Henry Louis Gates Jr. was sometimes mistaken for a servant at the grand home he bought when he was a professor at Duke University.

New York Times columnist Stanley Fish, a former chairman and now professor emeritus of the English Department at Duke, recalled that renovation workers at Gates' home would often ask him for the owner of the house.

"The message was unmistakable: What was a black man doing living in a place like this?" Fish wrote.

Gates of course, was arrested after he had to break in his own home in Cambridge, Mass. Police officers say he had become disorderly.

Fish wrote that Gates was not readily accepted at Duke, which Gates came to call "the plantation."

At the university (which in a past not distant at all did not admit African-Americans ), Gates’s reception was in some ways no different. Doubts were expressed in letters written by senior professors about his scholarly credentials, which were vastly superior to those of his detractors.