So let's get back to your great-great-grandmother. Gates hosted Faces of America, a four-part series presented by PBS in 2010. If the findings of conventional genealogical research produce fireworks, the results of the DNA analysis generate shock and awe. 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. 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. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. And we'd have the chess board set up. An X-ray showed a bright portion that revealed just how much of her brain tissue was destroyed. American literary critic, professor and historian (born 1950), Critical studies and reviews of Gates' work. So where does that come from? They had kids, and they're buried next to each other. And I was exhilarated. Advertisement At the age of 14, Gates suffered a hairline fracture of the ball-and-socket joint in his hip while playing touch football. Updates? I killed my mama. Yeah. And the reason I wanted to be a writer is that my mother wrote so beautifully and read so beautifully. The womans suffering is assuaged at long last when she revisits the land and people that indelibly shaped her, including a local herbal healer. It's incredible that the mystery to my family tree - I'm looking toward Africa, and it was 18 miles away in Moorefield, W.Va., County Courthouse. Tune in for all-new episodes as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. explores fascinating ancestries and family mysteries for an array of . Gatess father, Henry Louis Gates, Sr., worked in a paper mill and moonlighted as a janitor; his mother, Pauline Coleman Gates, cleaned houses. [25][26][27] Finding Your Roots resumed in January 2016.[28]. So we went - my father showed us that picture and that obituary, and we went home. Gates wrote, executive-produced, and hosted the series, which earned the 2013 Peabody Award and a NAACP Image Award. GROSS: I think they're doing it through records and not through, like, secretly getting their blood samples. In the show, notable guests discover their family roots based on genealogical research and DNA results. GATES: They don't do that anymore for this particular kind of - I had a broken hip. GATES: Now, we don't do blood anymore, right? So I would say, you know, no, I don't think so. GATES: But then they did another special test. GATES: He wasn't even out the door, and I moved into his bedroom. GATES: For which she paid cash. 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. Isn't that a cool thing? "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!" . 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. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. After that, everything stopped. His name was John Redman. Will we reach consilience"William Whewells term for the combining of information from different domains toward the unity of knowledgebetween conventional and genetic genealogy (and, moreover, among the types of genetic analysis at play)? 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. Cambridge is a long way from Piedmont, but Gates traces the journey in his 1994 memoir, Colored People. 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? But we can expect some acknowledgment and interpretation of technologys limits. 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. I am descended from - on my father's side - from a white man who impregnated a black woman and, on my mother's side, from a white woman who was impregnated by a black man. Gates is the host of the TV genealogy series "Finding Your Roots." Time will tell. We're all admixed. It doesn't exist. And at this point, I'd run over to my mother and say, Mama, I'll never pass for white, Mama. As a literary theorist and critic, Gates has combined literary techniques of deconstruction with native African literary traditions. Historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. And it's for my father. GROSS: Whoa. "Up until that recent piece, people would have thought of him as someone who took a cautious and nuanced approach to questions like reparations. GROSS: Your father died not too long ago - a few years ago. While Gates has stressed the need for greater recognition of Black literature and Black culture, he does not advocate a "separatist" Black canon. From the 1980s Gates edited a number of critical anthologies of African American literature, including Black Literature and Literary Theory (1984), Bearing Witness: Selections from African American Autobiography in the Twentieth Century (1991), and (with Nellie Y. McKay) The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1997). And then black people would tell each other - they would say, you know, be sure to watch "The Late Late Show" tonight because "Imitation Of Life," which is my favorite film - 1934, with Claudette Colbert. So everybody knew that this whole thing was building to the climax when Delilah - is her name - the character. DAVIES: Henry Louis Gates speaking with Terry Gross in May of last year. 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. Many of us were troubled. And the obituary said, died this day in Cumberland, Md., January 6, 1888; Aunt Jane Gates, an estimable colored woman. That's the way it is. The current PBS documentary miniseries Faces of America traces the family histories of 12 prominent people who, over the course of several hours and with the aid of conventional and genetic genealogy, come to fasten their varied tribulations and successes to the arc of ancestry. 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. And then you see this white girl next to Claudette Colbert. The program documents a 3,000-mile journey Gates took through Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Tanzania, with his then-wife, Sharon Adams, and daughters, Liza and Meggie Gates. What is race? Sign up to receive the latest updates from U.S News & World Report and our trusted partners and sponsors. GROSS: So having done your, like, ancestry and everything, were you close to your parents? What percent would be from Europe? But it is clear, in any case, that we fully inhabit a genealogical society"to use the anthropologist Elizabeth Povinellis phrase. (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.) Once javascript and access to those URLs are allowed, please refresh this page. DNA-derived genealogical information may also collide with other ways of rendering kinship and relation. He introduced the notion ofsignifyinto represent Black literary and musical history as a continuing reflection and reinterpretation of what has come before. You know, we used to say tribe, but now that's not politically correct - so the Yoruba ethnic group in Western Nigeria. After an evening at a bachelorette party, she woke up with what she thought was a hangover. In 1995, he received the Golden Plate Award of the. When we left off, Gates was talking about his own DNA mix. We know that BRCA1, BRCA2 - they're genetic. 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. (Rockefeller lost in 1972 but later served two terms as governor.). And I make it every week over and over with "Finding Your Roots.". We delineate our individual and collective identities based upon inclusion in and exclusion from groups. The Native American writer Erdrich refuses to assent to genetic ancestry testing, because she understands her DNA to belong to her community. You don't get $1,400 by saving your nickels and dimes as a slave, right? Du Bois Center there at Harvard, one of GROSS: So I want to squeeze in one more question. The fifth season of "Finding Your Roots" is currently showing on PBS. Gates currently serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the W.E.B. And I cluster more toward the Yoruba than any - because 50 percent GATES: Of my ancestry is from sub-Saharan Africa. 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. President Barack Obama, a friend of Gates, said that the Cambridge Police Department had acted "stupidly" in the arrest. 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 I couldn't imagine what, but two sets of those fourth great-grandparents are from my mother's line. You said that after - you had been getting death threats and these angry emails and everything. For example, while haplogroupssets of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), which are gene-sequence variants that are inherited together and categorized by letter and number (A, L3D, R, U5b, etc. You might have breast cancer. But it's just not those two genetic lines. As we honor the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King today, we're going to listen to an interview Terry recorded with historian Henry Louis Gates. But the ancestry is being investigated against the will of the people being outed. Eric Foner, professor of history at Columbia University, considered Gates's emphasis on there being "little discussion" of African involvement in the slave trade to be unfounded, stating that "today, virtually every history of slavery and every American history textbook includes this information". GROSS: Let's look at your ancestry and see who's really in it. And I learned a lot about the medium. This is FRESH AIR. 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. We'd spit in a test tube. Signifyin is the practice of representing an idea indirectly, through a commentary that is often humourous, boastful, insulting, or provocative. In 2022, the Boston Public Library honored Gates with its Literary Lights Award. 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. This is FRESH AIR. What does Henry Louis Gates, Jr., see as the most important form of resistance against hate? "Black people were so angry at me. GATES: We know he was Irish from my DNA. 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. And she throws herself on the casket. In some states - like, New York would let them vote sometimes, and then take it away. GATES: That's true. And I don't think that he understands how much power that - to heal, to bind that the Oval Office metaphorically has. He grew up in neighboring Piedmont. 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: Our TV - when we woke up, the TV was on, and nobody ever turned it off until you went to sleep. This kind of research has been especially important for African-Americans whose ancestors had their names and families taken away when they were enslaved. We fought to keep the pipeline of opportunity open, and, despite our ideological differences, we found a way to link arms against every form of bigotry.. 22,158 talking about this. Gates has such an eminent reputation", she said, "and so much gravitas. He has affirmed the value of the Western tradition, but has envisioned a more inclusive canon of diverse works sharing common cultural connections: "Every Black American text must confess to a complex ancestry, one high and low (that is, literary and vernacular) but also one white and black there can be no doubt that white texts inform and influence black texts (and vice versa), so that a thoroughly integrated canon of American literature is not only politically sound, it is intellectually sound as well. So I just wrote an essay that was published by Yale University Press about race. If you remember, it was called "African-American Lives." The forms of genealogical tracing that star in Faces function doubly: both splitting and lumping. GROSS: Terry Gross interviewed Henry Louis Gates last May when he was in Philadelphia to accept the WHYY Lifelong Learning Award. 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 TV was on kind of like the hearth in New England. The confrontation resulted in Gates being arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. And I wanted to be from them. - like the Aunt Jemima figure. 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. Prosecutors later dropped the charges. And the last thing I did before I went to bed on July 2, 1960, was to look up the word estimable. We'll hear more after a short break. After receiving a doctoral degree in English language and literature in 1979, Gates taught literature and African American studies at Yale University, Cornell University, Duke University, and Harvard University, where he was appointed W.E.B. 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. The show makes use of gene-sequencing techniques that have become widely available since African American Lives first aired, like whole-genome sequencing, which entails the mapping of all six billion base pairs in a persons DNA. "[7], Gates has argued that a separatist, Afrocentric education perpetuates racist stereotypes. [1] He rediscovered the earliest known African-American novels, long forgotten, and has published extensively on appreciating African-American literature as part of the Western canon. 2. And you - the last scene is the funeral. 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: 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. GROSS: But you also wanted to know who were your African ancestors. He's also written for Time magazine, the New Yorker, and the New York Times. It's a lot of data to process. Root seeking, on the one hand, produces idiosyncratic narratives. GATES: Oh, my father and I were the first father and son of any race and the first African-Americans fully sequenced. And I showed up from Yale, and he became my mentor. 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. GROSS: I've interviewed many people over the years. That's the first descriptor that comes to mind. In the series, he discussed findings with guests about their complex ancestries. GATES: And we - they only put - remember "The Late Show"? The minister would call on her. That yearning manifests itself in many ways, from anomie to ethnic mutual-aid associations. GATES: Yeah. 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 . GATES: But everyone who's in one of those databases has given some kind of permission. It was really, like, the photograph of her - of your great-great-aunt Jane Gates. 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. Speaks onstage during the 'Black America Since MLK: And Still I Rise' panel discussion at the PBS portion of the 2016. GROSS: So you know your medical background and if you're GATES: Yeah. And my brother went off to dental school. After a break, he'll talk about his childhood and about how DNA evidence demonstrates there's no such thing as racial purity. I told them that I did not want to know if I had any of the sort of - I don't know - the slam-dunk genes for Alzheimer's disease. I'm going to be black. GROSS: Have you been medically DNA tested? Faces expands on those outings in topic and technique, branching out from the genealogies of prominent blacks to those of a multiracial, multiethnic group of notables, including the actors Eva Longoria and Meryl Streep, the writers Louise Erdrich and Malcolm Gladwell, the musician Yo-Yo Ma, the poet and scholar Elizabeth Alexander, the comedian Stephen Colbert, and Gates himself. The injury was misdiagnosed by a physician, who told Gates' mother that his problem was 'psychosomatic'. It's a horrible way to start, in a way. 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. I can do it. GROSS: OK. Elizabeth Gates, the daughter of prominent Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, is in her twenties and suffered a severe stroke just four months ago. The most likely cause of this is a content blocker on your computer or network. We are unable to fully display the content of this page. Gates says John Morton Blum, a professor in Yale's history department, was his mentor. And that is the lesson of "Finding Your Roots. 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. 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. 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. So you found out that your ancestors were, like, 18 miles away from where you lived. GROSS: Huge story. And I was shocked by that. In 2020, Gates received the 400 Years of African American History Commission's Distinguished 400Award. Professor Gates is the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African-American Research at Harvard and has produced numerous books and documentaries about African-American history. He reflects on his own history and some of the more controversial aspects of DNA testing. Ostensibly one familys illness narrative, the story is also an allegory about how the experience of migrationwhether forced through slavery, pogroms, or economic vulnerability, or motivated by hope for a better futuremay generate a latent or conscious yen for community. [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]. I love you. And you got this from the 1870 census - (reading) that Jane Gates, age 51, female, mulatto, laundress and nurse, owns real estate valued at $1,400; born in Maryland; cannot read or write. That shocking news is relayed to Gladwell in an exchange pregnant with anxiety and uneasiness on the part of both men. More than anyone else, the historian is responsible for "entertaining the idea remotely" that Gates could become a writer. [8] The first African American to be awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, Gates sailed on the Queen Elizabeth 2 for England, where he studied English literature at Clare College, Cambridge and earned his Ph.D. degree. Catch #FindingYourRoots Tuesdays at 8/7c on PBS (check local listings). 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.
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