GATES: I don't think the riots derailed the civil rights movement. I think that the implication of King's assassination has not been fully appreciated. The riots showed the depth of frustration over racism and economic deprivation.

Remember, King was participating in a protest against the wages of garbage workers when he was assassinated, and he had turned his analysis away purely from a race based analysis to a race cum class based analysis which was very important and which, as James Foreman said recently, was something that they hadn't largely considered during the civil rights era. They thought that racism was the big thing. If we could get rid of legal racism all of us would plunge headlong into the middle class. Well, it turned out that that's not the case.

But what was really troubling about King's assassination was the absence of a plan, an analysis, someone who had understood how race and class produce their peculiar compounding effect in the United States and the implications that has on people of color in general and African-Americans in particular.

So the leadership splintered, went all sorts of ways. You had young radical black power advocates who were obsessed with black is beautiful and with a race-based notion of our oppression. You had fringe groups like the Black Panther Party which had moved to an economic analysis and certainly to the advocacy of violence and guns and self defense and protection, but they were being annihilated systematically by the FBI and they were totally annihilated eventually. And then you had the remnants of the center, King's successors, who were floundering around, trying to hold onto their little bit of turf and I think that we've suffered because of a lack of a coherent analysis as to what causes our oppression. I think that the violence has terrified America and led America to do what it generally does in the face of black violence - which is throw water on the fire in the form of immediate grants, bandaid solutions instead of to deeper structural cancerous causes.

CROSS: What brought King to the issue of class?

GATES: Dr. King's Nobel Prize had a more powerful transforming effect on him than I think he realized at the time. He went to Stockholm, he went to Oslo where he received the Prize, he saw a combined economy, a mixed economy, an economy that was capitalist but had -- an economy that was capitalist certainly but that also had a socialist safety net, so that medicine was socialized, pensions, etc. He thought it was much more humane. What's interesting about that is that Booker T. Washington went to Denmark in the early part of this century for a similar reason. He was concerned with how vocational education worked in Denmark and if the Danish model could be imported into the United States, and that was a pivotal trip for him and it certainly was for Dr. King too. So gradually King, who had been accused by Hoover of being a communist all along, gradually moved toward a more socialized form of capitalism.

Most black leaders, whether left, right or center, from Frederick Douglas and Martin Delaney on in the middle of the 19th century have not even wondered about the merits of the capitalist system. Few exceptions, but not very many.

Marcus Garvey's not an exception. Elijah Mohammed was not an exception. Farrakhan is not an exception. They are all bourgeois capitalists. I mean they believe in capitalism. They think what's wrong with capitalism is that we don't have our fair share, and they're certainly right about that.

But King decided that we needed a mixed economy and he thought that the system itself, not evil people, but an inherently flawed system, was the cause of black oppression and that was quite a transformation. Very important. But very few people -- there are exceptions of course -- but very few people have followed that up. Cornel West's analysis is very similar to that, I would say.

CROSS: The Panthers picked it up in their rhetoric certainly.

GATES: Yeah, the Panthers were what Eldridge Cleaver called 'voodoo nationalists.' They loved black nationalism and the trappings of black nationalism but they based their political analysis on a form of Marxism and they saw themselves as part of a larger revolutionary vanguard that manifested itself in Cuba, in Hanoi, in Algiers, in China, in wherever they could make allies. Che Guevera was very important to Eldridge Cleaver. The successful revolution in Cuba was very important to them, and indeed when he fled the country he and Kathleen went to Cuba where they became quickly disillusioned with the Cuban form of communism.

CROSS: As I look at the list of the 'grizzled elders' that you had made, most of them were in what I would call the Black Power movement as opposed to the civil rights. In fact only Julian and James Foreman I consider traditional.

GATES: I tried to pick people who were representative of a broad spectrum of the fissures and factions of the civil rights establishment, and a lot of people are dead. Roy Wilkins is dead, Thurgood's dead, Wiggin Young of course died swimming in Nigeria. But these are the guys who are left, and also they were some of the most energetic, some of the most vocal in calling for a radical transformation of American society, so I thought it would be interesting to talk to them to see what would have happened to America had they succeeded. What would have happened to America had their programs been adopted, either through violence or through peaceful legislative means?

CROSS: Is the effort to try to find out what would have happened or what mistakes they made?

GATES: Both. Yeah, but implicitly you do both, but if you lead off saying what mistakes did you make, most people would say I didn't make any mistakes, get the hell out of my house. I think the surprising thing in my interviews is that very few people even imagined, I quickly realized, that they would win. They wanted to survive, they felt the things that they felt, I mean they took to heart the things that they said, they were deeply committed but they never dreamed that they would actually win. And the way to find out is to say what would America look like 30 years later had you won? And generally they say,we'd have more multicultural textbooks. Like, excuse me? We need a revolution for that?

CROSS: What is the brain trust you are building at Harvard? Explain to me the idea of the brain trust.....

GATES: What we're trying to do first and foremost is to build a strong academic department at a major research institution of higher learning. You don't need to be Albert Einstein to figure out how to do that. You look at other departments, how do they become great departments? They became great departments by inviting the senior scholars, the most productive scholars, the central scholars in their discipline to come to Cambridge and work together, and that's what we've done. When I was appointed I asked Anthony Appiah who's the most brilliant African philosopher ever if he would come, because I believe that African and African-American studies should be brought together in one way or another.

And then together we made a list of people we'd like to see as colleagues, Cornel West, William Julius Wilson, Evelyn Brooks Higgenbotham, Leon Higgenbotham, people like that were on the list.

Lawrence Bobo, to whom we've just extended an offer, Patricia Williams, to whom we hope to make an offer soon, Lani Guinier, we hope that she comes to the law school. These are people, if we could in the med school and public health, in the Kennedy School, if we could extend offers to an ideal group of people who are involved in one way or another with what we might loosely call African-American studies, who would those people be? And that's what we did. And to our astonishment many of those people are now here and we hope to bring as many in over the next three or four years as we've brought in over the last five years.

Now, once you get them here, then what? You cannot, as a chairman, tell William Julius Wilson or Anthony Appiah or Cornel West what to do. All I want to do is keep everybody happy so that they stay and so we can build a strong Ph.D. program but also through the Du Bois Institute, the oldest research institution devoted to African-American studies in the United States, through that vehicle begin to address the problems of race and class that afflict America. A black think tank as it were, a black Brookings and I recently became a member of the board of the Brookings Institution. I was very excited about that because I thought I could learn a lot about the history of one of America's foremost think tanks and figure out what we can imitate and where we need to make departures to. I feel like Doc Holliday.

Then I thought it would be good to build connections with other black think tanks, Trans Africa in Washington, the Joint Center run by Eddie Williams in Washington, a few others perhaps, and figure out how we can pool our resources to begin systematically and in a non-ideological way to address these problems. We need to study everything. We need to throw everything up for grabs. We need to get rid of all of our assumptions, our predispositions and start over. How did we end up with the largest middle class in history and the largest underclass in history 30 years after Martin Luther King was killed?

CROSS: When you say 'we' you mean --

GATES: America The central paradox confronting our generation of African-Americans is this: we have simultaneously and paradoxically the largest black middle class in history and the largest black underclass in history.

45% of all black children live at or beneath the poverty line. Nobody predicted this in 1968. We thought that if we could move into the middle class to such a great extent as we had then everybody would be in the middle class. Thurgood Marshall told his associates the day of Brown v. Board, it's all over now, boys, five years we won't even need the NAACP, we won't even need advocacy groups, we will all be members of the American mainstream. And as we know all too painfully that didn't take place.

First of all, it was naive to assume that tens of millions of black people would all be in the same class. You see, we were all in the same class before the law under segregation. If you have a law that says all blacks shall or all blacks shan't then you're all in the same class whether you're a janitor or a doctor, whether you're a brain surgeon or a hairdresser. But once that law is lifted then the class distinctions which had always obtained within the African-American community, as every black person knows, came to the fore. In fact they became infinitely more complex because instead of having what my mother used to call colored money, now if you were in the upper middle class you could, after affirmative action, have access to white money. Meaning you didn't live in Sugar Hill in Harlem, in the upper class section any more, you could eventually move to Scarsdale or Greenwich or Stanford or some other upper middle class white suburban town. And as William Julius Wilson has pointed out, that had enormous implications for the African-American community. All the middle class role models took a hike.

The people living in inner cities don't want to live in inner cities necessarily. They want to live in nice communities where they feel safe. A lot of people love black culture and they like the cultural space that let's say Harlem was, or Bedford-Stuyvesant was, but if they have to choose between the legacy of our culture and rats and roaches and drug heads and the homeless, well what are they going to do? Where are you going to raise your children? They want to move. So they move when they could.

CROSS: What you offered to William Julius Wilson I know in particular was to be with like-minded black folks who were all going to tackle the major issue facing black Americans in 1996.....

GATES: The sales pitch--is we need you more than any institution that you can think of, particularly the University of Chicago in Bill Wilson's case. We need you because we're young, we're building a team, we're building an institution. It's not fixed in concrete, it's not formulated and you will be associated with people just like you. People who work very hard, who have a lot of energy, who are very productive and who are passionately concerned about solving the problems confronting too large a segment of the African-American community.

That is what appeals to people. It's very lonely being a prominent black intellectual at an institution where you're the only prominent black intellectual. That was the model that was followed in the late 60s when black studies started. You'd get one here and one there and one here, like Johnny Appleseed. And 20 years later you hoped a great apple tree producing some sort of fruit would grow.

Our model is to build a forest. Our model is to bring a group of people together who can cross pollinate. You can think of so many things that you would never think of otherwise if you're surrounded by creative people and that team effort is what we're trying to foster here. And we encourage it by having a weekly seminar, the Du Bois seminar 12 to 2. It's a brown bag lunch, maybe 50 people come each week. Someone speaks for an hour and then we have an hour of questions and answers.

We had one yesterday. Bill Wilson was there, Cornel West was there and frankly, it was hard for me to follow the paper because I was so excited at looking around and seeing Anthony Appiah and Wilson and Evelyn Brooks Higgenbotham all in a room together, and then listening to their questions, their comments, the way we agree, the way we disagree. That's wonderful, and we're hoping to start a discussion group among the faculty in the second semester to consider specifically the problems of race and class and that'll be headed by Bill Wilson and I think the attendance will be 100%, 150% and the results over a long period of time should be quite spectacular. You see, we want to start doing white papers. Non-ideological analyses of very specific problems which then can be pieced together into larger policy statements. They can be used by people like the Black Caucus or occupants in the White House and wherever. Solid reliable research without an ax to grind. One of the most satisfying aspects of being part of this group is that there is no ideological position that any of us can hold that would get us kicked out of the group. We have enormous respect for each other and it is beyond our idiosyncratic ideological quirks and twists and differences.