A New, and Vast, Frame of Reference

'Do You Think You Can Fill It Up?'

The African American National Biography was the brainchild of the manically entrepreneurial Gates. No one involved can quite imagine anyone else pulling it off.

Reached by phone in California -- where he's on sabbatical at Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences -- Gates credits his inspiration to two sources in particular.

One was Yale historian John Blassingame, who introduced him to the outpouring of quirky black biographical dictionaries of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Largely efforts to refute the most damaging lie of all about black people -- that they were intellectually inferior to whites -- these works tended toward hagiography but preserved many names that might otherwise have been lost.

The other inspiration, Gates says, was one of his heroes, "the smartest black intellectual in the first half of the 19th century." James McCune Smith was, among other things, the first professionally trained black physician in the United States, the nation's first black candidate for political office and an influential abolitionist. Seven years ago, Gates went looking for Smith among the many thousands of entries in the premier American biographical dictionary, Oxford's American National Biography.

He wasn't there.

Nor was a second name Gates was looking for, classical scholar William Scarborough. Nor were most of the names on a list of maybe 25 prominent blacks Higginbotham assembled after Gates told her of the gaps he was finding.

Gates called Casper Grathwohl, who headed Oxford's reference division, and told him he needed to publish a stand-alone African American reference work.

"Do you think you can fill it up?" Gates recalls Grathwohl asking.

Not a problem.

An initial database, compiled at the Gates-run W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, ran to more than 12,000 names. Some were already famous; others, like Smith and Scarborough, were more obscure but nonetheless established historical figures. But many -- brought to light by burgeoning research efforts in African American history over the past quarter century -- remained virtually unknown outside the academy.

Gates and Higginbotham set out to turn that database into what Gates calls "the grandest history of the African American people ever written" by telling "the life stories of the actual human beings who created African American history."

The editors had many basic questions to resolve.