A New, and Vast, Frame of Reference

Would they include people like Stanly, the black slaveowner, who were notable for largely negative reasons?

Short answer: sometimes.

How would they decide the nettlesome question of who, precisely, was African American?

Usually, Higginbotham says, they included those who defined themselves as black.

What about living people? Other biographical dictionaries mostly have refrained from including them. Higginbotham had reservations about violating this practice, but Gates talked her into it.

"So much of importance in African American history occurred in the 20th century," he says. And for student users, it seemed especially important to include the Colin Powells and the LL Cool J's.

Members of the staff Gates and Higginbotham assembled began work in 2002, based in the Du Bois Institute. By 2004, they had produced a handsome 600-entry volume called African American Lives that served as a kind of advertisement for the full Biography, and which Gates later adapted for a PBS documentary.

A good start, it might seem.

Not long after African American Lives was completed, however, its editors began to fear that the larger project would never get done.

'A Cellphone in Each Ear'

Historian Donald Yacovone, who joined the Du Bois Institute staff a year and a half ago, has a story he tells about his job interview at Skip Gates's house. He's telling it, this day, in the light-filled offices of the institute, a couple of blocks off Harvard Square, with his Du Bois colleague Tom Wolejko sitting in.

"He was having leg surgery," Yacovone says, "so he had this medieval contraption on his leg to lengthen it. He's sitting in this Barcalounger, legs are up, okay? He's got a laptop and he's doing e-mail. He's got a television, watching the finals of soccer matches. He's got a cellphone in each ear, he's interviewing me and -- "

"Is that true?" Wolejko asks?