You are both strong believers in the idea that culture must be a conversation among different voices.   Our world is a place filled with diversity and overlapping histories. That is what makes America America.  It is part of America's story - and increasingly, it is an important element of the realities of many other countries as well.  Tolerance and understanding across cultural lines are essential. 

Almost a century ago, W.E.B. Du Bois announced that the most effective way to fight anti-black racism would be the publication of a comprehensive Encyclopedia Africana of the black world, that would be the equivalent of a black Encyclopedia Britannica.  DuBois believed that if people better understood black culture, they would no longer be able to make judgments based solely on skin color.  The project was plagued by nine decades of setbacks but in 1999, the Encyclopedia Africana finally came into existence, largely through the persistence of Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.   The end result - in print and digital formats -- was much more comprehensive than the four-volume set DuBois had originally imagined.

Henry Louis Gates has deepened the knowledge and broadened the conversation about the African American experience and the contribution of African Americans to the history of the United States.  In his writing and teaching and through his leadership of the "dream team" of scholars he brought together at Harvard, Gates has shed light on authors and traditions that had until then gone unknown.  He has described the American experience with force, with dignity - and, most of all, with color.