Dream Team

Beginning in the mid 1990s and continuing until 2001, the Harvard Dream Team was a gathering of very well-established scholars at Harvard University's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research and Department of Afro American Studies. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a major literary figure, spearheaded the idea of bringing together a “dream team” of scholars, which included Cornel West, William Julius Wilson, Evelyn Higginbotham, and Kwame Anthony Appiah. Seeking to create an opportunity to jumpstart Black Studies at Harvard, Gates hoped that this group of scholars would be the new intellectual wave of the field. The Dream Team had several successes in the public arena, spreading liberal educational views, highlighting the importance of African Americans in the American academy, and producing useful documents for the field, including the Encarta Encyclopedia. The Dream Team, under intense public scrutiny, had several personal and professional circumstances that resulted in diminishing their number and influence at Harvard. However, it is generally [Page 222]believed that irreconcilable differences with the administration at the university led to the ultimate breakup of the group. By 2003, of the entire Dream Team, only Gates, Higginbotham, and Wilson remained at Harvard.

All of the major players in the Dream Team had their own individual achievements. Henry Louis Gates was featured on Time magazine's “25 Most Influential Americans” list in 1997, received a National Humanities Medal in 1998, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999. Gates is coeditor of the encyclopedia Encarta Africana (1999) published on CD-ROM by Microsoft and in book form by Basic Civitas Books under the title Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience (2000). He is also the author of Wonders of the African World (1999), the book companion to the 6-hour BBC/PBS television series of the same name. Gates's most popular works include the Norton Anthology of African American Literature that he edited in 1996, which features the writings of Frederick Douglass, Phillis Wheatley, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and others and The Signifying Monkey: Towards A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (1988), which focuses on African American vernacular.

Cornel West taught primarily in the field of African American philosophy of divinity while he was at Harvard University. Prior to his tenure at Harvard, which began in 1994, West taught at Yale University, Union Theological Seminary, and Princeton University, where he was chair of the program in Afro-American Studies. He is the author of numerous books, including his most famous book, Race Matters (1993), Jews and Blacks: Let the Healing Begin (1995), The Cornel West Reader (1999), The African-American Century (2002), and Democracy Matters (2004). He has also recorded a jazz/hip-hop CD called Sketches of My Culture (2001). West's visibility outside the academy created friction between him and Harvard's administration, and West eventually left Harvard in 2002 and returned to Princeton.

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham began teaching at Harvard in 1998. Higginbotham is the author of Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (1993). She also is coeditor with Darlene Clark Hine and Leon Litwack of the Harvard Guide to African American History (2001). William Julius Wilson arrived at Harvard in 1996, after teaching sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and University of Chicago for 24 years. Wilson's major works—The Declining Significance of Race (1978), The Truly Disadvantaged (1990), and When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (1997)—are noted for contending that the economic plight of blacks in America is the result of poverty from joblessness rather than race. Kwame Anthony Appiah grew up in Ghana and England. Among his books are Assertion and Conditionals (1985), For Truth in Semantics (1986), In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (1992), and, with Amy Gutmann, Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (1998). Appiah is also coeditor with Henry Louis Gates of Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience (2000). He joined the faculty at Princeton along with his fellow former Dream Team associate Cornel West in 2002.

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