Behind the Book—First of Its Kind: African American National Biography

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is never not on the move. When we spoke with him in November, he was fresh from a sit-down with Oprah and en route to Jersey to conduct his own interview, with his 94-year-old father, for the sequel to the 2006 PBS documentary African American Lives.

Our interview was regarding another of the cultural critic's projects set to debut in early February: the eight-volume African American National Biography (AANB), which he coedited with fellow Harvard professor Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. Published by the Oxford University Press (OUP) in collaboration with Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, which Gates heads, the AANB spans five centuries and holds 4000 entries by some 1000 scholars. It is the largest research project on African American studies to come out of the academy since Norton's 636-entry Dictionary of American Negro Biography (1983).

The AANB is not Gates's first attempt to collect and codify African Americans' life stories: in 1987 he coedited Black Biographical Dictionaries, 1790–1950 (Chadwick-Healey, 1987). "I was fascinated with these people no historian writes about," Gates says of the effort, "but it just wasn't adequate."

Then OUP reference publisher Casper Grathwohl called. Oxford wanted to supplement its 24-volume American National Biography (ANB, 1999) and sister database (www.oup.com/online/anb/) with profiles of 50 underepresented African Americans. "You have these major holes in the ANB," Gates countered. "Why not let me edit a separate biography, and we'll put them all in?" Grathwohl quickly agreed, setting into motion a project Gates has envisioned for 20 years.

Adding to the AANB's cross-referenced entries, each of which ranges from 1000 to 3000 words and leads into a further reading section, are 1000 images, a directory of contributors, and multiple indexes. Because the work is not intended as a strictly historical tract, the living (e.g., presidential contender Barak Obama) share equal footing with the dead (e.g., Esteban, the earliest-known African to settle in North America).

Gates describes the AANB as a sort of "rescue and recovery project" resurrecting the long-buried life stories of African Americans even the voluminous ANB couldn't house. Furthering the metaphor, Higginbotham says the work has been a process of salvaging treasure from a sunken ship: "When you dive in, there are all the big and familiar pieces that would excite any treasure hunter," she says, "but also innumerable other riches you'd never expect to find because you never even knew they existed.

"Yet, surely, with so many African Americans lost to the historical record, the expedition for primary-source documents must have often surfaced empty-handed?

Gates explains that's not the case. "We're recovering lost black historical figures who already have a place in the historical record, even if only just a few words," he says.

Gates, Higginbotham, and their collaborators—a handpicked editorial board and group of subeditors—have also been able to restore to the record a greater number of African American women than ever before. That's partly because, as Higginbotham says, the historiography of the Civil Rights Movement has changed. "Before, civil rights used to just mean Martin Luther King Jr., but now there's so much more material available to us about local people—mostly women—who mobilized communities to register to vote and defy segregation laws," she says.

Since Gates and Higginbotham coedited the one-volume African American Lives (OUP, 2004)—not to be confused with the aforementioned PBS documentary of the same name—what Higginbotham calls "a sort of pilot" to attract the grants for this project, they have been issuing callouts for information through Oxford's and Harvard's sites and also via postcards, ads, conferences, personal correspondences, and other avenues to attract contributors.

The approach has not been entirely successful: "I get contacted every week by someone claiming their great-grandfather invented the light bulb and that Edison stole his idea," laughs Gates. But, he adds, it often proved fruitful. What's more, contributors would sometimes emerge from the unlikeliest places. When a student of Higginbotham's, for example, submitted a dissertation on interracial marriage in 1890s Louisiana and Higginbotham didn't recognize most of the names she had culled from court records, this student, too, became a contributor.

"It was like slowly pulling up a thread and finding there's a whole outfit attached," Higginbotham says of the discovery process. "And there are so many sources we're only just beginning to tap.

"Threads drawn between reissues of the print copy will be woven thrice annually into the database of the Oxford African American Studies Center (www.oxfordaasc.com), where the AANB will exist as a breathing, muscular, mutable biography of a people still largely bearing discovery. And that will leave Gates and his team with plenty of additional digging to do.