Gates Beats Back Digital Divide

DORCHESTER--Harvard met the hood in Dorchester last night, to use the words of Rev. Eugene F. Rivers 3d.

Professors, city officials and local teens gathered at Baker House, a settlement house here, to open a new after-school program sponsored by the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Studies.

The program, the brainchild of Du Bois Professor of the Humanities Henry Louis Gates Jr., is designed to teach neighborhood kids about the Internet through content that focuses on black history and culture.

Forty neighborhood middle school and high school students will spend a semester working with Encyclopedia Africana, a program developed by Gates and Professor of Afro-American Studies and Philosophy K. Anthony Appiah.

The program is designed as a pilot for a series of similar ventures that Gates hopes to establish across the country. The goal is no less than to close the "digital divide"--the growing gap between the technological haves and have-nots.

Rivers, the famous Pentecostal Minister who serves as President of Baker House, says that program is extraordinary because it brings a top scholar into the realm of public activism.

"Henry Louis Gates is now moving to a new level of engagement," he said. "He is launching a frontal attack on the digital divide."

At Baker House last night, the young people in the program--some of whom will participate as part of their probation--mingled with the likes of Gates, Appiah, Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, and Police Commissioner Paul Evans, over bug juice and catered hors d'oeuvres.

Rivers led a ribbon cutting ceremony that culminated in the slicing of a bow over a projected image from the Africana Encyclopedia with a pair of giant sheers.

"This is a major victory," Rivers told a packed house. "In launching this program we are launching a model that we want to replicate across the country."

The guests then toured the House's Technology Center, filled with new computer equipment that was piled in a Barker Center hallway just last week.

The students were already at work in the lab, poking around the video introduction to Africana, visiting everythingblack.com and loudly playing DMX, Christina Aguilera and

Eminem.

The classes will use a curriculum developed under the leadership of Aaron Meyers '98. There will be four single-sex groups divided between high school and middle school students. The class topics this term are revolutionary African-Americans and African-American music.

Students will spend the first hour of each session in a lecture format and the second hour working on projects. The computer resources will be available to Baker House visitors outside of class throughout the week.

The project that brought some of Harvard's biggest academic superstars to one of the city's poorest neighborhoods last night had its origins in a keynote address that Gates delivered at the United Negro College Fund meeting in Minneapolis on January 18, 1999.

This was also the launch date for his Africana.com website, which now gets 18 million hits a month.

Gates said he envisions the program as a kind of "Hebrew school" for blacks, "an after-school program to teach culture and language in your local neighborhood."

"We use the basic concept and digitize it," he said. "We're concerned that black people master the new form of literacy. We want these programs to serve as digital bridges."

Over the course of the next two years, Gates, Appiah, art historian Karen Dalton and other Du Bois Institute staff secured a $200,000 grant from the Markel Foundation, cultivated a number of smaller donors, established a relationship with the Baker House and developed detailed curricula.

Teacher training finished last week and instruction begins Monday.

The Du Bois Institute has hired Educational Development Center (EDC) in Newton to evaluate the program, and the idea that engaging content can facilitate the development of digital skills, over the next year.

Whether or not the thesis proves true, Rivers said Gates' coming to Dorchester is important.

"The political and institutional significance is quite astounding," he said. "Gates is...physically, financially and institutionally [becoming] a presence in this community."