was fired from the
NAACP after writing an editorial that said that since the goal post of the
civil rights movement appeared to be receding, perhaps it would behoove the
Negro to develop separate political, social, educational, economic, and
cultural organizations until the goals of the civil rights movement were
realized. This ran counter to the etiology of the NAACP then, and it runs
counter to the NAACP today.
It was the Great Depression. Du Bois needed $250,000 to do a two million
word encyclopedia. This encyclopedia would be about the Negro in Africa, the
Caribbean, the United States, plus individuals of African descent who were
eminent in Europe and Asia—people like Alexander Pushkin, who had near
African ancestors. He couldn't get any money to do it, except for the initial
money that Anson Phelps Stokes had put up. Finally, in 1937, he went to Anson
Phelps Stokes and said, "What are we going to do? Nobody will give money during
the Depression for this encyclopedia that people think it's frivolous." Or else
they were terrified of Du Bois because he was so radical. Stokes offered half
the money—$125,000—on a matching basis.
Stokes also went to Frederick Keppel, head of the Carnegie Corporation,
and asked him to match the $125,000. Keppel said, "I'll do it, but don't tell
Du Bois, because I have to get my board to approve it." As soon as Keppel left
his office, Stokes picked up the phone and called Du Bois and said, "Dr. Du
Bois, don't tell anybody, but on May 17, 1937, at 3 o'clock, the board of the
Carnegie Corporation is going to convene and at 4 o'clock they're going to call
you and they're going to tell you they've matched my $125,000 donation, but
you've got to be surprised."
Du Bois promised to be surprised. And as soon as he hung up, he called
[historian] Rayford Logan. Like W.E.B. Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson, Rayford
Logan was a black man who got a Ph.D. in history from Harvard, but unlike Du
Bois and Woodson, Logan at one time was engaged to my great aunt. I got to know
him very well in his last decade of life, and he told me this story that had
never been in print, until very recently.
He said that Du Bois told him to be at his office 3 o'clock on May 17,
1937. He walked into the office and there on Du Bois's desk, over in the
corner, next to one of those old-time black telephones, was a bottle of vintage
champagne chilling in an ice bucket and two champagne flutes. Rayford didn't
know what was going on and Du Bois said, "Sit down Logan, sit down. At 4
o'clock that phone's going to ring and it's going to be the Carnegie
Corporation. It's going to be Frederick Keppel and he's going to tell us that
he's matched Anson Phelps Stokes's generous grant and we'll be able to do the
encyclopedia." So for the next hour they slapped five or whatever Du Bois did
when he was happy, and finally they waited until 4 o'clock comes and goes. At
five minutes to five, Du Bois, realizing that the phones are never going to
ring, looks at Logan, looks at the ice bucket, grabs the bottle by the neck,
yanks it out of the ice bucket and slams it against the bookshelf and back at
his desk.
The phone never rang because he'd been lobbied against by Carter G.
Woodson. On September 26, 1936, Woodson claimed on the front page of the
Baltimore Afro American that Du Bois stole the idea from him. You see in
those days, ladies and gentlemen, there was tension among African American
intellectuals. I know we find it hard to believe today. You know, mirror,
mirror on the wall, who's the greatest Negro of all [laughter]. People were
terrified of Du Bois because he was so radical.
To make a long, fascinating story short, in 1961, Du Bois ended up
moving to Ghana at the request of [Ghanaian president] Kwame Nkrumah to edit
the Encyclopedia Africana. He was ninety-three years old. He joined the
Communist party, renounced his American citizenship, and repatriated to Ghana.
On December 15, 1962, he convenes the first and only meeting of the board of
editors of this Encyclopedia Africana, and this project, unlike the
first two, would be, and I quote what Du Bois told his audience that day, "by
Africans, for Africans and about Africans."
He was very angry at the American Negro leadership because it didn't
support him during the McCarthy era when he'd been arrested, imprisoned, and
tried as a Communist. He wasn't a Communist, though he was on the Left, but the
official civil rights establishment didn't support him. He was so angry with
them that he completely cut them out of the Encyclopedia. "This is only
going to be about Africans and no longer a truly pan-African encyclopedia." He
recapitulated the history of the idea as I've done for you today and then he
said, "Perhaps it was only fitting that the idea couldn't come to fruition
before now, 1962." It had to wait for the independence of the African
continent. Remember in 1960 alone, nineteen African nations became independent.
Cut to the summer of 1963. The night before the March on Washington, Du
Bois writes out a message which is sent by cable to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The next day, after King's great "I Have a Dream" speech, [NAACP president] Roy
Wilkins reads the content of the cable and announces that Du Bois had died in
his sleep.
I heard about this idea [for the Africana] in 1969 when I went
off to Yale and decided that I'd really like to do it. Four years later, at the
University of Cambridge, I met Wole Solinka, who was my professor, and [Kwame]
Anthony Appiah, who is a distinguished professor of philosophy in African and
African American studies here. One night, the three of us made a drunken pledge
that we were going to try [to do the encylopedia]. In the late 1970s, the
Encyclopedia Britannica company told us they would do it if we raised $20
million. How much could we raise? I was twenty-nine years old; I had just taken
my Ph.D. from Cambridge. I raised $50,000, which is not bad for a 29-year-old;
just enough money to print my own stationary [laughter] and convene a meeting
of the board of editors.
So cut to 1995. Quincy Jones said he would put up development money if
we could get matching money from a publisher. Random House's CEO asked, "You
can do it as a CD-ROM, can't you?" I said, "Absolutely, but why do you want us
to do it as a CD-ROM?" He said, "Well, this is confidential, but in a few
months Encyclopedia Britannica's going to have a press conference and declare
they're bankrupt."
In 1990, the Encyclopedia Britannica, which was founded in 1768, enjoyed
its biggest profit in history. In 1991, a computer geek from Redmond,
Washington—who had tried to license Britannica and the World
Book and gotten turned down—bought Funk and Wagnall's Encyclopedia,
hired a team to put bells and whistles on it, and reduced it to a CD-ROM. Four
years later, Britannica was bankrupt.
So I left there that day with $125,000 to develop a prototype of a
CD-ROM. In fact, I went across the street to a phone booth, called Anthony back
here at Harvard Square at the old AfroAm and I said, "Kwame, Kwame, you'll
never believe it, we have development money to do a prototype of a CD-ROM."
He said, "Oh."
And I said, "There's only one problem."
He said, "What?"
I said, "What's a CD-ROM and can we do one?"
He said, "Yes."
We did a CD-ROM prototype and six months later I made this dazzling
45-minute presentation to Random House's executives and got a standing ovation.
Then Alberto Vitale, the CEO from Random House, stood up and said, "That's the
good news."
I said, "The good news: what's the bad news?"
He said, "The bad news is that in the last six months the bottom is
falling out of the market for academic CD-ROM products. If you can do it as a
game . . ."
I'm an optimistic person, but I sat there and had to blink. First of
all, I saw my $2 million flying out the window—which is what we needed to
do a two-million-word encyclopedia. I just was so discouraged, I couldn't
believe it. We had done everything right. We had earned it. I told Anthony it
was over. I wasn't going to work on this any more.
The next day I sent twenty-five letters out to all the major publishers
in the United States and asked them if they'd do this project. In the next few
years, I met with those publishers and demonstrated the prototype. Nobody
wanted to cough up the $2 million we needed that to develop the encyclopedia.
Finally, a friend suggested I pitch it to Frank Pearl, who was about to start
Perseus Books. I went to Frank's suite at the Carlisle Hotel, and for the 26th
time I gave the same demonstration of that CD-ROM.
After forty-five minutes, Frank said, "How much do you need to do this
project?"
I answered, "$2 million."
He stuck out his hand and he said again, "You've got a deal."
I said, "Don't mess with me, Frank." I couldn't believe it and he said,
"You've got a deal."
In the meantime, I had written to Bill Gates. They flew us out to
Redmond, Washington, Anthony and I went out there, we pitched it, they said
they loved the idea, but they wanted to do a marketing study. And I said, "Well, what's that?" They said they wanted to count the number of black people
with computers because that was our principal market, so I said, "Okay." So
then I got back, I called all my friends who had computers and said, "Here's
Bill Gates' e-mail, write to him and say, I am black, I have computer" [laughter]. I am not joking.
So the day after meeting [Pearl] at the Carlisle, Microsoft called and
said, "You've got a deal. You've got a million dollar advance from the
publisher and a million dollars from Microsoft." There was only one caveat.
They said we had to do the whole thing in eighteen months. So we hired a staff
that eventually grew to forty people. I set up an office on Francis Avenue, and
the staff wrote about 45 percent of the encyclopedia.
And twenty years after Wole Solinka, who would go on to become the first
person of African descent to win the Nobel Prize for literature, and Anthony
[Appiah], an African prince and the nephew of the late Asantehene, the king of
the Asante, and me, a poor, working-class colored boy from Piedmont, West
Virginia—twenty-five years after we made a drunken pledge at the
University of Cambridge that we would try to fulfill Dr. Du Bois' great dream,
we shipped 2.25 million words to Microsoft. On January 19, 1999, Martin Luther
King's birthday, the official holiday, ninety years almost to the day after the
great W.E.B. Du Bois had a dream, had a vision that the most efficacious way to
fight white racism would be the editing of a comprehensive encyclopedia about
the whole black world, we published Encarta Africana.
Thank you very much [applause]. Now I want to take a little time to show
it to you . . . [music starts] This is the third edition. We've published three
editions in two years. It's divided up into articles, welcome, features,
library; this edition has ten million words—three million words of
encyclopedia articles and seven million words in another feature that I'm
really proud of, but first I'm going to show you a few of the articles. . . .
We digitized [the Library of Black America] for this edition—160 books
written by black people between 1773 and 1919, which was the end of public
domain. We didn't have to ask anybody for the rights to these books. They are
free and fully searchable.
Last December an undergraduate came to me and asked me if anybody black
wrote about Charles Darwin in the 19th century. How would I know? Then I
realized, "Well I do know." I typed in "Darwin," the computer searched all
seven million words, and found five references to Charles Darwin. We find in
the entry on Anna Julia Cooper, who wrote A Voice From the South in
1890, where she wrote Charles Darwin's name, with "Charles Darwin" highlighted
in yellow. Isn't that great? Do you know how long it would take to do all that
research? It's amazing; we'll revolutionize scholarship in African and African
American studies.
We also developed a music timeline with Quincy Jones. We figured if we
couldn't get inner-city black kids interested in computers with this, then we
were dead. [audio begins with music] I mean, we might as well give up. This is
a history of black music from 1870 to Lauryn Hill. Click on 1870 and we're
going to see the first Jubilee singers. Now we can go to film footage of a
minstrel routine. It's disgusting, but it's part of the tradition. You have to
teach that. Let's look at 1950. Click on Miles. Look at this: Miles and
Coltrane together, 1959. Isn't that great? We have thousands of pieces of film
footage like this and audio clips. . . .
REMARKS BY REV. EUGENE RIVERS
I'm here this evening to talk about the Martin Luther King Afterschool
Program, which is the brainchild of Skip Gates. Let me [first] say that what
Skip and Anthony Appiah have achieved here is actually quite revolutionary,
just in terms of bringing information and data to a larger community and a much
more diverse population.
For the last twelve years, I and some colleagues of mine have been
working in an inner-city neighborhood [of Boston]—in Dorchester—doing
outreach to gangs. It's an odd story. We were all here at Harvard in the early
1980s and really wrestled with a number of political issues. At the most basic
level, we were a group of folk motivated by our faith commitment. The big
political question for us in 1981, '82, '83, was how to translate our
experiences and privilege into benefits that would tangibly impact the lives of
what was then increasingly referred to as the black underclass. So a group of
us left Harvard around 1983 and moved into inner-city Dorchester. The irony is
that we had just planned to move into a poor neighborhood to do some organizing
among poor black people. To my amazement, we moved into a neighborhood that
during the day looked relatively pleasant but where 40 percent of the homicides
in the entire city were being committed. The second night we were there, [my
wife] Jackie and I literally heard machine guns go off. We decided to go out
and take a walk in the neighborhood. There was a young man who had been
monitoring us since we had moved in the day before, who was riding around the
neighborhood on a motorbike. As we walked down the street, the young man
charged me with the bike, did a wheelie, got about five feet away, turned and
skidded. He jumped off the bike and said, "Yo ho, what's up? What you doing in
my neighborhood?" I said, "Well, brother, I just moved in." I'm with my wife
and I have to do one of two things: either I'm going to run, which in my
experience has been a bad move, or I'm going to go down, at least looking
strong. I stood and didn't blink. He said, "That's okay. I thought you were
real estate speculators who had come into the neighborhood to buy up property
for folk who don't look like us." This was a remarkable observation on the part
of this young man, who we subsequently learned was the drug dealer who
controlled the neighborhood. When we moved in we didn't have any shades up, so
I stacked the windows with books. He stood out in front of our house for about
half an hour just looking at the titles. It was an amazing experience.
I began to develop a relationship with this young man, who introduced my
wife and me to a whole other universe. There was a subterranean reality of
young blacks, largely males, who were engaged in selling crack cocaine. [Many]
were brilliant, very talented young people who were uneducated but actually
quite perceptive and intellectually engaged.
For the next four or five years, as we built our ministry, I had a whole
series of political discussions and debates with these young drug dealers
around the nature of the drug game. We'd have these intellectual exchanges, and
they would actually ask, on occasion, about black history. We continued to do
the work and struggled to develop a model for violence prevention, doing direct
work with gangs at the street level.
From 1988 to 1991, there was like a 37 percent increase in the number of
violent crimes in terms of gang activity, largely driven by the crack epidemic.
In 1992, there were 152 homicides in the city, which was unheard of for the "Athens of America," and it was a very frustrating period. The year before my
house had been shot into twice. . . . We intensified the outreach and really
wrestled with how to begin to penetrate the worldview and the outlook and the
experience of these young people because they were obviously alienated from the
larger society. That year, in my copious free time during the summer, I wrote
an essay that was sort of a reflection on my experiences. It was titled, "On
the Responsibility of the Intellectuals in the Age of Crack." And in this
essay, which was published in The Boston Review, I asked the question, "What precisely is the pedagogical relationship between a black intelligentia
and a generation of young people who were essentially drowning in their own
blood?" . . . I submit this evening that Skip Gates has answered that question
I raised in 1992 of what black intellectuals could do as scholars to make an
objective difference in the material conditions and the cultural condition of
the black community.
About two years ago, I ran into Skip. . . . He says, "You know what we
need to do is put this Encarta Africana in the churches all across
America. We need to put this thing in the most cultural institution in the
black community so that we can get to [kids]. It will be the equivalent of the
Hebrew School that has a been a major source of cultural enrichment in literacy
for another community." It was so funny. I said, "Negro, that's brilliant. In
fact, that's probably the smartest thing I've ever heard you say." That was an
ingenious idea—to use the most important, the premier sovereign
institution of the black community that penetrates across class lines, this
major resource, to make a major difference in the lives of so many kids. By
basing this CD-ROM program in the community, you would develop an institution
that young people in inner cities would have access to. I though about it for a
week, then called him back and said, "Skip, we're going to do this, right, I
want to do it."
Here was an idea to bridge the digital divide in a way that is
userfriendly to a population of kidss who, under normal circumstances, are not
thinking about a book. Hence the idea was born that we would establish in
partnership. I'm the president of the Ella J. Baker House, which is a
settlement house in Dorchester that serves annually about 2,600 kids a year
through twenty-two different programs that we run twelve months a year. We had
been doing extensive work with a number of gangs at this center and also doing
similar work in the prisons and in the department of youth services. So we had
this laboratory and this field experience as we tested ideas about how to
inspire a thirst for literacy among a population of young people, who, through
no fault of their own, have not had the opportunities to engage in intellectual
development. The schools are jacked up 90 percent of the time, the kids go
there to fight or to defend themselves. They drop out when it becomes too
tough. So here we had an opportunity to test some brilliant ideas.
So Skip secured the funding and we set up a computer lab in the Ella J.
Baker House. Our goal was to give poor young people access to the Information
Highway seven days a week. Many of them would not have had access because they
didn't come from affluent backgrounds, but what we were going to do is create
an environment where these young people could find sanctuary and refuge from
the streets. And we'd have an intellectually enriching environment where there
was safety and security. They could come into the computer lab and learn.
So on October 12, 2000, the Martin Luther King After School program
opened to a packed house. [Boston] Mayor [Thomas] Menino showed up. We
recruited all across the city, and got an absolutely astounding the response
from young people. Beyond that, we went to the Department of Youth Services and
Dorchester Court and requested that young people be sentenced to this literacy
program, as a condition of probation. [applause] We said, "Now look here,
Leroy, you're out there with those guns, cutting up, and we're going to work to
try to get you off being stuck on stupid. We are going to have your probation
officer sentence you, Leroy Jackson, to computer and cultural literacy as a
condition of probation." Young people were sentenced to the Martin Luther King
After School Program as a condition of probation. It was astounding when the
first six young men—teenaged boys with that sullen, thug-like look, having
OD'd on too much Rap City on BET—walked into the Baker House. The first
thing we did was show them the music timeline [on Encarta Africana]. We
could not get those young men out the first night. They came in at 3:30, they
left at 10:30. It was amazing.
These young people were connecting knowledge acquisition to their
identity as young black males. Never had they been encouraged to conceive of
themselves as anything other than a public enemy. But here was an opportunity
for young men to develop a much more positive association between themselves
and literacy. When they left, they went out and got Cornbread, Chewey,
Bonehead, and Leroy Junior and brought them back, too. The demand was so
extraordinary that we were forced to staff up on Saturdays and Sundays because
the excitement that these young people exhibited as they were introduced to
knowledge was absolutely astounding.
Here you had a bridging of the gap, linking up the world of scholarship,
research, technology with an entire generation of young black people who, in
too many cases, are drowning in their own blood, deprived of opportunity,
lacking hope. We had a series of structured classes with a very detailed
curriculum and lesson plans developed by Skip's staff and lesson plans, so this
is not black history off the cuff. There was actually a structured,
disciplined, linear approach, a beginning and an end to the narrative. The
young people were excited. It wasn't just me telling stories about the civil
rights movement—stories I could have cooked up.
It was amazing to me to see young black girls come in who had been
referred to the program by the Department of Youth Services and who had very
negative self-images. We had one young instructor who did a course on
revolutionary black women. It was remarkable because it elevated their
self-esteem and expanded their range of understanding and sense of
possibilities. They saw themselves as something other than Lil' Kim or Foxy
Brown.
Parents heard about what their kids were doing, would visit the center,
have this great educational experience and then ask, "Are there classes for
parents?" We are now trying to build a literacy movement. That's my agenda. The Encarta Africana is a remarkable resource. It is transforming fragile
children's sense of who they are, expanding their sense of capacity as they get
on the computers and they peck and play and acquire these skills.
Today, a group of black clergy have been meeting all day at the Center
for International Development at the [Harvard University] Kennedy School [of
Government]. I talked with them about building a national movement in
faith-based institutions to promote literacy. Making black and African history
a curricular centerpiece for any work you would do with young black people is a
no brainer. We're now trying to move into the jails and develop a whole series
of classes to transmit literacy to a lot of young black men who are just
recycled through the system. So we're going to attempt to build an entire new
cultural literacy movement to improve and expand the life chances of young
people who under normal circumstances have not had a good experience with
research and scholarship.
In a world where young black people don't know what Malcolm X means or
have no real knowledge of who Martin Luther King was, we have the resources at
our disposal to lay a foundation and in a very genuine way resurrect faith and
hope for a generation of damaged young people who are now discovering their
place in history as a result of [the Encarta Africana]. I mean that. I'm not
trying to be poetic.
At the Ella J. Baker House there's always something jumping. We've got
young people running through the place, and we now work to keep the building
open seven days a week so that young people can come in off the streets and
have access to the treasures of the African world. I'm very thankful to Skip
and the Du Bois Institute for the fact that these young people have access to
this resource so that the digital divide, which will be the great
dis-equalizer, is reduced so that a generation of young black people have a
shot at life. . . . With this resource, we can say to so many young people in
the inner city—and I'm talking about thugs, sure enough, bonafide thugs,
gunslinging thugs—"Give me the gun, son, that's all right. We're going to
go to the computer lab, and we're going to educate you. Nobody's scared of you,
son." The fact that we have this resource is just amazing. Thank you very
much.
|
|
