King of Cats
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., on what the critic and novelist Albert Murray inspired in generations of black intellectuals.
Murray on writing Count Basie's autobiography: "'For years,' he has remarked more than once, 'when I wrote the word "I," it meant Basie.'" Gates frames Murray as one who "defied an entrenched literary mainstream, which preferred to regard black culture as so much exotica—amusing, perhaps, but eminently dispensable."