Black in America

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Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: I’m Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and I’m the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard, where I direct the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. I’ve been writing for The New Yorker since the early 90s. You’re looking at some fascinating artifacts from what turned out to be a watershed moment in The New Yorker’s history: the 1996 “Black in America” double issue.

That striking cover by Michael Roberts really captured what this issue aimed to do: to present the complexity, the vibrancy, and sometimes, the contradictions of Black life in America at that particular moment in time. 

You know, when Tina Brown approached me about this special issue, I could barely contain my excitement. This was The New Yorker, after all, an institution that hadn’t always been known for featuring Black voices or engaging deeply with Black issues. But Tina had this remarkable vision. She understood that you couldn’t really tell the story of America without telling the story of Black America. And she wanted to do it with the depth and the care for which The New Yorker was famous. 

I ended up contributing two pieces for that issue. My goal was for both pieces to capture the ongoing tension in Black political and intellectual life: between ideals of integration and the ideals of separation, between working within the system and working outside of the system.

The whole issue brought in so many luminaries of Black intellectual and creative life at that time. You had the late, great Stanley Crouch, whose fax to Tina you can see here, bringing his sharp cultural criticism to Duke Ellington. There was Hilton Als, with his penetrating profile of Angela Bassett, lyrical poetry by Rita Dove, something category-defining by Anna Deavere Smith, pieces by Nell Painter, and Pat Williams, and John Edgar Wideman, fiction by Sapphire. 

Just an extraordinary gathering of voices. And there was Jervis Anderson, too, who’d grown up in Jamaica and had written for The New Yorker since the 1960s. Unpublished stories by Ralph Ellison and a terrific profile by David Remnick, who would later bring about the diversification of The New Yorker’s writers and staff. And what made the issue special was that each of us was allowed to approach our subjects with our own distinct voice and perspective.

Looking back now, I think what that issue did, and what makes these artifacts so significant, was to demonstrate that Black intellectual and cultural life couldn’t be reduced to a single narrative or perspective. Instead, we were showing the richness and diversity of Black thought, Black creativity, and Black experience, and people were doing it in the pages of one of America’s most prestigious magazines, with all the literary sophistication and depth that The New Yorker was known for.