The Hutchins Forum began as an experiment.
It was 1995, and Henry Louis (Skip) Gates Jr. was four years into his tenure at Harvard University, when he was tasked with building the “greatest center of African and African American studies in the world.”
The renowned literary critic and historian had been visiting the Vineyard since 1981, known to him by then as both a “smorgasbord” of intellectual activity and a special place in African American history. Mr. Gates asked himself: Could the Vineyard be an incubator for conversations of national importance on race, democracy and justice? And would the country’s foremost authorities on those topics be interested in coming to the Vineyard to explore them?
The answer, he discovered, was yes.
The Hutchins Forum, sponsored by Harvard University and philanthropists Glenn and Debbie Hutchins, remains a venerated Island tradition 31 years later, taking place annually at Edgartown’s Old Whaling Church.
“Our mission is to show the centrality of race and ethnicity to the history and the future of American democracy,” Mr. Gates told the Gazette in an interview this week. “African American history is American history. There is no American history without the substantial presence and input and experiences of African Americans.”
This year’s forum is titled Balance of Power: Redistricting, Courts, and the Right to Vote. It takes place on August 20, featuring former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder as moderator, elections attorney Marc Elias, New York University law professor Melissa Murray and Terri A. Sewell, who represents Alabama’s 7th district in the House of Representatives. Her district includes Selma, a pole star of the Civil Rights Movement.
“The year’s most urgent question to us is, what is the relationship among race, justice and democracy, as figured through the right to vote?” Mr. Gates said.
Mr. Gates founded the forum through Harvard’s W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute, now part of its Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, which he directs. Americans’ voting rights, he said, are under threat, given the Supreme Court’s systematic dismantling of the Voting Rights Act since 2013.
“Now the Supreme Court is undermining the 15th Amendment, undermining the right of Black people to vote, and we need to protest that,” he said.
For its first few years, the forums were run “on a shoestring,” according to Mr. Gates. Enter the Hutchins family in 2002, whose name now marks the forum and is synonymous with African and African American scholarship at Harvard.
In a recent Gazette interview, Glenn Hutchins recalled attending his first Hutchins Forum, then called the Du Bois Institute Forum, and being invigorated by what he saw. He approached Mr. Gates to say he wanted to help.
“I came directly from the beach. I was dressed in a bathing suit and flip-flops,” Mr. Hutchins recalled to the Gazette. “I told him after the event I was going to give him my 25th reunion gift to Harvard, and he said he thought when I approached him, I was actually going to ask him for money.”
Since then, the Hutchins family has worked closely with Mr. Gates to produce the event each year, creating space for conversations tailored to the moment.
“Our partnership and friendship with Skip Gates in doing this is a very important part of our professional and personal lives,” Mr. Hutchins said. “He’s a national treasure, and the work that we do together is very meaningful to all of us.”
Both Mr. Hutchins and Mr. Gates are excited about this year’s guests.
As attorney general, Mr. Holder’s name was on the 2013 landmark case Shelby v. Holder, which saw the Supreme Court strike down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. Ms. Murray is a constitutional scholar, and Ms. Sewell is the lead sponsor of a pending bill to safeguard voter rights. Mr. Elias is “on the front lines of the legal struggle to thwart the anti-democratic voting rights rollback in our country,” Mr. Gates said.
In 2004, the Hutchins forum notably hosted former President Barack Obama, then a senator from Illinois, to talk about Brown v. Board of Education. Mr. Hutchins said the Old Whaling Church was Mr. Obama’s first stop after his now famous speech at that year’s Democratic National Convention.
The Hutchins family’s support for the event keeps it free and open to the public, and it’s streamed on PBS.
“There are a lot of those fundraising type events around the Island through the year [where] a lot of people are left pressing their nose against the window, trying to look in and see what’s going on inside…” Mr. Hutchins said. “Opening this stuff up broadly to the community is a really important thing to do, not just to some sort of self-appointed elite.”
For Mr. Gates, the Hutchins family has been critical in bringing the forum to audiences year after year, both by offering their resources and their ideas.
“No one has done more to support the field of African and African American studies philanthropically than Glenn and Debbie,” he said.
And for the Hutchins family, the hope is that the audience, consisting of guests from all over the Vineyard, the country and the world, will absorb what they learn in the Old Whaling Church and carry it onward.
“What we do here on Martha’s Vineyard is … a microcosm of what we’re trying to accomplish,” Mr. Hutchins said.
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