Dear fellow educator,
I’m delighted to share with you the paperback edition of my latest book, The Black Box: Writing the Race, which grew out of the Introduction to African American Studies course I’ve taught at Harvard for the last many years. It was exciting to transpose the magic that takes place in the classroom onto the page, especially at a time when many of the questions I try to raise for my students are burningly relevant. My hope is that, in reading The Black Box, you will encourage your colleagues to adopt it for their classes and perhaps even recommend it for your school’s common reading programs for students.
A word about the book: Here is my attempt to tell the history of the African American experience through the prism of the written word. How have Black people used poetry, literature, autobiography, essays, plays, and speeches to define and redefine themselves over the centuries? How did these writers champion each other, argue with each other, and build on each other’s work? How did they navigate their way in and out of a black box, at once a source of confinement and protection against the outside world? This collective act of resistance and transcendence—from Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, to Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and many more—has led to a resilient, inventive, powerful, diverse culture, to a “nation within a nation,” to the creation of a people. And the work continues.
You have my deepest thanks and admiration for all you are doing to nurture the rising generation of students who will one day lead the way. I would be profoundly grateful if you see a way to connect them to The Black Box with the hope that it helps them on their journey.
Best wishes,
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Alphonse Fletcher University Professor
Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University
