Skip's broken hip
Banned Histories of Race in America
Skip had a broken hip. It had started as an unnoticed hairline fracture weeks earlier. But now just the pain from standing collapsed him to the floor of the doctor’s office. Even though the doctor watched this happen, he didn’t believe anything was actually wrong.
Skip was only 14 years old at the time and if I told you nothing else, you might be tempted to think his age was the source of the doctor’s doubt. A broken hip is an unusual injury for a child, especially when it happens – as it had for Skip – during a touch football game. But something else was going on in this moment. You see, Skip was Black, the doctor white and this was in 1964 Piedmont, West Virginia.
During the examination, Skip had told the doctor that he also wanted to be a doctor someday. The doctor responded to this by telling Skip’s mother that nothing was wrong with her child except for being an “overachiever”.
Skip would later explain, “Back then, the term didn't mean what it usually means today. In Appalachia, in 1964, ‘overachiever’ designated a sort of pathology: the overstraining of your natural capacity. A colored kid who thought he could be a doctor -- just for instance -- was headed for a breakdown.”
Rightfully furious, Skip’s mother removed her child from the situation, bringing him University Medical Center, 60 miles away. There, his injury was taken seriously and he received the proper medical treatment, but it was still 1964. The technology for such an injury could only do so much, especially for a growing 14-year-old. Skip’s next fifteen years would be spent in constant pain.
The pain, however, did not keep him from accomplishment. After a year at Potomac State College, Skip would transfer to Yale where he’d receive a B. A. in History. He was the first Black American to be receive the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award, which brought him to the University of Cambridge in the U. K. where he would receive his PhD in English Language and Literature.
Soon, Skip would be back at Yale where he became a professor. Then he was recruited by Cornell. Then Duke. Then Harvard. And after authoring more than ten books, receiving more than 50 honorary degrees and countless other awards including being in Time Magazine’s 25 Most Influential Americans, at the age of 57 Skip got the limb lengthening procedure he’d been waiting for.
All was good in the world. For a couple of years. Then, one day after arriving home from China having just met with Yo-Yo Ma, Skip discovered his front door was jammed. He entered through the back door and tried to open it from the inside, but it was stuck. He recruited his driver to help him and eventually it opened, but the lock was broken. The driver left. Skip got on the phone to Harvard maintenance, as the building was owned by the university.
As he was requesting the door be fixed, Skip noticed a police officer standing on his porch. “Officer, can I help you?” Skip asked.
“Would you step out onto the porch.”
Skip would later recall of the incident, “All the hairs stood up on the back of my neck, and I realized that I was in danger. And I said to him no, out of instinct. I said, ‘No, I will not.’
“He said ‘I’m here to investigate a 911 call for breaking and entering into this house.’ And I said ‘That’s ridiculous because this happens to be my house. And I’m a Harvard professor.’ He says ‘Can you prove that you’re a Harvard professor?’ I said yes, I turned and closed the front door to the kitchen where I’d left my wallet, and I got out my Harvard ID and my Massachusetts driver’s license which includes my address and I handed them to him.
“Now it’s clear that he had a narrative in his head: A black man was inside someone’s house, probably a white person’s house, and this black man had broken and entered, and this black man was me.”
Skip repeatedly asked the officer for his name and badge number, but the officer refused, turned his back and began to leave. Skip followed, continuing his request. Then he noticed six other officers on his porch. He stepped outside to ask the other officers their names and badge numbers only to be answered with, “Thank you for accommodating our request. You are under arrest.”
Skip, who, again, was once listed in Time Magazine’s 25 Most Influential Americans—but was still Black, was arrested on his own porch, charged with disorderly conduct.
News of the arrest travelled fast and made national headlines. Even though Skip was released within hours, the charges dropped five days later, a national argument about racial profiling ensued and everyone was weighing in. Six months into his first term, the president at the time, Barack Obama said, “the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home.”
The incident then escalated to the point where Skip, the arresting officer and Obama all had a publicized meeting, referred to as The Beer Summit. Skip would later say of the Summit, “I thought that it would be hubristic and dishonest if I compared what happened to me to what happens to black people in the inner city….Well, that might be related to police excesses and abuses, but it’s a far end of the scale, and I was able to reverse what happened to me, unlike an Eric Garner.”
Obama would later say that the incident caused an enormous drop in support from white voters that was never recovered.
These days Skip, or as you may know him, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. remains one of America’s most influential people as the author of more than 20 books and the host of Finding Your Roots on PBS.
https://www.nytimes.com/1990/12/09/magazine/about-men-a-giant-step.html
https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/henry-louis-skip-gates-jr
https://www.hss.edu/newsroom_henry-louis-gates-hss-limb-lengthening-procedure.asp
https://www.theroot.com/skip-gates-speaks-1790869826
https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/12/politics/obama-memoir-promised-land/index.html
this article sent me to the video of the woman who made the 911 call. thanks Cambridge PD before mentioning Gates
https://youtu.be/WcNL59gw7YA?si=3L0XqS2pBqKDjPwr