​Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and A’Lelia Bundles Discuss Gate’s New Book May 28  at 7 p.m.  
Press Release · Wednesday, May 22, 2019

Washington, DC

Join journalist A’Lelia Bundles and historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr., on Thursday, May 28, at 7 p.m., for a discussion of Gates’ new book, Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow.  This event is free and open to the public, and will be held in the William G. McGowan Theater of the National Archives Museum, and live streamed on YouTube.  Made possible in part by the National Archives Foundation through the generous support of The Boeing Company.

Attendees should use the Special Events entrance on Constitution Avenue at 7th Street, NW.  Reservations are recommended and can be made online. The building is Metro accessible on the Yellow and Green lines, Archives/Navy Memorial/Penn Quarter station. 

In Stony the Road, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., offers a new rendering of the struggle by African Americans for equality after the Civil War and the violent counter-revolution that subjugated them.The abolition of slavery in the aftermath of the Civil War is a familiar story, as is the civil rights revolution that transformed the nation after World War II. But the century in between remains a mystery: if emancipation sparked "a new birth of freedom" in Lincoln's America, why was it necessary to march in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s America? In this new book, Gates seeks to answer that question in a history that moves from the Reconstruction Era to the "nadir" of the African-American experience under Jim Crow, through to World War I and the Harlem Renaissance. 

Through his close reading of the visual culture of this tragic era, Gates reveals the many faces of Jim Crow and how, together, they reinforced a stark color line between white and black Americans. An essential tour through one of America's fundamental historical tragedies, Stony the Road is also a story of heroic resistance, as figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells fought to create a counter-narrative, and culture, inside the lion's mouth. As sobering as this tale is, it also has within it the inspiration that comes with encountering the hopes our ancestors advanced against the longest odds.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, and institution builder.  His six-part PBS documentary series, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross (2013), which he wrote, executive produced, and hosted, earned the Emmy Award for Outstanding Historical Program—Long Form, as well as the Peabody Award and NAACP Image Award. Having written for such leading publications as The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Time, Professor Gates now serves as editor-in-chief of TheRoot.com, a daily online magazine.

A’Lelia Bundles is National Archives Foundation Board chair emerita, a former ABC News executive and producer, and a Columbia University trustee. She is the author of four books including On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker, a biography of her great-great-grandmother that was named a New York Times Notable Book. She serves on the advisory boards of the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute and the March on Washington Film Festival.