Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow

Henry Louis Gates Jr. (b. 1950) is an American literary critic, historian, and documentary filmmaker specializing in African American Studies. He received a BA in History from Yale University, graduating summa cum laude in 1973, then went on to earn an MA and PhD from Cambridge University. In 1976, Gates was employed as a lecturer in the Afro-American Studies Department at Yale before finishing his studies. The arrangement included the expectation that he would advance to an assistant professorship upon the completion of his dissertation. In 1979, he held a joint appointment in the Afro-American Studies and English Departments at Yale. He was promoted to associate professor in 1984, after which he was recruited by Cornell University, where he taught until 1989. Following a two-year appointment at Duke University, Gates joined the faculty at Harvard University, where he is currently Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, an endowed chair he has held since 2006, and director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. His credentials, both as a student and professor, make him particularly well-suited to author a book about the United States after Reconstruction.

Gates has published extensively on Black history, culture, and literature. His writings cover a range of topics, but all challenge the white Eurocentric academic canon. Stony the Road highlights Black achievements in the face of generational racism. It redirects attention away from Europe to the achievements and challenges of Black Americans. In this regard, it is of a piece with Gates’s earlier book The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (Oxford University Press, 1988). Lauded as Gates’s first major scholarly work, The Signifying Monkey addresses the folkloric origins of signifying, an African American literary concept related to trickery. It won the 1989 American Book Award. Alongside the 25 others works he authored or coauthored, The Signifying Monkey made Gates one of the most prominent Black literary theorists of the 20th and 21st centuries.

In addition to his scholarly output, Gates has published articles in newspapers and magazines throughout his career. In 1990, for example, he published an article explaining the music of 2 Live Crew to the New York Times’ largely white readership (Gates, Henry Louis Jr. “2 Live Crew, Decoded.” The New York Times, 19 June 1990). Similarly, in 1991, he wrote an article for Sports Illustrated reminding readers that sports were not the only avenues of opportunity for young Black people (Gates, Henry Louis Jr. “Delusions of Grandeur.” Vault). Gates has also created 23 documentary films. Notable among these is Finding Your Roots, a PBS series that first aired in 2012 and is currently in its ninth season. Each episode features Gates with a celebrity guest tracing their ancestry using traditional genealogical research and genetics testing. In 2013, Gates created a six-part PBS documentary series titled The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, which chronicles the African American experience from enslavement until the second inauguration of President Obama (“The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross.” PBS). The series received a Peabody Award and an NAACP Image Award. In 2019, Gates presented a four-hour PBS documentary titled Reconstruction: America after the Civil War, a companion to Stony the Road.