Black in America

This is sad:

By Elizabeth Mehren
July 23, 2009

Reporting from Boston — In a region where summer preoccupations normally revolve around baseball and the weather, blogs exploded Wednesday with people eager to weigh in on issues of race, class and police harassment.

Talk radio made room for little else. And coffee counters in beach communities from South Boston to Martha’s Vineyard buzzed with discussions about Harvard’s prominent African American studies professor, Henry Louis Gates Jr., who was arrested after attempting to enter his home.

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Although Cambridge police had already dropped the charges against Gates, labeling the incident “regrettable and unfortunate,” the case continued to reverberate through an area that prides itself on a spirit of open-mindedness — despite its history of racial strife.

“This is not dying down, and it’s not going to,” said Callie Crossley, a Boston TV and radio commentator.

It all started last Thursday when Gates, returning after a 20-hour flight from China, was unable to open the front door to his house a block from Harvard Square. While his limo driver tried to help him, a woman called police to say that “two black males with backpacks” were trying to break into a home. A confrontation ensued. Gates, 58, was led away in handcuffs. A police mug shot of one of the country’s leading black intellectuals soon surfaced on the Internet.

Gates is the director of Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research and edits an online magazine on black news and culture. He has written numerous books, produced documentaries for PBS and BBC, won a MacArthur “genius” grant and in 1997 was one of Time magazine’s “25 Most Influential Americans.” According to Harvard’s website, he holds 49 honorary degrees.

Gates’ arrest has resonated “with persons of color, in particular,” Crossley said, because “if it could happen to him, it could happen to any of us.”