Gates hosted Faces of America, a four-part series presented by PBS in 2010. - like the Aunt Jemima figure. Tune in for all-new episodes as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. explores fascinating ancestries and family mysteries for an array of . [35] As of 2021, Gates is married to historian Dr. Marial Iglesias Utset. 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.. 10. As soon as the Civil War ended, they became common law husband and wife GATES: Which was illegal in Mississippi. GATES: That's true. And it's for my father. When I became a teenager, my father and I bonded. Discomfort is also experienced by the viewer. GATES: Right after the Beer Summit, it all went away. 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. That's the way it is. And your driver was helping you - well, he was shoving his shoulder against the door trying to open it. And I think that we throw terms like that around too loosely. Henry was born in Patterson Creek, W.Va., on June 8, 1913. Speaks onstage during the 'Black America Since MLK: And Still I Rise' panel discussion at the PBS portion of the 2016. They had a medical doctor who specializes in sharing this information. 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. Because the series is so successful in demonstrating the intersections between world history and personal history, the lack of contextualization here is notable. In 1974, Carol Stacks important ethnography All Our Kin (Harper & Row) suggested the plasticity of the designation cousin well beyond consanguinity. 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. "Finding Your Roots" has become a phenomenon -- and it all began with host Henry Louis Gates Jr. receiving a piece of angry fan mail. Author Herb Boyd, who teaches African and African-American history at the College of New Rochelle and City College, CUNY, argued that despite the complicity of African monarchs in the Atlantic slave trade, the United States "was the greatest beneficiary, and thus should be the main compensator". James . The most likely cause of this is a content blocker on your computer or network. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. GROSS: So having done your, like, ancestry and everything, were you close to your parents? The show's third season was postponed after it was discovered that actor Ben Affleck had persuaded Gates to omit information about his slave-owning ancestors. They had two geneticists. As host of the PBS series Finding Your Roots, Gates tells celebrities about their family history. (SOUNDBITE OF ALLEN TOUSSAINT'S "EGYPTIAN FANTASY"). I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross. Please make sure your computer, VPN, or network allows Later, he acquired and authenticated the manuscript of The Bondwoman's Narrative by Hannah Crafts, a novel from the same period that scholars believe may have been written as early as 1853. Copyright 2019 NPR. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities in 1991. In the series, he discussed findings with guests about their complex ancestries. [33], Gates married Sharon Lynn Adams in 1979. And I was just overwhelmed with emotion. Accuracy and availability may vary. As a result of the injury, Gates walks with a cane and his right leg is more than 2 inches shorter than his left. And that is a long time. In Wednesday's press conference, President Obama called the Cambridge Police Department "stupid" for arresting Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. And I was exhilarated. It's incredible. So I thought that I had a pretty good chance. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. 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. His mother. So I just wrote an essay that was published by Yale University Press about race. It was really, like, the photograph of her - of your great-great-aunt Jane Gates. As a prominent Black intellectual, Gates has concentrated on building academic institutions to study Black culture. 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? And that is the strongest argument for brotherhood, sisterhood and the unity of the human species. We know that BRCA1, BRCA2 - they're genetic. In the show, notable guests discover their family roots based on genealogical research and DNA results. Such information forces you to contemplate your own history, he observes. And when this little girl's passing for - she passes for white and breaks her mother's heart. And my Y DNA, which is - comes in an unbroken chain, descends from this Irishman. In 2021, Gates was named a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and elected to the Johnsonsians (Society). 2. 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. But I also watched TV. So (laughter) given the example that President Obama set in calming down that kind of argument in America over you and this officer, what do you hear now coming from our president? Cambridge is a long way from Piedmont, but Gates traces the journey in his 1994 memoir, Colored People. And what's the real showstopper for me is the fact that my three sets of my fourth great grandparents lived 18 miles from where I was born. GATES: For which she paid cash. So everybody knew that this whole thing was building to the climax when Delilah - is her name - the character. GROSS: Do you know - do you want to know your medical DNA? Not all U.S. presidents are missed once they leave the White House. 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). And I think that that's sad. Since 2012, he has hosted a PBS television series, entitled Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr..[24] The second season of the series, featuring 30 prominent guests across 10 episodes, with Gates as the narrator, interviewer, and genealogical investigator, aired on PBS in fall 2014. 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. 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". Du Bois Center there at Harvard, one of Video of the day: Drake and 21 Savage's "Spin Bout U" NYC's Extra Butter and Russ & Daughters Join Forces on 50th-Anniversary PUMA Clyde NYC's Extra Butter and Russ & Daughters Join Forces on 50th-Anniversary PUMA ClydeTwo quintessential Lower East Side outposts celebrate the downtown staple sneaker.HypebeastDylan Kelly Culture: Henry GROSS: Yeah. The world just isn't like that. He loved the news. GROSS: Yeah. In the second season of the program, Gates learned that he is part of a genetic subgroup that may be descended from or related to the fourth-century Irish king, Niall of the Nine Hostages. 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. African-Americans all think that they're a descendant from a Native American. 5. (January 21, 2015), Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, Potomac State College of West Virginia University. And my brother went off to dental school. It feels heartbreaking, Rosanne Cash admitted through tears after finding out that an ancestor of her mother, Vivian Liberto Cash the first wife of singer-songwriter Johnny Cash, who both received threats from the KKK was enslaved. And she and Claudette Colbert are both unmarried mothers. GROSS: So you assume it was not a consensual relationship, but she managed to own her own home five years after being freed from slavery. American literary critic, professor and historian (born 1950), Critical studies and reviews of Gates' work. At the time, only Vivians European background had been known, and this discovery in her ancestryresurfaced thanks to a profile on Johnnys first wife in The Washington Poston May 16. And I don't think that he understands how much power that - to heal, to bind that the Oval Office metaphorically has. GATES: Yeah, I was 15 years old. And then it was a property requirement. 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? So I know that moment of transcendence is real.". It's a gift - and for my mom. Or they stayed home, and they drew. GROSS: Thank you for all of all of the things you've written for your TV shows, for your movies. GROSS: Whoa. Whereas prior shows relied heavily on analysis of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and Y-chromosome (Y-DNA), yielding results that included at most about 2 percent of ones complete genetic inheritance, in Faces techniques are used that probe deeper into more of the genome. [20], In September 1995, Gates narrated a five-part abridgement (by Margaret Busby) of his memoir Colored People on BBC Radio 4.[21]. And that is the lesson of "Finding Your Roots. [5], At the age of 14, Gates was injured playing touch football, fracturing the ball and socket joint of his right hip, resulting in a slipped capital femoral epiphysis. We'd spit in a test tube. What does Henry Louis Gates, Jr., see as the most important form of resistance against hate? Obama then held a much-publicized meeting with Gates and James Crowley, the officer who had arrested Gates, which became informally known as the beer summit because Obama invited the two for beers in the White House Rose Garden. And I make it every week over and over with "Finding Your Roots.". I have the Ui Neil Haplotype. [25][26][27] Finding Your Roots resumed in January 2016.[28]. The minister would call on her. The two series demonstrated the many strands of ancestry, cultural heritage, and history among African Americans. And I loved the news. In 2020, Gates received the 400 Years of African American History Commission's Distinguished 400Award. Amid discussion of Malcolm Gladwells roots, Gates discloses that the best-selling authors Jamaican maternal ancestor, a free woman of color, owned slaves of African descent. So I would say, you know, no, I don't think so. Now she was born in 1819; died in 1888. 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? You don't get $1,400 by saving your nickels and dimes as a slave, right? After turning that corner, Sharon gave birth to Maggie, their first daughter, in July 1980, and Liza was born 18 months later. And I learned a lot about the medium. It's a lot of data to process. GATES: Yeah, yeah. And the first thing they said was, you don't have any of the genes that's going to give you Alzheimer's. Thank God. And your father was a tailor, which is why we GATES: And my mother went to Atlantic City. Alexanders relation to Colbert or Longorias to Ma underscores a central theme of the series: Underlying the many faces of America is a fundamental genetic unity. 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. Rosanne Cash became tearful after learning that her mom, Vivian Liberto Cash, had a Black great-great grandmother who was subjected to a life of slavery. You know, no matter how different we appear phenotypically, under the skin we're 99.99 percent the same. After a month at Yale Law School, Gates withdrew from the program. Gates says John Morton Blum, a professor in Yale's history department, was his mentor. He applied the notion to the interpretation of slave narratives and showed how it informs the works of Phillis Wheatley, Zora Neale Hurston, Frederick Douglass, the early African American writers of periodical fiction, Ralph Ellison, Ishmael Reed, Alice Walker, and Soyinka. And when I was a young teenager, early adolescence, my father and I connected through the news. In an essay that Henry Louis Gates, Jr., wrote in 2018 for the Encyclopdia Britannica Anniversary Edition: 250 Years of Excellence, he identified voting as the most important form of resistance against hate. August 22, 2013, 12:00 a.m. In 1973 he entered Clare College, Cambridge, where one of his tutors was the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka. And you - the last scene is the funeral. and Ph.D. in English literature from Clare College at the University of Cambridge. Stay informed daily on the latest news and advice on COVID-19 from the editors at U.S. News & World Report. In "Root Worker," a short . 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. And then he'd - and I read quite a lot. It measures your ancestry back 500 years approximately. And we knew the name of his great-great-grandmother and the name of this white man. In 1989, Gates won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for editing the 30 volumes of "The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers". GATES: And my father lived to be 97 1/2 without any dementia. Catch #FindingYourRoots Tuesdays at 8/7c on PBS (check local listings). February 12, 2010. That's not the way it was. 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. And that imprinted this woman's story in my mind. I only did black people. - like the Bible says? Gates' Daughter Speaks Out CBS 2.04M subscribers Subscribe 53K views 13 years ago Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s arrest continues to cause controversy after President Obama. His writing includes pieces in The New York Times that defend rap music and an article in Sports Illustrated that criticizes Black youth culture for glorifying basketball over education. 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. As a literary historian committed to the preservation and study of historical texts, Gates has been integral to the Black Periodical Literature Project, a digital archive of Black newspapers and magazines created with financial assistance from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is a trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. And you don't have a Y DNA, so that's why you're a woman. We might think of Faces of America, then, as an allegory of the simultaneous diversity of our experiences and the deep interpenetration of our histories. 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). The surprising reveals, coupled with the celebrities raw reactions to the information conveyed by the host, deliver moments of high drama and genuine emotion. doi:10.2307/1208745. Prosecutors later dropped the charges. But they came from someplace else. So my whole life is really an attempt to honor and please my parents and make them proud of me, you know. 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. 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 2020, Gates was named a Walter Channing Cabot Fellow by Harvard University. 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. Coproduced, hosted, and written by Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W.E.B. People might remember the Beer Summit, when you were stopped in your own home trying to unjam a lock after a long trip. So it was just the two of us and my mom, right? In front of all these people and all these viewers. 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. 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. We have the great privilege of having Professor Henry Louis Gates, of Harvard University, the Director of the W.B. 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". According to a police report, Gates refused to cooperate when he was later questioned in his home, which resulted in his arrest. [7] In his major scholarly work, The Signifying Monkey, a 1989 American Book Award winner, Gates expressed what might constitute an African-American cultural aesthetic. Vivian filed for divorce in 1967, and Johnny went on to marry singer June Carter Cash. Rather, he works for greater recognition of Black works and their integration into a larger, pluralistic canon. GATES: But then they did another special test. In some instances, we are left wanting to know much more. It was astonishing. You might have breast cancer. 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. The first time we met was when I interviewed him for "The Reflection Effect," an essay I wrote for O, the Oprah Magazine about the power of nostalgia to drive happiness and build resilience after loss. [9] Gates accepted the offer by Cornell in 1985 and taught there until 1989. But we have a disproportionately higher risk of sickle cell. So overseer, slave plantation - rape, right? 3. Gat. GATES: Don't you? What percent would be Native American? Gates has joined the Sons of the American Revolution. 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. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). So that was a steal. If you remember, it was called "African-American Lives." More than anyone else, the historian is responsible for "entertaining the idea remotely" that Gates could become a writer. In 2020, Gates received the Muhammad Ali Voice of HumanityAward. Corrections? Barack Obama. This ancestor was Vivians maternal great-great grandmother, a Black woman named Sarah Shields, whom Rosanne learned about for the first time ever during an episode of the PBS show Finding Your Rootsthat aired in Feb. 2021. Gates currently serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the W.E.B. The series is the latest iteration of Gatess innovative, fascinating foray into the nexus of genealogy and genetic ancestry testing that began four years ago with African American Lives (and continued with African American Lives 2 and Oprahs Roots).

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