Free America Behind the Color Line by Henry Louis Gates

campus, I would say, I want to be like that.
    Black kids who grew up later, in the fifties, thought the blackest thing you could be, the greatest thing you could do for our people, was to become like Thurgood Marshall or Dr. King. Being an athlete was okay, and there was Hank Aaron and Willie Mays in the fifties. But when I was growing up, there was only one athlete—Joe Louis. When Joe Louis fought—he fought Billy Conn the first time in 1941—every radio in the court in our housing project was on. You could be out in the court and hear the fight, because every radio was on, and everybody cheered and he was big. We knew about Jesse Owens, but that happened in 1936. But we saw—heard, you couldn’t see it—heard about Joe Louis on the radio. He was the man athletically.
    I was in sixth grade, and during the annual Negro History Week celebration, my best friend, Frank Hill, who lives out in Kansas City now, was given the role of Joe Louis. This is the role that everybody wanted and it’s the role I wanted, because you get to wear trunks and tennis shoes and boxing gloves to go on the stage. And you come out with these boxing gloves and you bow and then you get to the middle of the stage and you say, “I am Joe Louis,” and you get cheered. So Frank got that role, and I was a little jealous. I was given the role of William Grant Still, which meant I had on paper tails and a baton in my hand, and I walked down and said, “I am William Grant Still and I conducted Tchaikovsky’s symphony and New York’s blah, blah . . . ,” and no buzz, no cheers. But as I think about my life, that was a role I should have had, as opposed to Joe Louis, because it was more consistent. But it was not a happy moment. Everyone wanted to be Joe Louis because he was the man.
    I always knew as a kid, growing up in the public housing project, that I was going to college. It was never a doubt in my mind, because the seed had been planted. And so it was not even a second thought. The role of economics, in terms of racial discrimination and the future of our people, takes a backseat to education. The problems affecting our people now have first to do with education. You can’t get to the economic issues until you get the education. There was a time when you could work and not be educated because it was about brawn. Now it’s about brains. Even if you have a job at McDonald’s, you have to know how to work a computer. So you have to start with education, certainly in fundamental reading, writing, arithmetic, and computers. Then you are reasonably assured of some degree of economic security. Education is first. It begins there.
    When I got ready to go to college, I had a falling-out with my best buddies, because we had talked since junior year about going to Howard—getting a house, having a car, being sharp every day, and dating the beautiful girls who we understood went to Howard. We didn’t talk a whole lot about studying. But then this marvelous man came to my school from the National Scholarship Service Fund for Negro Students. He talked about the fund and he talked about going north to school, and I was absolutely intrigued by him, and I applied and got accepted. My buddies didn’t like it, because it was going against the grain, and while they didn’t accuse me of being white, they felt that I thought I was better, which is sort of the same thing, and that I was not a brother anymore.
    One night I couldn’t go out with my buddies because I had to work on my mother’s business, but I went out the next night with a girlfriend who had been out with them the night before. We were sitting on this date and she says, I want to tell you something. I said, what’s that? She said, your friends aren’t your friends; you were the topic of conversation, and they said you are doing something different, so you are odd man out, and while I was bothered by it, I was not sufficiently bothered by it to change my mind.
    But when I went home for