Gates Donates 'Beer Summit' Handcuffs to Smithsonian

The "beer summit" is now a little piece of American history. Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. has donated the handcuffs used to arrest him to the new museum on black history at the Smithsonian. Last summer's arrest set off a racial brouhaha that led to the so-called summit at the White House with Gates, Cambridge cop James Crowley, Joe Biden, and Barack Obama.

"No one would exactly call me Malcolm X," Gates tells Deborah Solomon for her "Questions" column in the New York Times Magazine. "And I don’t think as time goes on that I will be remembered for handcuffs. I hope not." Gates says Crowley gave him the cuffs when the two met for another drink after the beer summit. (More Henry Louis Gates Jr stories.)