Storyweb: Storytime For Grownups

This week on StoryWeb: Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s memoir Colored People. Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is well known in the United States as a leading professor of African American Studies, director of Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, and host of several PBS series, including Finding Your Roots. Many Americans also know him as the man who was arrested for breaking into his own home and then being invited to have a beer with President Obama. What is less well known about Gates is that he hails from Piedmont, West Virginia, a small town on the Potomac River, two hours west of Washington, DC. The home of working people, many of them immigrants, Piedmont has a sizable African American population. How did Gates come out of a small West Virginia town and ultimately land in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a leading professor at Harvard University? Cambridge is a long way from Piedmont, but Gates traces the journey in his 1994 memoir, Colored People. The book tells of Gates’s childhood gr