Colored People

By Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

In a coming-of-age story as enchantingly vivid and ribald as anything Mark Twain or Zora Neale Hurston, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., recounts his childhood in the mill town of Piedmont, West Virginia, in the 1950s and 1960s and ushers readers into a gossip, of lye-and-mashed-potato “processes,” and of slyly stubborn resistance to the indignities of segregation.
 
A winner of the Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Award and the Lillian Smith Prize, Colored People is a pungent and poignant masterpiece of recollection, a work that extends and deepens our sense of African American history even as it entrances us with its bravura storytelling

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jul 6, 2011
• ISBN: 9780307764430

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. An award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, and institution builder, Professor Gates has authored or coauthored twenty-two books and created eighteen documentary films, including Finding Your Roots. His six-part PBS documentary, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, earned an Emmy Award for Outstanding Historical Program-Long Form, as well as a Peabody Award, Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, and NAACP Image Award.

Reviews for Colored People

[scottjpearson · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Professor Gates is perhaps best known to the American people for being invited by President Obama to the “beer summit” on the White House lawn. More notably, he is an esteemed professor at Harvard and author of many works of literature. This work is his most accessible and, perhaps, his most entertaining. Simply, this work memorializes his childhood in West Virginia as his small hometown overcame segregation.

Gates’ telling is memorable for its wittiness and for its earthy relating of fundamentalist Christianity, of lye-and-mashed-potato treatments on black hair, and of fighting racial indignities. Gates, a skilled author, learned how to be a man, not at Yale, but among colored people overcoming segregation. His hometown of Piedmont was divided into a black culture and a white culture until the schools became integrated just before Gates entered first grade. Integration changed things and horizons. Gates eventually graduated valedictorian of his class and dated a white lady during his freshman year of college.

While those familiar with Gates only through the White-House beer summit might stereotype him as an “angry black intellectual,” this work clearly places him on the side of reason, logic, and love. He is consistently eloquent and respectful in tone. He wrote this book as a letter to his daughters so as to explain the mystery of their family. Unlike other memoirs by black figures, he said he wrote this work deliberately – “without a white editor looking over his shoulder.” He wanted to portray the black culture which raised him unvarnished, warts and blessings together. Fortunately for us, he accomplishes this task and more through a lens open to enlighten all who might read.

[laytonwoman3rd · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This memoir of childhood and very early adulthood is just excellent. Dr. Gates grew up in a small mill town in West Virginia, where he experienced the beginnings of desegregation without the trauma it generated in so many places. His childhood was a happy one, his colored community a strong support system for its members, and most of his interactions with white people unremarkable. When he left home for college in 1968, his horizons broadened and he became more worldly, more political, yet realized that the struggle for a full recognition of black identity ironically brought about a certain loss of the feeling of safety and security he had known growing up. This is a thought-provoking read from the perspective of a very thoughtful man. Highly recommended.