Scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. marks Black History Month by telling students and faculty about the long struggle to publish Encarta Africana.

By Sarah Murphy
Berklee.edu Correspondent
April 8, 2003

	Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
	Photo by Justin A. Knight

Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. began this year's Warrick L. Carter Lecture with these words, recalling a 90-year saga that resulted in the ultimate reference book on African culture and people of African descent. The goal of this black encyclopedia was no less than the end of racism in America, for the encyclopedia's creators hoped that if white Americans better understood black culture, they would no longer be able to make judgments based solely on skin color. Yet despite this unassailable goal, the Encyclopedia Africana project was plagued by nine decades of setbacks—financial, political, and personal—that nearly doomed it to failure.

In many ways, the creation of the Encyclopedia Africana is the personal story of the two men who brought it to life: The man who first imagined it, W.E.B. DuBois; and the man who saw the project through to completion, Henry Louis Gates.

DuBois is widely considered the greatest black intellectual of the 20th century. His studies of black culture greatly shaped American views on civil rights, and informed important themes in African American history and literature. In many ways, Gates is DuBois's heir apparent, a leading black academic who occupies a professorship at Harvard named after DuBois, and serves as the chair of Afro-American Studies at the university. Though the two never met and did not work together on the project, they collaborated across time, and the story Gates told of their collaboration was a fitting topic for the Carter lecture, which is held annually in observation of Berklee's Black History Month celebration.

When the idea of a black encyclopedia first came to DuBois in 1909, he was already an academic superstar and a leader in America's civil rights movement. In 1895 he became the first black person to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard University. In 1903 he published his landmark work, The Souls of Black Folk, which, Gates said, "remains into the 21st century the veritable bible for would-be young black intellectuals." And in 1910 he would become a founding member of the NAACP and editor of its magazine, The Crisis.

DuBois was so taken with the concept of a black encyclopedia, he printed up official stationery for the project and used it to write to dozens of the world's most prominent scholars, inviting them to support him. Though all of the scholars agreed the Encyclopedia Africana was an excellent idea, funding was scarce, and so DuBois was forced to shelve the project.

In the mid 1930s, despite the hardship of the Great Depression, several philanthropists had taken an interest in the encyclopedia and had agreed to fund it. But at the last minute, the money fell through and DuBois's dream was again put on hold. By this time, he had been fired from his position at the NAACP for his contradictory views on integration, and his political enemies were lobbying hard against his ever receiving funding for the encyclopedia project. Then, in the 1950s, things took a turn for the worse, when DuBois and his wife were accused of being communists. Both were acquitted, but the trials they suffered left them bitterly disappointed and disillusioned with America.

In 1961, at the age of 93, DuBois renounced his U.S. citizenship, joined the Communist Party, and moved to Ghana, which had recently won its independence from Britain. There, he would have one last chance to realize his dream. The new president of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, had agreed to fund the Encyclopedia Africana and invited DuBois to undertake the project on free African soil. But DuBois passed away in 1963 without ever making real headway on his beloved project.

Dean of Professional Education Lawrence McLellan (right) presents a plaque to Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Photo by Justin A. Knight

"I [thought] what a hoot it would be to edit that encyclopedia, because encyclopedias played a big role in my education and in my family. We still have a 1956 World Book sold to us by my school principal," he said.

As Gates continued his undergraduate education, his passion for the project grew. A year spent traveling around Africa further piqued his interest. Following his studies at Yale, Gates participated in a fellowship at Cambridge, where he met two Africans who would become lifelong friends and would share his interest in making Encyclopedia Africana a reality: the exiled Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka and a young prince from Ghana named Anthony Appiah.

One night in London, over a dinner of Indian food and many bottles of wine, Gates told his new friends of DuBois's dream. "That night we made a pledge that we would edit DuBois's encyclopedia," Gates said.

In 1979, Gates began to pursue the project in earnest. He wrote to Encyclopedia Britannica editor Charles Van Doren, who agreed to help if Gates could raise the millions of dollars needed to pay for the project. Gates managed to raise $50,000, just enough to convene a meeting of prospective editors and, in homage to DuBois's first step back in 1909, print up official stationery on which to write letters to supporters.

Without money, though, the project languished until 1991, when Gates arrived at Harvard to help rebuild the university's Afro-American Studies Department, where his resolve was renewed by support from fellow scholars Appiah, Cornel West, and William Julius Williams. Then, the project took a giant step forward when Berklee alumnus Quincy Jones '51 provided money for Gates and his coworkers to develop a prototype encyclopedia on CD-ROM. But publishers, though they professed to love the product, were unwilling to pay the millions of dollars in advance money needed to make it a reality.

After 25 publishers had rejected Gates's plan, he decided to go to the richest man in America, a man who, by a strange coincidence, happens to share his last name. "Finally, I decided to throw a hail mary pass to Bill Gates," he said. "To my astonishment, he caught [it]."

In the end, Microsoft agreed to pay $1 million in advances, an amount that was matched by publisher Perseus Books. Perseus would publish a hardbound, print version, and Microsoft would release a digital version in CD-ROM format. In a nod to Mircrosoft's existing franchise of reference publications, the name would change to Encarta Africana. But the real catch was that the encyclopedia had to be completed in just 18 months. So, Gates called upon a team of more than 400 scholars from around the world to complete the project.

Not only did the team finish on time, the end result was far bigger than the two-million word, four-volume set DuBois had originally imagined. "Eighteen months later, to the day, we shipped not 2 million words but 2.25 billion words," Gates said. "And on January 19, Martin Luther King's birthday, 1999, dedicated in memory of W.E.B DuBois and in honor of Nelson Mandela, Encarta Africana was born."

All it took was 90 years in gestation and the life's work of two of the most important intellectuals—black or otherwise—in America's history.

The Warrick L. Carter Lecture is the keynote speech of Berklee's annual Black History Month Music Celebration. See links below for more on related activities for 2003 and Carter lectures from recent years.

Links of Interest
•	Black History Month 2003: Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
•	Black History Month 2003: Take 6
•	Black History Month 2003: Mathew Knowles
•	WLC Lecture 2002: Stefon Harris
•	WLC Lecture 2001: Regina Carter
•	WLC Lecture 2000: Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot
•	WLC Lecture 1999: Robert Johnson