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Brooke Williams. "We deconstruct ethnic identities to show that when the lights came down, everyone was sleeping with everyone else -- that's the way human history goes!" . GATES: Yeah. Testing showed he had ancestors from sub-Saharan Africa, Ireland and England. What percent would be Native American? Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s arrest continues to cause controversy after President Obama criticized police action, Michelle Gielan reports. So I would say, you know, no, I don't think so. And she invents this pancake mix, and they become fabulously wealthy. You get your Y DNA from your father, and that's what makes me a man. GROSS: There's some people who are trying to use genealogy to out people who are white supremacists and say, oh, you think you're so pure white, that that's such a big deal? GATES: And think about it. This is FRESH AIR. So then I became close to them but in two completely different ways. Thank God. So I thought that I had a pretty good chance. And I think that that's sad. 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. And I watched reruns of early black films like "Amos 'n' Andy" and "Beulah." As a result of the injury, Gates walks with a cane and his right leg is more than 2 inches shorter than his left. As Elizabeth Alexander comments in Faces about her own family history, We dont even know the half of it. That profound uncertainty makes it all the more troubling that Gladwell translates the peculiar institution into a personal burden. GATES: But then they did another special test. 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.. Gates was an Anisfield-Wolf prize winner in 1989 for The Schomburg Library of Women Writers. It was just misdiagnosed. Or they stayed home, and they listened to or played music. DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. Other TV credits included the documentary miniseries Wonders of the African World (1999), Black in Latin America (2011), The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross (2013), and Reconstruction: America After the Civil War (2019). They - but you're absolutely right. In July 1976, Gates was promoted to the post of lecturer in Afro-American Studies, with the understanding that he would be promoted to assistant professor upon completion of his doctoral dissertation. In the series, he discussed findings with guests about their complex ancestries. My mother used to read me - the greatest book ever written to me was "The Poky Little Puppy," right? And you - the last scene is the funeral. And your father was a tailor, which is why we GATES: And my mother went to Atlantic City. Mixing cutting-edge DNA research and old-school genealogical sleuthing, FINDING YOUR ROOTS . GROSS: So when you had your DNA done, did you have a wish for a certain area of Africa or a certain group of African people who you wanted to be your ancestors? 8. Gatess father, Henry Louis Gates, Sr., worked in a paper mill and moonlighted as a janitor; his mother, Pauline Coleman Gates, cleaned houses. At Yale University in 1973, he was one of 12 students selected as a Scholar of the House, a program that allows seniors to write a book or compose a symphony or follow a similar passion instead of taking classes. In 1984, Gates was recruited by Cornell University with an offer of tenure; Gates asked Yale whether the university would match Cornell's offer, but they declined. Gates graduated as valedictorian of his high school class in 1968 and attended a local junior college before enrolling at Yale University, where he received a bachelors degree in history in 1973. And when my grandparents came as immigrants, my family was able to assimilate pretty easily because we're white. And I have my mother's certificate from this vocational school where she learned to be a seamstress. Graduated from Piedmont High School in 1968, Gates attended Potomac State College of West Virginia University before transferring to Yale University, from which, in 1973, he earned a bachelor of arts degree in history, summa cum laude, and he gained membership in Phi Beta Kappa. And the obituary said, died this day in Cumberland, Md., January 6, 1888; Aunt Jane Gates, an estimable colored woman. GROSS: And then your slightly more contemporary ancestors not having any rights in the country, you know, or very few rights - not being able to vote, having to live in segregation. 1. So what I did - my father and I agreed, for science, that we'd put our genomes in the public domain so that any scholar or student can study our genome. I have the Ui Neil Haplotype. We know that BRCA1, BRCA2 - they're genetic. Season 8. GATES: We know he was Irish from my DNA. Cambridge is a long way from Piedmont, but Gates traces the journey in his 1994 memoir, Colored People. The Native American writer Erdrich refuses to assent to genetic ancestry testing, because she understands her DNA to belong to her community. In 2009, when I did "Faces Of America," a retail value of full genomic sequencing was $300,000. So you GATES: Because of this white man. He was 97, as you said. Yeah. Trump, who is running for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, announced a slate of futuristic new policies in a campaign video Friday. Black people came here - not willingly, of course. GROSS: Yeah. The fifth season of Gates' TV series "Finding Your Roots" is now running on PBS. If you remember, it was called "African-American Lives." A passerby called police, reporting a possible break-in after describing to 911 "an individual" forcing the front door open. All that was on still in 1965 in syndication. And I make it every week over and over with "Finding Your Roots.". They lived together. In 2006, Gates wrote and produced the PBS documentary "African American Lives," the first documentary series to use genealogy and genetic science to provide an understanding of African-American history. Soyinka persuaded Gates to study literature instead of history; he also taught him much about the culture of the Yoruba, one of the largest Nigerian ethnic groups. And I don't think that he understands how much power that - to heal, to bind that the Oval Office metaphorically has. Remember all the talk about post-racialism that GATES: We thought when Obama - we had turned a corner, and we could, you know, beat our - the plowshares into pruning hooks - right? This is FRESH AIR. Thank you so much for accepting this award. His early life is described in his memoir that is entitled, Colored People (1994). And deep down, I realized in retrospect that my desire to make films was probably born about that time. But when I started the series, it wasn't called "Finding Your Roots." "Black people were so angry at me. [9] Gates accepted the offer by Cornell in 1985 and taught there until 1989. GATES: Well, the average African-American GATES: The average African-American is 24 percent European. The daughter of prominent black scholar and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. said her father's arrest last week at his Cambridge home has deeply saddened him. Prosecutors later dropped the charges. GATES: Very close to them, yeah, particularly to my mother. Transcript: Q&A with Henry Louis Gates Jr. January 16, 2009 Greg Hicks: Everyone welcome, this is a very special moment for us and we really want this to be just as informal as possible. GATES: But everyone who's in one of those databases has given some kind of permission. Coproduced, hosted, and written by Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W.E.B. You said that after - you had been getting death threats and these angry emails and everything. And I'm wondering if being laid up from an injury for a while affected your desire to - and your time to immerse yourself in books. It measures your ancestry back 500 years approximately. [18] To build Harvard's visual, documentary, and literary archives of African-American texts, Gates arranged for the purchase of The Image of the Black in Western Art, a collection assembled by Dominique de Mnil in Houston. I mean, they know Donald Trump. I said, well, I've never met Donald Trump. Like Joe Louis's fights, which my father still talks about as part of the fixed repertoire of stories that texture our lives. Then he'd come back. GROSS: But it's making me think of how much death figured into your formative thoughts - the death of your grandfather, which led you to see the picture of your great-great-grandmother, everybody's deaths through your mother memorialized in those obituaries. GROSS: But you had family that passed for white. GROSS: Is that too personal? [34] They had two daughters together before they divorced in 1999. The book tells of Gates's childhood growing up in the 1950s in a close-knit extended family and an equally close-knit small-town community. GROSS: I've interviewed many people over the years. GROSS: It's mind-boggling. His mother cleaned houses. Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr. (born September 16, 1950) is an American literary critic, professor, historian, and filmmaker who serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. People might remember the Beer Summit, when you were stopped in your own home trying to unjam a lock after a long trip. This kind of research has been especially important for African-Americans whose ancestors had their names and families taken away when they were enslaved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. So we knew he was Irish. Catch #FindingYourRoots Tuesdays at 8/7c on PBS (check local listings). So that was a steal. GATES: Yeah, I was 15 years old. [35] As of 2021, Gates is married to historian Dr. Marial Iglesias Utset. 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". In "Root Worker," a short . GATES: You know, I'm totally exposed. This article was most recently revised and updated by, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Henry-Louis-Gates-Jr. African American Registry - Biography of Herny Louis Gates, Jr. Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self, Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow, The Signifying Monkey: Towards a Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. Read about President Obama's comments on Gates's arrest. GATES: And I gave it to my mother once. 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. And most DNA companies in the United States will tell you that they have never tested an African-American who is 100 percent from sub-Saharan Africa. Not all U.S. presidents are missed once they leave the White House. I only did black people. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., (born September 16, 1950, Keyser, West Virginia, U.S.), American literary critic and scholar known for his pioneering theories of African and African American literature. Know Thyself, the final episode, which shares its title with the slogan of Knome Inc., focuses mostly on genetic genealogy. GROSS: OK. On your mother's side, you found out that you had three men in the family who were freed slaves - freed before 1776. 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". Gates traced the practice of signifyin to Esu, the trickster figure of Yoruba mythology, and to the figure of the signifying monkey, with which Esu is closely associated. GROSS: And I read you talking about this. GATES: And we - they only put - remember "The Late Show"? Once javascript and access to those URLs are allowed, please refresh this page. Moreover, these genetic techniques may be inconsistent with the aims of conventional genealogy. and Ph.D. in English literature from Clare College at the University of Cambridge. Joness tale offers some insight into the appeal of genealogy, another effort at reconnection with home and kin, and ballast against the tumult of modern living. They had two geneticists. That shocking news is relayed to Gladwell in an exchange pregnant with anxiety and uneasiness on the part of both men. 3. And I sat down. And it's for my father. [citation needed] Gates has been criticized by John Henrik Clarke, Molefi Kete Asante, and the controversial Maulana Karenga, each of whom has been questioned by others in academia.[15][16][17]. This trip came 25 years after Gates worked at a hospital in Kilimatinde, near Dodoma, Tanzania, when he was a 19-year-old pre-medical student at Yale University. And TV was on kind of like the hearth in New England. A Letter from Henry Louis Gates, Jr. to his daughters Maggie and Lisa I enjoy the unselfconscious moments of a shared cultural intimacy, whatever form they take, when no one else is watching, when no white people are around. But mutations exist. In 1992, he received a George Polk Award for his social commentary in The New York Times. Henry Louis Gates Daughters Elizabeth is in her twenties and suffered a severe stroke in May 2010. He argued that the material, which the government charged was profane, had important roots in African-American Vernacular English, games, and literary traditions, and should be protected. 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: He is a trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. Gates claimed that his arrest was a sign of racism on the part of police. In 1995, he received the Golden Plate Award of the. But the ancestry is being investigated against the will of the people being outed. The arrest attracted national attention after U.S. President Barack Obama controversially declared that the Cambridge police "acted stupidly" in arresting the 59-year-old Gates. The confrontation resulted in Gates being arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. GATES: But I have an announcement to make GATES: For you. And then you see this white girl next to Claudette Colbert. Crockett Jr., Stephen A. GATES: And because it was PBS, we negotiated a deal with this company Illumina which sequences everybody. Alondra Nelson is an associate professor of sociology at Columbia University, where she also holds an appointment in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. One of eight children born to Edward St. Lawrence Gates and Helen Gertrude Redman Gates, he was the youngest of seven sons. And the black woman says all she wants is enough money to have a New Orleans-type funeral. "[14], As a mediator between those advocating separatism and those believing in a Western canon, Gates has been criticized by both. [10] At Harvard, Gates teaches undergraduate and graduate courses as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, an endowed chair he was appointed to in 2006, and as a professor of English. - like the Aunt Jemima figure. An X-ray showed a bright portion that revealed just how much of her brain tissue was destroyed. From Blum, he says, he learned a lot about writing and history. 10. Gates also notes that it is equally difficult to decide who should get such reparations and who should pay them, as slavery was legal under the laws of the colonies and the United States. We'll hear more after a short break. And my Y DNA, which is - comes in an unbroken chain, descends from this Irishman. As editor-in-chief of the online magazine the Root, Gates has a background in journalism. GROSS: So you know your medical background and if you're GATES: Yeah. DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. GROSS: When you were 14, you had a football injury. In 2021, Gates was named a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and elected to the Johnsonsians (Society). Vivian filed for divorce in 1967, and Johnny went on to marry singer June Carter Cash. GROSS: Terry Gross interviewed Henry Louis Gates last May when he was in Philadelphia to accept the WHYY Lifelong Learning Award. Other works by Gates included Speaking of Race, Speaking of Sex: Hate Speech, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties (1994), Colored People: A Memoir (1994), The Future of the Race (1996; with Cornel West), Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (1997), The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: Americas First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers (2003), America Behind the Color Line: Dialogues with African Americans (2004), In Search of Our Roots (2009), and Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (2019). GROSS: OK. In 2020, Gates received the 400 Years of African American History Commission's Distinguished 400Award. Discomfort is also experienced by the viewer. And before I started school - I started school when I was, well, 5, turning 6 - I would get dressed up, and I would go to church with my mom. If that date is correct, it would have precedence as the first-known novel written in the United States by an African American. But we need to get some distance from the binary opposition we were raised in: evil white people and good Black people. Henry Louis Gates Jr.: Head Negro In Charge. Hollywood Life One wishes that Gates, an inimitable literary scholar well before he became a pathbreaking Renaissance man, might have alluded to another of Edward P. Joness works, The Known World, a historical novel exploring life in an antebellum community in which both blacks and whites hold black slaves, by way of even partial explanation. American playwright, actor, screenwriter, producer, and director. "Beneath the return to the valley of the culture wars". He loved the news. Based on admixture testing, Longoria is told that she is 70 percent European, 27 percent Native American, and 3 percent African. Recently, he has enraged many of his colleagues in the African-American studies fieldespecially those campaigning for government reparations for slaveryby insistently reminding them, as he did in a New York Times op-ed last year, that the folks who captured and sold Blacks into slavery in the first place were also Africans, working for profit. In 2012, The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. You might have prostate cancer that runs in your family. He was a graduate of Frederick Street High School and in 1998 received an honorary doctorate degree from Seton Hall University. And when this little girl's passing for - she passes for white and breaks her mother's heart. And then it was a property requirement. summa cum laude in history from Yale University and his M.A. As host of the PBS series Finding Your Roots, Gates tells celebrities about their family history. That yearning manifests itself in many ways, from anomie to ethnic mutual-aid associations. This is FRESH AIR. And you realize it's Peola, grown up, coming back. Kids don't even know what they are anymore, but everybody here does. Joe Biden launched his presidential bid in April with a bold . GATES: And they said, OK, we won't tell you. In the first series, Gates learned that he has 50% European ancestry[22] and 50% African ancestry. So my whole life is really an attempt to honor and please my parents and make them proud of me, you know. And the geneticists have found the identity finally of Jane Gates's paramour, the man GATES: Yes. In 1989, Gates won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for editing the 30 volumes of "The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers". After a month at Yale Law School, Gates withdrew from the program. And he'd make a couple - a move. I can do it. "[13] After his 2003 NEH lecture, Gates published in the same year a book entitled The Trials of Phillis Wheatley, about the early African-American poet. They had kids, and they're buried next to each other. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (@henrylouisgates) Instagram photos and videos henrylouisgates Verified Follow 519 posts 129K followers 173 following Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Dir. And there were a lot of people who voted for Donald Trump as a repudiation vote. GATES: Terry Gross speechless - first time in 35 years. He rediscovered the earliest African-American novels . (Note: Clotel (1853) by William Wells Brown is recognized as the first novel published by an African-American author, but it was both written and published in London.) And I would watch this beautiful, brilliant goddess. My father loved sports, and I didn't care about sports that much. I think you know where I'm heading here. Gates collaborates with genetic scientists, including Eric Lander and David Altshuler, of the Broad Institute of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the Harvard professor George Church, progenitor of the Personal Genome Project; and personal genomics companies such as 23andMe and Knome Inc. 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. In front of all these people and all these viewers. As a Black intellectual and public figure, Gates has been an outspoken critic of the Eurocentric literary canon. You don't get $1,400 by saving your nickels and dimes as a slave, right? GROSS: Have you been medically DNA tested? We're listening to the interview Terry recorded with Harvard historian, author and filmmaker Henry Louis Gates before an audience at WHYY in Philadelphia last May. But it's just not those two genetic lines. Now think about that. He is on the boards of many notable institutions, including the, In 2010, Gates became the first African American to have his, In December 2014, Gates was announced as one of 14 recipients of a 2015. He was there in exile because he had been in prison and to be offering civil war for 27 months and was given a fellowship at the University of Cambridge. And remarkably, she's now able to. The recipient of fifty-six honorary degrees and numerous prizes, Professor Gates was a . That belief is shared by Native groups that similarly objected to the Human Genome Diversity Project, as described in the work of Jenny Reardon and Kimberly TallBear. GATES: That's true. As a prominent Black intellectual, Gates has concentrated on building academic institutions to study Black culture. We started to roll. Some critics suggest that adding Black literature will diminish the value of the Western canon, while separatists say that Gates is too accommodating to the dominant white culture in his advocacy of integration of the canon. Gates's critically acclaimed six-part PBS documentary series, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, traced 500 years of African-American history to the second inauguration of President Barack Obama. GATES: Yeah, I loved books. I was more of a bookworm. Thank you for being you. In 2020, Gates received the Muhammad Ali Voice of HumanityAward. Gates has joined the Sons of the American Revolution. On hand again is admixture analysistesting that probes a persons full nuclear DNA for genetic indicators said to be suggestive of ancestry; percentages of African, American Indian, European, or Asian descent are inferred from those informative markers. GATES: And then there was "The Late Late Show." The most likely cause of this is a content blocker on your computer or network. Gates's web series, "Black History in Two Minutes (Or So)", which he executive produces with Robert F. Smith and Dyllan McGee, earned five Webby Awards, including for Best Podcast: Documentary and Best Video Series: Education & Discovery (2020), Best Podcast: Documentary and Best Social Video: Discovery & Education (2021) and Best Social Video: Discovery & Education (2022). You may then be asked to log in, create an account if you don't already have one, That's how much the science of genetics has changed in terms of the retail market since 2009. He's received 50 honorary degrees from such institutions as Harvard University and Williams College. And we'd have the chess board set up. After an evening at a bachelorette party, she woke up with what she thought was a hangover.