African American Lives: An Overview

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute of African American History at Harvard University, speaks about the development of the African American National Biography, the largest African American biographical collection ever published, spanning more than four centuries, with 4,100 entries in eight volumes. The series presents African American history as told through the lives of its most notable historic actors, documenting and dramatizing the central role played by African Americans in our nation's history, from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries.