A New, and Vast, Frame of Reference

Take Steven Niven, who has been on staff from the beginning and who replaced Tuttle as executive editor in 2006. Before shifting primarily into editing, Niven says, he spent a blissful nine months doing nothing but writing biographies himself. Among the 124 he finally ended up doing were volleyball ace Flo Hyman and longtime White House chief butler Alonzo Fields.

Niven mentions Medal of Honor winner Vernon Baker as well as Frankie Baker of "Frankie and Johnny" fame. He talks up Joe Gaetjens, the soccer player whose goal beat England, 1-0, in the 1950 World Cup. He tells the story of Charles Caldwell, who spent five years in the Mississippi senate before being assassinated in 1875, noting that "we also wanted to show the barriers to achievement."

The hardest stories for him to write, he says, were those of Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley -- the girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing of 1963.

Yacovone enthuses about Antioch Law School founder Jean Camper Cahn. Aiello is fascinated by Susie Baker King Taylor, the only black woman to write a Civil War memoir -- though her entry was completed too late to make the print edition.

As for Gates: He can't stop talking about a Pennsylvania ferry fare collector and legendary storyteller whose life spanned the entire 18th century and who was still riding her horse from Bucks County into Philadelphia at the age of 96.

Without the Biography, he says, "who in the world would have remembered Alice of Dunk's Ferry?"

Unknown figures from centuries past are hard to research, and many names in the database still await biographers. The living come with more information attached but offer their own challenges.

What do you do, for example, with sprinter Marion Jones, who had yet to admit to using steroids when her biography was written? Or with Barry Bonds?

What about Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell? Both were shoo-ins for inclusion, but both have had their legacies of achievement destabilized by the Iraq war. Both of their biographies, Yacovone says, have been recently revised.

What happens when Deval Patrick suddenly becomes governor of Massachusetts? Well, an entry is hustled up. What about Barack Obama, who, on the day Yacovone is interviewed, has just won the Iowa caucuses and is surging in the polls?

On the one hand, Yacovone points out that if Obama gets elected president, there won't be that much need to update his entry. People will know.

On the other hand, the beauty of a biographical dictionary produced in 2008 is that it can be updated online. In fact the online edition solves so many problems that one has to ask:

Why is there a print edition at all?

'You Can Have Your Cake . . .'

Oxford's Aiello has a simple answer to that question. "At the time we launched it," he says, "the marketplace still wanted print."

You can order the print version right now for $795. The online version is proceeding more slowly and won't include all 4,100 entries for another 10 months or so. It is part of a collection of online reference tools called the Oxford African American Studies Center, available by subscription.

Aiello is not sure, however, that a second print edition will ever appear. The online product comes with too many benefits.

There's the lack of manufacturing cost, of course, and the by-now-familiar virtue of being able to link between entries.

There's the ease of making revisions. An online work can reflect new scholarship quickly and it makes including living people a much less hazardous proposition.

There's the infinite space available. The Du Bois Institute's database now contains upward of 15,000 names. In theory, all could be included.

Finally, putting this and similar works online has the potential to resolve a question that the compilers of specialized biographical dictionaries are forever being asked: Aren't they, despite their good intentions, perpetuating a form of ghettoization?

The beauty of working in an online biographical universe, Gates explains, is that "you can have your cake and eat it, too." Before long, users will be able to search across all Oxford's reference tools without specifying race -- but they'll still be able to separate African American entries if they want to.

Whether they're talking online or print, Higginbotham and Gates both express enormous satisfaction with the historical rescue efforts.

"I'm exhilarated," Gates says. "These people are amazing." If someone had enough time, it would be great "just to start with A and read to the end."

You won't catch him sitting down to do that himself, however. And it's not just because he's thinking ahead to his African biography project, which should daunt him -- all those languages! all that history! -- but doesn't appear to.

No. He's already lighting out for new territory.

"Oxford doesn't know it yet," Gates says cheerfully, "but I want to do blacks in Latin America and the Caribbean."