A New, and Vast, Frame of Reference

"Absolutely," Yacovone says. "I love telling that story. It tells you something about Skip's energy."

Indeed. Gates is a man who, asked what he's working on now, has trouble recalling the full list.

His sabbatical project is "a book on race and the Enlightenment." Another book, "In Search of Our Roots," will be out in April. He's just gotten approval from Oxford University Press for a huge African biography project, as yet untitled. There's a PBS show airing next month, the second to be based on "African American Lives." Oh, and he's forgotten to mention "the big project I'm gearing up to do": an eight-hour PBS series on the history of the African American people -- "the whole sweep, from the slave trade to Barack Obama."

Gates is also working on a Web-based project in partnership with The Washington Post Co. and its online magazine, Slate. He declined to talk about this for publication. Slate Editor Jacob Weisberg would say only that there should be an announcement soon.

In short, Gates is hardly a typical academic. He is uncomfortable with the slower rhythms of university scholarship, and some academics, in turn, are uncomfortable with him.

"A lot of people working for Skip get a little freaked," says Kate Tuttle, a book editor and journalist whom Gates and Higginbotham brought in, late in 2004, to help jump-start the project. Tuttle describes the Gates modus operandi as setting "audacious goals," then getting people to "work like hell and come close."

For whatever reason, the coming close part wasn't happening.

When Tuttle signed on, she says, the Biography was mostly a Du Bois Institute production, with little input from the publisher, and there was a feeling among the staff "that the project was impossible." Her chief idea for retooling it was to get Oxford more involved.

And why not? "It isn't really an academic project," Tuttle says. "It's a publishing project."

A key decision, says Tuttle's Oxford counterpart, Anthony Aiello, was to reduce the responsibilities of the Du Bois staff by recruiting 17 highly credentialed "subject editors" -- for education, art, slavery, civil rights and so on. The subject editors assumed the responsibility for checking and approving biographical entries in their fields, to be written mainly by some 1,700 outside contributors.

Some layoffs came with the reorganization, Tuttle says, "and that was painful." But the enterprise had traction again.

'Alice of Dunk's Ferry'

Talk to enough people who've worked on the project and you'll find they have one thing in common: They keep mentioning names.