For Henry Louis Gates Jr., NAACP’s Spingarn Medal is ‘one of the greatest honors in my life’

At the recent NAACP Convention in Las Vegas, the storied Spingarn Medal was awarded to Henry Louis Gates Jr.

The Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research is the 109th recipient of the prestigious prize, the oldest and most continuous recognition conferred for outstanding achievements by Black Americans. 

“Because of its longevity and exclusivity, it has a certain mystical aura around it, for sure,” Gates said following the ceremony. “I never dreamed that anyone would find my achievements worthy of this wonderful prize.”

Presenting Gates with the medal was colleague and friend Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and of African and African American Studies. Her remarks opened with a bit of background on the prize itself, first awarded in 1915.

“As it happens, I am not the first professor on the Harvard faculty to be awarded the Spingarn Medal,” Gates noted. “That honor goes to Evelyn’s late husband, Judge A. Leon Higginbotham, in 1996.” 

In her speech, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham went on to underscore Gates’ visionary contributions as an academic and institutional leader. “When he joined the Harvard faculty in 1991, he breathed new life into the interdisciplinary field of African American Studies,” she said. “This field of studies has grown in respect and grown worldwide, in no small part because of him.”

For most professors, Higginbotham added, that accomplishment alone would be satisfactory. But Gates has continued to publish works of history and literary criticism even while branching out into documentary filmmaking and creating the long-running PBS series “Finding Your Roots.” Meanwhile, the Hutchins Center has become “a marvel for people to behold,” housing not only the W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute, a multidisciplinary fellowship program that is nearly 50 years old, but also the Cooper Gallery, the Hiphop Archive, Transition Magazine, and the Afro-Latin American Research Institute, among its 12 units reaching into every corner of the African diaspora.

“Henry Louis Gates Jr. is an ever-flowing fountain of ideas, always seeking new ways to convey knowledge about people of African descent,” Higginbotham said.

At least a dozen additional members of what Gates called “the Harvard family” have received the Spingarn Medal. They include author, activist, and NAACP co-founder W.E.B. Du Bois 1890, M.A. 1891, Ph.D. 1895 (awarded the medal in 1920); the Nobel Laureate diplomat Ralph Bunche, M.A. ’28, Ph.D. ’34 (awarded in 1949); and attorney Charles Hamilton Houston, L.L.B. 1923 (awarded posthumously in 1950). 

“To be considered worthy of joining this august assemblage of so many of my personal heroes is truly one of the greatest honors in my life,” Gates said.