Henry Louis -- Gates the Birth Encarta Africana

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 a 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 co-found 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. . . .

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 encyclopedia]. 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 Soyinka, 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. . .

Source: .http://www.edletter.org/past/issues/2001-mj/forum.shtml