Review by Choice Review
Gates directs the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. This volume is an excellent example of Gates's ability to maintain high standards of scholarship while making a broad, dense subject accessible to a modern audience. This incredibly comprehensive history begins African life in America in 1513 with a free black conquistador who accompanied Ponce de Leon, and concludes with Barack Obama's presidential election in 2008. Amazingly, Gates manages to capture well-known figures and events as well as the not so well known. And he covers the diverse spectrum of black American politics, art, literature, religion, sports, and popular culture. The book is richly illustrated with maps, woodcuts, line drawings, cartoons, color photographs, and daguerreotypes; there is some type of picture on each page. Much of the history presented here is "familiar in the academy"; however, it will be new to many general readers, and as Gates writes in his introduction, he intends this book to be "a general history for a general audience." A remarkable accomplishment that should endure through many editions. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. D. W. Bilal Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
SEVERAL years ago I gave a talk, or attempted to, at Fisk University on a book I'd written about the Billie Holiday song "Strange Fruit." The reaction was, to put it mildly, hostile. Who was I, a white man, to write on such a topic? I beat a hasty retreat that night, not even bothering to open the box of books I'd brought with me. The question, while offensive to me, is nonetheless interesting: why are white writers and historians so drawn to the history of black Americans? The answers are simple: The story is just so endlessly rich, and powerful, and poignant, and inspiring. Many topics, like "Strange Fruit" itself, aren't so neatly divided into "black" and "white." And of course, embedded in black history is the story of America itself. It is the story that Henry Louis Gates Jr. - a man whose credentials in this department, unlike mine, can never be challenged - attempts to encapsulate in this ambitious but frustrating book. Through dozens of profiles and other short essays, accompanied by abundant and beautifully reproduced prints, paintings, newspaper clippings and photographs, Gates, the director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, tries to summarize the black experience in North America, from the arrival of the free black conquistador Juan Garrido with Ponce de León in 1513 to the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Though there are inevitable gaps (there's one scant reference to Billie Holiday, for instance, and her name is misspelled), most of the major figures are here, from politics, religion, scholarship, entertainment, sports. It is an appropriately eclectic group, ranging from leaders of slave rebellions like Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner to Michael Jordan and Michael Jackson. Most are familiar, at least to semi-serious students of black history, but some are undeservedly obscure, like Cotton Mather's slave Onesimus, who taught Mather how to inoculate the Massachusetts Bay Colony against smallpox. There are the milestone events: the Middle Passage, the advent and abolition of slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Great Migration, the civil rights movement. Various black responses to oppression - emigration, accommodation, nonviolent protest, militarism - are also here, along with their principal exponents: Marcus Garvey, Booker T. Washington, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael. So, too, are the various organizations, which, surprisingly to generations accustomed to seeing them march side by side, in fact had distinct origins and philosophies. Then there are the celebrated places: Harpers Ferry, Fort Pillow, Selma. And institutions like the Tuskegee Institute and Oberlin College, which single-handedly "admitted more black students before 1865 than all other American colleges and universities combined." (The first one didn't make it through Gates's Harvard until 1870.) Gates lays out the horrifying roster of humiliations, riots, poll taxes, chain gangs and court decisions that subjugated all blacks, freed and enslaved, North and South. After the Supreme Court's decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) - in which Chief Justice Roger Taney, sounding very much like today's "origin al ists," maintained that in decreeing blacks subhuman, the court was merely following the Constitution's "true intent and meaning when it was adopted" - even the indomitable Frederick Douglass considered emigrating to Haiti. Miraculously, a people given every excuse to be disloyal displayed extraordinary heroism in all American wars, dating back to 1776. There are periodic surprises in the book, particularly at the outset, when the subject matter is less familiar: "only" 450,000 of the 12.5 million slaves brought to the New World came to the United States; New York's blacks were in effect barred from Lincoln's funeral march; a black man named Matthew Henson may have beaten Adm. Robert Peary to the North Pole (that is, if either of them ever got there), at least by a few steps; and, fearing the Scottsboro Boys really were rapists, the N.A.A.C.P. shied away from defending them. But for every edifying surprise, there are many frustrations. Most fundamentally, this book is not what it claims to be. Rather than a nuanced, textured account of what it has meant to be black in America, "Life Upon These Shores" is a hit parade of black accomplishment and exceptionalism - a chronicle of what Du Bois called (I guess it sounded all right at the time), and Gates later dredges up (jokingly, but nonetheless tastelessly, to describe some contemporary black corporate chieftains), the "talented tenth." On every other page is a black first: first slave narrative published in North America; first published poem and novel by an African-American; first black newspaper; first black medical school graduate, college professor, diplomat, elected official, woman lawyer, West Point graduate, licensed woman pilot, author to write a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. It reads a bit like one of those page-a-day historical calendars. Strictly as a matter of mathematics, black history in this country consists primarily of slavery: what Lincoln called "the bondsman's 250 years of unrequited toil" still far exceeds the time blacks have actually been free. Yet there's almost nothing here about how these slaves lived: whom and how they married, tinder what circumstances their families were broken up, how and what they ate, whom and how they worshiped, what they sang and how they spoke. This same shortcoming - the failure to describe the lives led by ordinary people - marks, and mars, the entire book. The very thing for which Gates extols the writers Amiri Baraka and Claude Brown - capturing black consciousness and life on the streets - he supplies precious little of himself. There are more problems. Gates's insistence on making all entries bite-size gives excessive weight to some people and seriously shortchanges others. Towering figures like Douglass and Du Bois simply demand much more attention than they're given. So, too, do crucial topics like lynching, which afflicted black Americans for decades. I, for one, would happily have forgone some details about Halle Berry, "Soul Train" and Prince to make room for it. In the Wikipedia era, entries in books like this must be more vivid and insightful than some of Gates's more pedestrian moments. Descriptions of epochal events, like Martin Luther King's magnificent final speech in Memphis, are rendered lifelessly. Isn't something like Bill Russell's sometimes frosty relations with white fans and the white press more interesting than meaningless stats about his presence on the 25th- and 35th-anniversary N.B.A. all-time teams? (In a book of this kind, the underrepresentation of whites is entirely defensible. But can one really write about King's assassination without at least identifying the man who killed him, and why? Or about John Brown's raid without adequately describing John Brown?) The book is often repetitious. There are also structural problems; for instance, "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" comes before Malcolm X himself. Sometimes it's almost embarrassingly contradictory, suggesting separate authors or an AWOL editor or both. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 "paid dividends almost immediately," one section concludes. "Passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 did little, at first, to advance the struggle for civil rights," the very next section begins. There are mistakes: when Jack Johnson became heavyweight champion; which home run constituted Henry Aaron's record breaker. Claude Barnett founded the Associated, not the American, Negro Press; that Joe Louis was exponentially more popular than Jesse Owens in the 1930s is so obvious that appending a "perhaps" is simply wrong. Gates is prone to exaggeration, even cheerleading. Could Gordon Parks - or any photographer, white or black - really have "photographed virtually everyone of significance" in his career? Do you think Condoleezza Rice "steadfastly and expertly" guided the country through its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? At one point, Gates unbecomingly peddles two of his own PBS series. And he soft-pedals, too: True, Ralph Ellison died before completing his second novel. But shouldn't we be told that Ellison had had 42 years in which to write it? Gates's problem is partly ambition, or chutzpah. Far better it would have been to have gotten experts to paint small portions of this vast canvas than to have slathered it all on oneself. But the real flaw is in his approach. The blacks in "Life Upon These Shores" are all heroes and victims, with no one more variegated in between. Missing are not just ordinary folks but villains (if you don't count the muchmaligned Booker T. Washington, an easy target of Gates's frequent gibes). While he celebrates black athletes aplenty, for instance, Gates writes nothing about O. J. Simpson, whose trial also surely said something profound about "life upon these shores." The story Gates has valiantly attempted to chronicle - and the book is a useful primer for neophytes - is endlessly fascinating and thrilling. But that one of our most eminent black scholars feels compelled to give us something so often superficial and boosterish is sad as well. It reminds us, yet again, that we still haven't come as far as we must. Senators Blanche K. Bruce and Hiram Revels flank Frederick Douglass in a chromolithograph from 1881. After the Dred Scott case, even Frederick Douglass considered emigrating to Haiti. David Margolick, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, is the author of "Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 4, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review
Four hundred years of public records and private collections went into the creation of this survey of African American history from well before the slave trade that would swell the black population of the New World to the election of the first black U.S. president. Gates begins with the little-known history of free black conquistadors, including Juan Garrido, who accompanied Ponce de Leon on his first expedition to Florida. Gates documents the famous, the obscure, and the long forgotten, from exploration to slavery to the Civil War, Emancipation, and Reconstruction to the world wars to the Great Migration and the Great Depression to the Harlem Renaissance and the Jazz Age to the civil rights and black-power movements to the hip-hop generation. Maps, posters, manuscripts, documents, photographs, and postcards add to the appeal of this chronicle of the pressing issues and events of each generation and the incredible diversity covered by the appellation African American. A tour de force of African American history.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
With nearly 900 illustrations (formal portraits, news photos, historic lithographs, broadsides, flyers, posters, newspaper clippings, advertisements) complemented by a succinct but informing text, Harvard professor Gates (Black in Latin America) provides a visual sojourn through African-American history, a generally upbeat march from Juan Garrido, accompanying Cortes in 1519, to Barack Obama taking the presidential oath in 2008. Gathered in this chronologically arranged compendium, with its focus on the accomplishments and moments of achievement in the African-American community, is a wealth of materials about the historical, political, social, literary, and scientific events influencing American social and political culture. Scant attention is paid to the oft-told tale of plantation slavery, although the devastations wrought upon the African-American community are not neglected: "the infamous Middle Passage," Fort Pillow massacre, the convict lease system, the Tulsa race riot, the Tuskegee syphilis study, the police attack on the Selma marchers, Hurricane Katrina. The familiar and famous are in Gates's encyclopedic reach, but so are the less known and nearly forgotten. (How hard it is today to imagine that a 1950 photograph of Billy Eckstein with "white female fans" could be "revolutionary.") "Although we cannot change the past," Gates observes in one entry, "we can change how we remember it." In this sumptuous volume, Gates assembles an affirming, illuminating, and needed tribute. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The credentials of author Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard. Challenging the notion of a single "Black Experience," Gates contextualizes his narrative with more than 800 images and doesn't duck controversy. (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Black in Latin America, 2011, etc.) arranges his history chronologically, with each chapter successively packed with more information, reflecting the ever-increasing impact of African-Americans on the nation. From the conquistadors and the origins of slavery in the Americas, through the Revolutionary period, the rise of abolitionism, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, the Great Migration, both World Wars and the 20th century's civil-rights movement, up to President Obama's election, the supremely qualified Gates guides us through centuries of history with encyclopedia-style, mini-essays on a vast array of topics. No significant figure in African-American history goes untreated, and many names are rescued from neglect. Gates takes the "looking" part of his subtitle seriously. The stunning illustrations--photos, paintings, engravings, posters, broadsides, drawings, maps, advertisements, cartoons and film stills--perfectly supplement a text in which individual entries are necessarily abbreviated to permit single-volume coverage of so vast a topic. More than 800 images, many unforgettable, instantly convey, for example, the charm of Billy Eckstine, the fierce dignity of Frederick Douglass, the grace of Arthur Ashe, the intensity of Richard Wright and the anguish of Martin Luther King Jr. They powerfully capture the brutality of a slave coffle, the horror of lynching, the heedless cruelty of the sambo caricature and the absurdity of Jim Crow prohibitions. A striking, comprehensive guide to the breadth and depth of African-American history.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
