GROSS: Was that reflected in the way you wanted to say goodbye to your father at the funeral? And when this little girl's passing for - she passes for white and breaks her mother's heart. If you continue to experience issues, contact us at 202-466-1032 or help@chronicle.com. "Finding Your Roots" has become a phenomenon -- and it all began with host Henry Louis Gates Jr. receiving a piece of angry fan mail. GROSS: Whoa. In 1989, Gates won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for editing the 30 volumes of "The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers". summa cum laude in history from Yale University and his M.A. By Henry Louis Gates Jr. . and Ph.D. in English literature from Clare College at the University of Cambridge. She paid cash for that house in what was largely a white neighborhood. One of eight children born to Edward St. Lawrence Gates and Helen Gertrude Redman Gates, he was the youngest of seven sons. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. GATES: And think about it. In 2021, Gates became the seventh recipient of the, In 2021, Gates received the prestigious Gold Medal from. We'll hear more after a short break. And I have my mother's certificate from this vocational school where she learned to be a seamstress. It comes from slavery. Yeah. And my mother used to write the eulogies, the obituaries for all the black people in the Potomac Valley, where I grew up. Now think about that. It was better to be free than be a slave, but you were free but not free. GATES: Right after the Beer Summit, it all went away. OK. The injury was misdiagnosed by a physician, who told Gates' mother that his problem was 'psychosomatic'. Cameo as a digital presentation of a fictional version of himself as, This page was last edited on 1 March 2023, at 15:56. The recipient of fifty-six honorary degrees and numerous prizes, Professor Gates was a . But I saw that photograph and read her obituary on the day that we buried my father's father, Edward St. Lawrence Gates. GATES: And because it was PBS, we negotiated a deal with this company Illumina which sequences everybody. Daughter Elizabeth Gates interviews her dad about . He is a trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. And when they analyzed my mitochondrial DNA, it went to England. Both conventional and genetic tracing yield unanticipated results in Faces of America. GATES: Yeah. GROSS: Huge story. On April 19, 1989, he was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society. What percent would be from Europe? As of February 2022, Gates, 71, serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and as the Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.. In 1992, he received a George Polk Award for his social commentary in The New York Times. That's the way it is. And deep down, I realized in retrospect that my desire to make films was probably born about that time. GATES: For which she paid cash. He rediscovered the earliest African-American novels . And she come to - it's the woman who invents box pancake mix - right? I mean, like, my - I'm second-generation American. They spoke in front of an audience last May when Gates received WHYY's annual Lifelong Learning Award. Over . Kids don't even know what they are anymore, but everybody here does. Gates has joined the Sons of the American Revolution. And I was exhilarated. And the reason I wanted to be a writer is that my mother wrote so beautifully and read so beautifully. Cambridge is a long way from Piedmont, but Gates traces the journey in his 1994 memoir, Colored People. GATES: Don't you? You might have breast cancer. So obviously rape or, at best, cajoled sexuality was the cause, but there are exceptions. And under the skin, we are almost identical genetically. And I realized only recently that though I was raised to be a doctor, deep down, I really wanted to be a writer. Wants W. E. B. DuBois, Wole Soyinka and Phyllis Wheatley on the Nation's Reading Lists, As Well As Western Classics like Milton and Shakespeare". When asked by National Endowment for the Humanities Chairman Bruce Cole to describe his work, Gates responded: "I would say I'm a literary critic. After that I would say I was a teacher. Know Thyself, the final episode, which shares its title with the slogan of Knome Inc., focuses mostly on genetic genealogy. Surely, most people of African descent do not expect to find a black slave owner in their family tree. Du Bois Center there at Harvard, one of And the obituary said, died this day in Cumberland, Md., January 6, 1888; Aunt Jane Gates, an estimable colored woman. Because of the injury, Gates now uses a cane when he walks.[6][7]. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. Gates was arrested on charges of disorderly conduct, but the charges were dropped. (Rockefeller lost in 1972 but later served two terms as governor.). I'm Dave Davies in for Terry Gross. You know, I try to - doing "Finding Your Roots" is a way to paying homage to my mother and father every year. Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Black America Since MLK: And Still I Rise, "Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Biography, Books, & Facts", "African American Lives The Past Is Another Country 2 4of4 YouTube", "Finding Your Roots: Decoding Our Past Through DNA", "The biggest brother: interview with Henry Louis Gates, black America's foremost intellectual", "Yale Afro-Am Chair Resigns After Remarks of Yale Pres", "Henry Louis Gates Jr. to continue at Harvard", "Henry Louis Gates is Wrong about African Involvement in the Slave Trade", Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, "Henry Louis Gates Jr. announced as editor-in-chief of the new Oxford Dictionary of African American English", "What It Means to Be Black in Latin America", "Ben Affleck's slave-owning ancestor 'censored' from genealogy show", "Ben Affleck Demanded PBS Suppress His Slave-Owning Ancestry", "Citing Ben Affleck's 'Improper Influence,' PBS Suspends 'Finding Your Roots', "PBS' 'Finding Your Roots' returning in January after Ben Affleck controversy", "West Virginia Weslesyan College biography", "Black Studies' New Star: Henry Louis Gates Jr", "Henry Louis Gates Jr. On 'The Black Church' and His Own Bargain with Jesus", "MacArthur Fellos Program: Henry Louis Gates Jr. | Literary Critic | Class of June 1981", "Golden Plate Awardees of the American Academy of Achievement", "Mister Jefferson and The Trials of Phillis Wheatley,", "2015 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award Winners Announced", "Henry Louis Gates Jr. Receives duPont Award for The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross", "Read Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s Acceptance Speech for the duPont Award", "Chicago Tribune Announces 2019 Literary and Heartland Award Winners", "Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. Named Don M. Randel Award Recipient | News | The Harvard Crimson", "Encarta Africana, the First Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Black History and Culture, Launches Today", Bibliography of Gates's publications and responses to it, African American National Biography Project, NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work Nonfiction, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Henry_Louis_Gates_Jr.&oldid=1142289654, African-American history of West Virginia, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences fellows, Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Television personalities from West Virginia, African-American television personalities, Members of the American Philosophical Society, All Wikipedia articles written in American English, Articles with unsourced statements from August 2009, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, Gates has received numerous honorary degrees, including a. So my whole life is really an attempt to honor and please my parents and make them proud of me, you know. And your father was a tailor, which is why we GATES: And my mother went to Atlantic City. Henry Louis Gates Jr. was born Sept. 16, 1950, in Keyser, W.Va. His father worked at the local paper mill during the day and as a janitor at a telephone company at night. Lolita Buckner Inniss, a professor at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, argued that notwithstanding African involvement as "abductors", it was Western slave-owners, as "captors", who perpetuated the practice even after the import trade was banned. And the geneticists have found the identity finally of Jane Gates's paramour, the man GATES: Yes. GROSS: Yeah. Even with the aid of cutting-edge 21st-century genealogydigitized archival records and genetic analysiswe may never know the ins and outs of how Gladwells fifth-great-grandmother came to be a slaveholder. A passerby called police, reporting a possible break-in after describing to 911 "an individual" forcing the front door open. In "Root Worker," a short . What is race? We delineate our individual and collective identities based upon inclusion in and exclusion from groups. His mother cleaned houses. Gatess father, Henry Louis Gates, Sr., worked in a paper mill and moonlighted as a janitor; his mother, Pauline Coleman Gates, cleaned houses. GATES: I'll never - I love you, Mama. Police arrested Gates on July 16 on charges of disorderly conduct after a confrontation with an officer at his home in Cambridge, Mass. But I think that one of the mottos of finding your roots is that there is no such thing as racial purity, that these people who have fantasies, these white supremacists, of this Aryan brotherhood, you know, this Aryan heritage that is pure and unsullied and untainted, that they're living in a dream world. And your driver was helping you - well, he was shoving his shoulder against the door trying to open it. ", The lesson of "Finding Your Roots" - we're all immigrants. And I was in the hospital for six weeks. And a doctor from the Philippines taught me to play chess at West Virginia University Medical Center in Morgantown, W.Va. And he'd come around in rounds. Season 8. In 2010, Gates wrote an op-ed in The New York Times that discussed the role played by Africans in the Atlantic slave trade. August 22, 2013, 12:00 a.m. So what that means is that it's the percent of - if you had a perfect family tree, what percent would be from sub-Saharan Africa? And she and Claudette Colbert are both unmarried mothers. The series combines the work of expert researchers in genealogy, history, and historical research in genetics to tell guests about the lives and histories of their ancestors. And the DNA tests we were doing at that time - when they analyzed my Y DNA, it went to Ireland. It was really, like, the photograph of her - of your great-great-aunt Jane Gates. Cambridge police officers were dispatched. And I gave it to her for birthday. Testing showed he had ancestors from sub-Saharan Africa, Ireland and England. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (@henrylouisgates) Instagram photos and videos henrylouisgates Verified Follow 519 posts 129K followers 173 following Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Dir. GROSS: And it made me think about - because I was just reading this - it made me think about how a president can set the tone for the country on so many things, including, you know, racial issues, immigration. GATES: Very close to them, yeah, particularly to my mother. We'd spit in a test tube. But it's just not those two genetic lines. And that night - and then daddy showed my brother and me, Dr. Paul Gates now, chief of dentistry at Bronx-Lebanon Hospital GATES: Well, it's the spirit of my mother. And she burst into tears because she used to read me that book all the time. GROSS: Is that too personal? Henrys research also led him to discover a census from 1870, which revealed that Rosannes great-great grandfather a man named Lafayette Robsinson was mixed-race. Upon learning this, Rosanne recalled the long-running rumors of her mothers background and said, So, it was, at least, a small part true., Related: GROSS: So having done your, like, ancestry and everything, were you close to your parents? 6. Omissions? Jr. (Design School Visiting Committee 1984-89) in honor of their daughters, Brooke Higgins Bing Williams, Harvard College 1988, and Eden Branford Bing Williams, Harvard . In the years that followed he earned a reputation as a literary archaeologist by recovering and collecting thousands of lost literary works (short stories, poems, reviews, and notices) by African American authors dating from the early 19th to the mid-20th century. The work extended application of the concept of "signifyin'" to analysis of African-American works. Stay informed daily on the latest news and advice on COVID-19 from the editors at U.S. News & World Report. 266. Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s arrest continues to cause controversy after President Obama criticized police action, Michelle Gielan reports. That shocking news is relayed to Gladwell in an exchange pregnant with anxiety and uneasiness on the part of both men. "Beneath the return to the valley of the culture wars". It's - remember, it's - my father dragged my brother and me upstairs in his parents' home and made us wait why he'd look through half a dozen of his father's scrapbooks, about which we knew nothing - complete mystery, a secret to us - looking for that obituary. Gates currently serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the W.E.B. Read about President Obama's comments on Gates's arrest. The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song was published in 2021. Historical evidence suggests that intraracial slavery was uncommon, and that when it did occur, sometimes free men and women of color purchased enslaved relatives and friends to rescue them from the cruelty of the chattel system, if not the social death of slave status. That yearning manifests itself in many ways, from anomie to ethnic mutual-aid associations. As a Black intellectual and public figure, Gates has been an outspoken critic of the Eurocentric literary canon. Please make sure your computer, VPN, or network allows Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. As a result of research he conducted as a MacArthur Fellow, Gates discovered Our Nig, written by Harriet E. Wilson in 1859 and thought to be the first novel written in the United States by an African American. Elizabeth Gates, the daughter of prominent Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, is in her twenties and suffered a severe stroke just four months ago. Following a two-year stay at Duke University, he was recruited to Harvard University in 1991. It's beautiful. February 12, 2010. I don't think that's true for very many people in this room or any - or many people who are watching this show. I go, goodbye. In October 1975, he was hired by Charles Davis as a secretary in the Afro-American Studies department at Yale. On the same night Harvard professor Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr . GATES: Yeah. And I make it every week over and over with "Finding Your Roots.". ", The Letters page of The New York Times of April 25, 2010, featured criticism and examination of Gates's views in response to his op-ed. GROSS: But you had family that passed for white. While assignment to the haplogroup L3x, for example, indicates an ancestor in what is now Ethiopia at least 50,000 years ago, this interesting detail does not fill in the contours of the family tree. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (born September 16, 1950) is an American literary critic, professor, historian, and filmmaker, who serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. And we're listening to Terry's interview with Henry Louis Gates. He has insisted that Black literature must be evaluated by the aesthetic criteria of its culture of origin, not criteria imported from Western or European cultural traditions that express a "tone deafness to the Black cultural voice" and result in "intellectual racism". He wrote his first column (about Little League games) at age 12 for the Piedmont Herald in West Virginia and continued to write for his high school and college newspapers. That seems to be one of the programs aspirations. Fifty or a hundred years from now, he explains, my hope for the present generation is that a future Du Bois will look back on our time and say that, in this era of fracture, we drew a line. GATES: Well, the average African-American GATES: The average African-American is 24 percent European. "Black people were so angry at me. I have the Ui Neil Haplotype. After a break, he'll talk about his childhood and about how DNA evidence demonstrates there's no such thing as racial purity. GROSS: And it's a way of outing people as not being who they think they are and not recognizing that we're all descended from so many different people. And then he'd - and I read quite a lot. They had a medical doctor who specializes in sharing this information. Sgt. Having grown up in an African-American community, however, he identifies as Black. As a result of the injury, Gates walks with a cane and his right leg is more than 2 inches shorter than his left. In a February episode of the PBS show, "Finding Your Roots," host and historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. presented Rosanne Cash with her DNA results and family genealogy. And so he introduced me to the Yoruba people. GROSS: Do you know - do you want to know your medical DNA? Brooke Williams. JSTOR1208745. GROSS: So given this kind of really rich mix that you've just described and all the surprises that you've just described, what does race mean to you? He has learned that he is also connected to the multiracial West Virginia community of Chestnut Ridge people. Root seeking, on the one hand, produces idiosyncratic narratives. Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (SOUNDBITE OF ALLEN TOUSSAINT'S "EGYPTIAN FANTASY"). And it's for my father. Gatess own genealogical narrative, unfurled against the backdrop of images of his family gathering in the kitchen or tender interactions with his nonagenarian father, Henry Louis Gates Sr., is also quite moving. In front of all these people and all these viewers. [36], In 1974, Gates learned the Transcendental Meditation technique. It was astonishing. 6.4K views 13 years ago Elizabeth Gates, the daughter of arrested Professor Henry Louis Gates, takes a few minutes to call CNN from Martha's Vineyard and talk to Don Lemon about the. Thank you so much for accepting this award. But we can expect some acknowledgment and interpretation of technologys limits. TERRY GROSS, BYLINE: Because you've talked to everybody about their genealogy, I want to talk with you about yours and what you've learned about yourself and the larger meaning of what you've learned about yourself. I'm going to be black. It's a gift - and for my mom. A new season of Finding Your Roots premieres January 4, 2022! I think it's vulgar and racist whether it comes out of a Black mouth or a white mouth. The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, African American who fought in the Revolutionary War, Alfred I. duPontColumbia University Award, Association for the Study of African American Life and History, The National Institute of Social Sciences, Who's Black and Why: A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race. The latter, tracing the ancestral history of contemporary figures, was especially popular. As Faces of America concludes, the connections among several of the participants are revealed using a technique developed by Altschuler and his colleague Mark Daly that is similar to 23andMes Relative Finder. These DNA cousins share several million of the three billion base pairs, suggesting a common ancestor a few or tens of generations in the past. And I don't think that he understands how much power that - to heal, to bind that the Oval Office metaphorically has.