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The other Gates
Henry Louis Gates Jr., the head of Harvard's African-American studies department, is always provocative. Now he's out with "The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin.''
In a wide-ranging interview published Sunday in the Globe, he offers opinions on a host of black figures from the past, including James Baldwin and Stokely Carmichael. He said Stokely and others used "Uncle Tom'' as a metaphor for Martin Luther King Jr. Gates said, "King, they thought, was the long suffering, too Christian person leading the movement astray.''
Gates has been at Harvard for 15 years, and I was looking forward to finally hearing him, but this morning he apparently canceled his scheduled reading tonight in Harvard Square. Oh well, more time to read.
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contributors
Nicole Lamy is editor of the Globe's Books section.
Jan Gardner writes the "Shelf Life" column for the Globe's Books section.
