![]() ![]() His supervisor was Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian writer who became the first African to receive a Nobel Prize in literature. He then earned a master’s degree and doctorate in literature from Clare College at Cambridge University in England. Gates attended Yale University, graduating summa cum laude in 1973. Colored People was Gates’s major crossover from writing for an academic audience to addressing a broad cultural readership. Gates describes his youth and coming of age in the storytelling memoir Colored People (1994), in which he recalls a vibrant black community about to be weakened by the onset of racial desegregation. Gates’s father worked as a laborer in the local paper mill and as a part-time janitor his mother was a housewife. ![]() He grew up in Piedmont, a small town of about 2,000 people, 10 percent of whom were black. ![]() Gates was born in Keyser, West Virginia, the son of Pauline Coleman and Henry Louis Gates Sr. ![]() “The class divide within our community is black America’s most urgent social problem,” he stated on “The Two Nations of Black America,” the Frontline program he wrote and hosted for WGBH-TV in 1998. He particularly attempted to refocus the country’s public policy debate by emphasizing that both the black middle class and the black underclass had grown considerably since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. emerged in the mid-1990s as a national spokesperson on racial issues. As a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine and in frequent public appearances throughout the media, Henry Louis Gates Jr. ![]()
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