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Rollins College Rollins Scholarship Online Oral Histories Archives and Special Collections 4-12-2018 Interview with Sylvester James Gates, Jr. Sylvester James Gates Jr Brown University Wenxian Zhang Rollins College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.rollins.edu/oralhist Part of the Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons Recommended Citation Gates, Sylvester James Jr and Zhang, Wenxian, "Interview with Sylvester James Gates, Jr." (2018). Oral Histories. 35. https://scholarship.rollins.edu/oralhist/35 This Oral History is brought to you for free and open access by the Archives and Special Collections at Rollins Scholarship Online. It has been accepted for inclusion in Oral Histories by an authorized administrator of Rollins Scholarship Online. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Dr. Sylvester James Gates, Jr. (Photo: ENERGY.GOV [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons) Sylvester James Gates, Jr., and Wenxian Zhang Interview April 12, 2018 WZ: Good afternoon. My name is Wenxian Zhang, I’m the Head of Archives and Special Collections at Olin Library, Rollins College. With me is Dr. James Gates, Jr., Ford Foundation Professor of Physics at Brown University. So, Dr. Gates, I understand you are a native Floridian? SJG: I was born in 1950 in Tampa, Florida. In those days, segregation really was by practice and law in Florida, and so there was a hospital for African Americans. It was called the Lily White Hospital, and that’s where I was born. WZ: Wow. And then I understand you have a father who served in the military? SJG: Yes, my father joined the U.S. military in 1942 or ’43; I don’t remember exactly, but one of those two years. He joined lying about his age. He was only seventeen, and he put eighteen on the forms. My father’s a very interesting man. I’ve often reflected on my life and how different it would have been with another father. My father decided when he was about fourteen that he did not wish to stay on the farm. His father, my grandfather, was a sugar cane farmer, and he actually owned property on which he actually did the farming. And it was his hope to pass the land on to his children. He had two sons. But my father decided at a very young age that—and the way that he put it, a couple of ways— he said, first of all, he didn’t think life would be interesting looking north at the south end of a mule. And the second thing he said was that he was sure that the world had something better for him off the farm than remaining on the farm. So he decided at a very young age that he was going to leave when he was seventeen. The Second World War was underway; there were inductions for soldiers to go and become part of the U.S. military. And so he joined. It was really interesting. He told me once, about a year or so before he died, that he weighed 127 pounds when he joined, or 128. And it's interesting because if he had been 125 or less, he would have not been allowed to join, so those two or three pounds of difference made the world of difference in my life. He served twenty-seven years. My mother was from Texas; San Marcos is the name of the town. She was an orphan. She and her brother were actually raised by different relatives. And she met my father as he was training in one of the military bases at San Antonio, I think probably Fort Sam Houston. And maybe a decade before he died, I spent about a week with Dad in San Antonio. I was invited to a conference, and I had extended to him an invitation to come, because the hotel was all paid for. And we spent, like I said, four or five days in the same hotel room. And I heard stories about my father’s life I had never heard before. For example, how he met my mother was something I had never known about. He says it was in a bar. He was on a barstool, and this elegant lady walked in, and she caught his eye, and he started trying to convince her that he was an okay guy. And the bar’s name was Tucker’s, I came to understand. The bar still exists to this day in San Antonio, although it’s in a different location from where he met Mom. He showed me the place that was there after they got married; their first apartment; and told me a lot of things about family history that was just remarkable to me, and so I treasure that to this day: that I had this opportunity of a week’s time, getting parts of the family history that were just unknown to me. And then he went off to the Second World War, leaving Charlie—her maiden name was Charlie Anglin, A-n-g-l-i-n. And he went off and then when he came back, they got married and stayed together until her death; she died in 1962. And in the process of the marriage, there were four children in total. I was the oldest, born in 1950. I have a brother, Ronald, who was born in 1951; a sister, born in 1952 in San Antonio; and a youngest brother, who was born in 1954, in St. John’s, Newfoundland, in Canada. Dr. Gates sharing a photo of himself at age eight, during his lecture “Why Am I A Theoretical Physicist?” at SunTrust Auditorium (Photo: Rollins College Archives) WZ: Wow. And so you had been moving around with your father and family because of military base transfers? SJG: Yes, it’s the usual thing in military life. Soldiers are posted to different army posts and bases, and there are facilities for families, often—either on base or very close to base. And so that was the first part of my life. WZ: So when did you move to Central Florida? SJG: Actually, I was in Central Florida a couple of times. Although I was born in Tampa, I lived in Orlando sometime around the period of being about maybe twelve, fourteen, or eighteen months old. Because oddly enough, I have a memory of my first haircut. I only discovered this in my late forties; that this sequence of images that I carried in my head were from my first haircut. I described them to Dad once, and he was amazed, and he said, “You were eighteen months old, and that was your first haircut. And I know this because . .” And then he went on to explain the circumstances of these pictures I had in my head, and he said, “When I got home, your mother was still crying from your haircut, because you had upset her so badly.” So he knew exactly what I was describing. And I was eighteen months old. So that’s one of my first memories. I have actually one other memory that’s older, but it’s kind of incoherent, so I don’t know how to explain it to people. So that was the first time I lived in Central Florida; I was probably just over one year old. Then we moved to Texas, where my sister was born. I was out of Central Florida from ’53 to ’63, so for ten years I was out of Florida. My biological mother died in ’62. My dad remarried; his new wife was a teacher here in Orange County Public School system. She would ultimately go on to teach for about thirty-three years. Her name was Miss Edith Bradshaw—Gates, of course, after the marriage. And so we moved here in 1963, and I finished half of my sixth-grade year in Hannibal Elementary, here in Winter Park. And then the next year, I started at Jones High. In those days, it was grades seventh through ninth were considered junior high school, and then tenth through twelfth was senior high school, but they were all in the same building at Jones High. WZ: So this is after Brown v. Board of Education, so schools were supposed to be desegregated. SJG: It is, yeah, but the reality is that Brown v. Board of Education was an aspirational decision. In fact, it’s even in the language of the decision, because they say something about “all deliberate speed.” So it was not an order for things to immediately change, but it was an aspiration for things to change. And things were changing; things did change. Most Americans don’t realize this, but from the time that the Brown decision was made up until about 1984, our schools were increasingly integrated across race in this country. That stopped in 1984, and ever since then, we’ve actually been re-segregating the schools. And it’s official policy of the Reagan administration. It’s no accident that it stopped. I mean, President Reagan made it very clear, and his Justice Department made it very clear, that that’s what they wanted, and they had won the election, and that’s what they began to implement. WZ: So you attended Hannibal Square Elementary and then went on to Jones High School. SJG: Yes. WZ: So that is an integrated high school? SJG: No, no; all the students were African Americans. There were a few European American teachers, interestingly enough, but no European American students. All of us were African American students in those days.

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