In the late summer of 2004, Barack Obama agreed to participate in a forum on race relations held at the Old Whaling Church in Edgartown.
African American History
February 25, 2010
My grandfather, Charles Shearer, was born into slavery. Henrietta Shearer was of Native American and African American descent. They were both educated at Hampton University.
August 20, 2009
Lauren Martin
Nodding to Professor Henry Louis (Skip) Gates Jr. at his Whaling Church panel discussion Achieving Equality in the Age of Obama last night, Princeton professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell shook her head and said: ”If you had told me this time last year, when we were all pretty emotionally up and excited, even though George W. Bush was still our President, that we would actually feel worse a year later, when Barack Obama was our President, about questions of race in America, I would have told you you were lying.”
August 20, 2009
Sam Bungey
Henry Louis (Skip) Gates Jr. uses the quiet entrance, through the corridors of the Martha's Vineyard Regional High School to a backstage area of the performing arts center, no doubt the sort of precaution he regularly takes since his arrest and high profile beer with the President last month.
But as he enters, he bellows with a theatrical gesture of his walking cane in the direction of his friend and legal counsel, Charles J. Ogletree Jr., the man he calls Tree.
August 6, 2009
Mimi Wells
It was a busy day for Kamala Harris; her Vineyard vacation was drawing to a close and she was pressed for time. Stopping for a television interview on her way to catch a flight to New York city, the San Francisco district attorney, who is running for California Attorney General in 2010, arrived hurried but not flustered. The lights snapped on, a cameraman mimed a countdown, and she was on; speaking with precision about crime rates, recidivism, and the California budget crisis.
August 3, 2009
Mike Seccombe
Nobel prize-winning economist Robert Solow had the overflow crowd roaring with laughter from the very start of his introduction of Henry Louis Gates Jr. at the Martha’s Vineyard Book Festival on Sunday.
“It’s not often,” he deadpanned, “that you get the chance to introduce a deserving but obscure scholar . . . .”
And people say Americans don’t understand irony.
July 30, 2009
Bettye Foster Baker
IN SEARCH OF OUR ROOTS: How 19 Extraordinary Americans Reclaimed Their Past. By Henry Louis Gates Jr. Crown. January, 2009. 424 pages. $27.50.
July 23, 2009
Elizabeth Gates
In early October 2008 I was invited to Chicago to sit in the Family and Friends Tent in Bryant Park and witness the possible election of our nation’s 44th President, Barack Hussein Obama.
January 22, 2009
Sam Bungey
The last time a new president was sworn in the only Vineyard party to make the news was an anti-inaugural street march complete with protest placards and a theme song.
November 6, 2008
Mike Seccombe
Vineyard voters came down decisively on the winning side of history on Tuesday, turning out in record numbers to help elect America’s first black President.
August 18, 2008
Mark Alan Lovewell
Longtime friends and followers of the late Dorothy West gathered on Saturday afternoon in the shade on a hot August day to pay tribute to the writer, who was the last surviving member of the Harlem renaissance, and to share memories.
August 14, 2008
Alexander Trowbridge
Linsey Lee emerged from what was once the Vineyard’s first African American church last week peeling a respirator from her face. By her count, she had spent more than 150 hours in the Bradley Memorial Church in Oak Bluffs, and the mask stood as a shield between her and decades of dust.
