Gates had earlier racial confrontation

updated 8:42 p.m. ET July 24, 2009

NEW YORK - Decades ago — long before Harvard, long before his books and documentaries — Henry Louis Gates Jr. and some friends nearly set off a brawl trying to integrate a West Virginia club.

Gates and the others were circled by a white mob. The owner screamed at the black students to leave, slamming one of them against the wall. The club was shut down, but Gates had been marked: West Virginia police, he would write in his memoir, placed him on a list of those who might be detained should race riots break out during election time.

"Someone in authority had decided I was dangerous?" he wrote. "I mean, I liked to think so."

Gates rarely has been considered a dangerous man. Gregarious, outgoing, media-savvy — yes. But in the years after the incident in Keyser, W.Va., his unrelenting focus on black life in America was intellectual. He has written essays, compiled reference works, searched for slave narratives, produced documentaries, assembled a mighty team of colleagues at Harvard.

"He's unquestionably one of the great public intellectuals. He puts people together, he makes a million speeches. He's on airplanes a lot. I think he has 50 honorary degrees by now," says David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, for which Gates has been a contributor.

Now a dispute with police has brought Gates down into the arena again.

Reached Thursday by telephone, Gates told The Associated Press he had no further comments to make about the incident, in which he was suspected of breaking into a house — his own — and then charged with disorderly conduct when he raged at a police officer.

Delves into black history with fervor
Gates' life has been an almost perfect arc of energy and ascent. A mill worker's son, he graduated with honors from Yale and has devoted himself to discovering and explaining the very marrow of the black past.

Video   Scholar's arrest raises racism claims July 21: Police responding to a call about a home break-in arrest famed African-American Harvard scholar, Henry Louis Gates Jr. as he tries to force open his front door. WHDH's Byron Barnett reports. NBC News Channel

As head of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, Gates has consciously attempted to build upon Du Bois' scholarship and to live out, and up to, his place in what Du Bois called "The Talented Tenth" of black elites.

Gates' projects have included an encyclopedia of Africans and African Americans, an anthology of African American literature and documentaries about Abraham Lincoln and "The Wonders of the African World." His books include an influential work of cultural criticism, "The Signifying Monkey"; and a compilation of essays, "13 Ways of Looking at a Black Man," which features pieces on Colin Powell, Louis Farrakhan and O.J. Simpson's murder trial.

"There are people who talk about President Obama being a three-dimensional chess player, operating on a lot of levels at once, and that's a good description of Skip," says fellow Harvard professor Lani Guinier, using the nickname Gates has had since childhood.

"He's entrepreneurial. He has an eye for investments and for networks that are a potential source of support. He has an eye for talent, for bringing in the best people he can to Harvard. And he has an eye for the media, for positioning himself and knowing how to present a story."

He has told his own story in a memoir, "Colored People." Gates was born in 1950 in Piedmont, W.Va., then a segregated mill community. His first knowledge of whites was through television, in sitcoms such as "The Life of Riley," which featured a factory worker, like Gates' dad. His family initially had little interest in protest, wondering why blacks would want to eat at white-owned restaurants since it was believed that whites couldn't cook.

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