Henry Louis Gates, Harvard scholar, arrested for being black.
Henry Louis Gates, director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University and one of America’s most brilliant scholars, was arrested inside his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was handcuffed and held for several hours before being released. He was booked for “being loud and tumultuous.” And, apparently for being black in Cambridge.
Cambridge, home of MIT and Harvard, has a history of this kind of behavior.
“He and I both raised the question of if he had been a white professor, whether this kind of thing would have happened to him, that they arrested him without any corroborating evidence,” said S. Allen Counter, a Harvard Medical School professor who spoke with Gates about the incident Friday. “I am deeply concerned about the way he was treated, and called him to express my deepest sadness and sympathy.”
Counter, who had called Gates from the Nobel Institute in Sweden, where Counter is on sabbatical, said that Gates was “shaken” and “horrified” by his arrest.
Counter has faced a similar situation himself. The well-known neuroscience professor, who is also black, was stopped by two Harvard police officers in 2004 after being mistaken for a robbery suspect as he crossed Harvard Yard. They threatened to arrest him when he could not produce identification.
