Markers of Hope In UVM speech, renowned scholar Henry Louis
Gates announces genome project to inspire inner-city children -
By Lee Ann Cox Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates -- public
intellectual, MacArthur “genius” Fellow, recipient of 51
honorary degrees -- is a true storyteller, irreverent and
irrepressible, speaking before a crowd as he might at a friend’s
dinner table, deep and rich as the topic might be. So it was as
he delivered this week’s Martin Luther King celebration keynote
address, riffing a musical performer’s “bad” hat, the shaved-
headed Gates describing his college Afro as making “my man”
Cornell West’s unmistakable silhouette look like a crew cut. He
was at UVM for the second occasion that paid homage to the civil
rights movement and the work of great African Americans. In
2007, when he received one of those honorary degrees, he met
commencement speaker Georgia Congressman John Lewis, one of
King’s “lieutenants” who had been a hero of Gates’ since he was
a teenager. “It was a bit like being