Henry Louis Gates Jr. Launches New Black-History Series

Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. has launched a weekly black-history series on TheRoot.com, with his inaugural column on Joel Augustus Rogers, a 1930s-era journalist widely respected in the black press. In 1934, Rogers published 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro With Complete Proof: A Short Cut to the World History of the Negro, a book that Gates first found while an undergraduate at Yale. Rogers has inspired Gates to name his column after the book, as Gates seeks to dispel the myth that there is just one African-American experience. The column is part of a run-up to Gates’s six-part PBS series The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, filming now and airing next year.