Faces of America by Henry Louis Gates Jr

Author:Henry Louis Gates Jr. [Gates Jr., Henry Louis]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2010-06-10T16:00:00+00:00

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Elizabeth Alexander

1962

DR. ELIZABETH ALEXANDER is a poet, professor, and chair of the African American Studies Department at Yale University. She is the author of five books of poems (including American Sublime, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize) and two collections of essays. Among her many honors, she has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the inaugural Alphonse Fletcher, Sr. Fellowship for work that “contributes to improving race relations in American society.” In 2008, Barack Obama selected her to compose and read a poem at his inauguration as president of the United States.

Elizabeth was my student at Yale and since then has become a dear friend, someone whom I have relied on for advice and inspiration time and time again. I asked her to be in the series for the same reason that I asked Malcolm Gladwell: because both can trace their ancestry, in part, to the West Indies. I also invited her because over the years I thought I had come to know part of her family story, and I was fascinated by the way in which it embodies the complex nature of racial identity in America. She and her parents, like countless other African Americans, forged strong identities for themselves despite knowing very little about their deep ancestors. Her mother has written two excellent books on her family’s past, but there are profound questions that she has been unable to answer. I wanted to take a try at these questions myself. And I must say, the results truly surprised her and me. Elizabeth, as we shall see, has one of the largest documented family trees of any African American on record—with ancestors whose lives, it turns out, stretch from Jamaica to Wales, from the heart of Africa to the heart of Europe.

Her story begins in one of my favorite places on earth: New York City. Elizabeth Alexander was born on May 30, 1962, in Harlem. Her parents were Clifford Leopold Alexander, Jr., and Adele Logan, both also born in New York, he on September 21, 1933, and she on January 26, 1938. Theirs was an exceptionally close family with a clear sense of what it meant to black and what it took to succeed in 1960s America. Elizabeth’s father was a pioneer in the civil rights movement and a very significant person in African American history. A trailblazer in the truest sense, Clifford attended Harvard University in the 1950s, where he was elected the first African American student-body president. He graduated with an A.B. in government and then went on to study law at Yale, one of the first black people to earn degrees from both those universities. Among his many accomplishments, he was one of President Lyndon Johnson’s closest advisers on civil rights, and he played a major role in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He was also, under President Carter, the first African American secretary of the army. In this capacity, he promoted Colin Powell to the rank of brigadier general.

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