The Black Box: Writing the Race

by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

I was still in high school when Negroes became Black people in the middle of the 1960s. When I applied to Yale in 1969, on my personal statement, I wrote, “My grandfather was colored, my father is a Negro, and I am Black!” The person probably most responsible for this transformation, after Malcolm X, was Stokely Carmichael, the charismatic head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Carmichael enunciated the political philosophy of Black Power during the James Meredith “March Against Fear” on June 16, 1966, in Greenwood, Mississippi. We were Black pretty much across the board for those two decades, until about 1988, when Jesse Jackson declared at a press conference that we were African Americans now.[1] Most of us have been African Americans since that time.