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. 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. The furor over the recent arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. erupted again Thursday following sharp criticism of the Cambridge Police Department by President Obama. 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. And on my desk set a red Webster's dictionary. 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. 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. All rights reserved. "My father was so sad. (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.) Henry was born in Patterson Creek, W.Va., on June 8, 1913. So I'm telling this story over and over of my - of rediscovering my own lost roots. 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. GATES: Yeah, I was 15 years old. I'm going to be black. One episode this season explores Gates' own DNA and family history. 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). Gates was born in Keyser, West Virginia,[2] to Pauline Augusta (Coleman) Gates (19161987) and Henry Louis Gates Sr. (c. 19132010). And you don't have a Y DNA, so that's why you're a woman. Coming up, journalist Brian Palmer talks about how slavery and the Civil War are described at Confederate historic sites in the South. The minister would call on her. In the series, he discussed findings with guests about their complex ancestries. Gates was also involved with various television documentaries that were aired by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). What is race? So it was just the two of us and my mom, right? 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. That shocking news is relayed to Gladwell in an exchange pregnant with anxiety and uneasiness on the part of both men. We know that BRCA1, BRCA2 - they're genetic. Many of us were troubled. The confrontation resulted in Gates being arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. He received the 2008 Ralph Lowell Award from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the highest honor in the field of public television. Catch #FindingYourRoots Tuesdays at 8/7c on PBS (check local listings). [35] As of 2021, Gates is married to historian Dr. Marial Iglesias Utset. In 2020, Gates was named a Walter Channing Cabot Fellow by Harvard University. And she come to - it's the woman who invents box pancake mix - right? 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). Barack Obama. Yet no lens is provided through which to interpret this genealogical bombshell. Thank God. GROSS: And you got this information from the 1870 census. So that was a steal. You get your Y DNA from your father, and that's what makes me a man. 35 (1): 212227. [36], In 1974, Gates learned the Transcendental Meditation technique. GROSS: But you had family that passed for white. Terry. And when I was a young teenager, early adolescence, my father and I connected through the news. 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. DAVIES: Henry Louis Gates spoke with Terry Gross before a live audience in Philadelphia last May. Well, I'll tell you a funny story. GROSS: Yeah. In some instances, we are left wanting to know much more. Isn't that a cool thing? GATES: Well, I was on "The View." (SOUNDBITE OF ALLEN TOUSSAINT'S "EGYPTIAN FANTASY"). 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. 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". The former vice president has become the Democratic front-runner with primary victories across the country. The fruits of the unearthed family treehistorical coherence; redemptive narratives of migration and assimilation; intergenerational social mobilityare unevenly dispersed. 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. Please make sure your computer, VPN, or network allows 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. GATES: Terry Gross speechless - first time in 35 years. After that, everything stopped. We started to roll. 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). 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). GATES: He wasn't even out the door, and I moved into his bedroom. [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. At the age of 14, Gates suffered a hairline fracture of the ball-and-socket joint in his hip while playing touch football. GATES: Now, we don't do blood anymore, right? GROSS: Do you know - do you want to know your medical DNA? GATES: Very close to them, yeah, particularly to my mother. So reading this - that she's a mulatto; she'd been a slave - the first question that comes to my mind - and I don't know if it was the first question that came to yours - was, was she raped by the man who owned her? Gates serves as the chair for the Selection Committee for the Alphonse Fletcher Sr. Fellowship Program that is sponsored by the Fletcher Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Fletcher Asset Management. 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. 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. It was just misdiagnosed. From Blum, he says, he learned a lot about writing and history. And when they analyzed my mitochondrial DNA, it went to England. 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. In 1973 he entered Clare College, Cambridge, where one of his tutors was the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka. If you remember, it was called "African-American Lives." ", 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. Is this instance of intraracial slavery an anomaly? I could've won the Nobel Prize, and somebody would say congratulations. Not all U.S. presidents are missed once they leave the White House. "Signifyin'" refers to the significance of words that is based on context, and is accessible only to those who share the cultural values of a given speech community. Like Joe Louis's fights, which my father still talks about as part of the fixed repertoire of stories that texture our lives. And my Y DNA, which is - comes in an unbroken chain, descends from this Irishman. That's not the way it was. American playwright, actor, screenwriter, producer, and director. . Even if you were free and you were black GATES: In most states, you weren't allowed to vote. GATES: Oh, my father and I were the first father and son of any race and the first African-Americans fully sequenced. But the ancestry is being investigated against the will of the people being outed. People might remember the Beer Summit, when you were stopped in your own home trying to unjam a lock after a long trip. Gates claimed that his arrest was a sign of racism on the part of police. 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. 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. Gates was arrested on charges of disorderly conduct, but the charges were dropped. 266. The womans suffering is assuaged at long last when she revisits the land and people that indelibly shaped her, including a local herbal healer. However, in the 60s amid the Civil Rights Movement, Vivian had been the target of attention from white supremacists since they believed she looked Black. He earned his B.A. 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. In 1989, Gates won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for editing the 30 volumes of "The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers". I said, well, I've never met Donald Trump. 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. It's incredible. If you continue to experience issues, contact us at 202-466-1032 or help@chronicle.com. 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? GROSS: You had family that passed for white. Both would be just as important. [9] Gates accepted the offer by Cornell in 1985 and taught there until 1989. I hope you never come back, you know? And by in traction, I mean on my back with my foot up with weights. In Wednesday's press conference, President Obama called the Cambridge Police Department "stupid" for arresting Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. You were 9 years old when you found her picture. 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. 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. In 2021, the National World War Two Museum recognized Gates with its American Spirit Award. Gates wrote, executive-produced, and hosted the series, which earned the 2013 Peabody Award and a NAACP Image Award. What percent would be from Europe? 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. He notably explored genealogy as host of the series African American Lives (200608), Faces of America (2010), and Finding Your Roots (2012 ). And TV was on kind of like the hearth in New England. And she throws herself on the casket. [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. His mother. Elizabeth Gates, the daughter of prominent Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, is in her twenties and suffered a severe stroke just four months ago. Now you can get a full sequence for less than $5,000 - some people say $1,000 or $2,000. This program examined the genealogy of 12 North Americans of diverse ancestry: Elizabeth Alexander, Mario Batali, Stephen Colbert, Louise Erdrich, Malcolm Gladwell, Eva Longoria, Yo-Yo Ma, Mike Nichols, Queen Noor of Jordan, Mehmet Oz, Meryl Streep, and Kristi Yamaguchi. GROSS: When you were 14, you had a football injury. His work has rooted African-American literary criticism in the African-American vernacular tradition.[12]. And I don't think that he understands how much power that - to heal, to bind that the Oval Office metaphorically has. 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. The new season of Gates' TV series "Finding Your Roots" is now running on PBS. The recipient of fifty-six honorary degrees and numerous prizes, Professor Gates was a . I go, goodbye. I'm Dave Davies in for Terry Gross. But on the other hand, you can't say that biology doesn't matter because it does matter. So I know that moment of transcendence is real.". And when my grandparents came as immigrants, my family was able to assimilate pretty easily because we're white. Because the series is so successful in demonstrating the intersections between world history and personal history, the lack of contextualization here is notable. When I did Morgan Freeman's family tree, it was obvious through his DNA that he was descended from a white man who was an overseer on a plantation in Mississippi. You have to get permission. 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. And I think that we throw terms like that around too loosely. President Obama's comments on Gates's arrest. And then he'd - and I read quite a lot. doi:10.2307/1208745. GATES: That was one of the happiest days of my life when my brother went to dental school. And the geneticists have found the identity finally of Jane Gates's paramour, the man GATES: Yes. When I became a teenager, my father and I bonded. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. It was a horrible, horrible thing. 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. 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. I found the first edition when I was an adult. GROSS: Was that reflected in the way you wanted to say goodbye to your father at the funeral? 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". February 12, 2010. GATES: I said, thank God. I can do it. And your father was a tailor, which is why we GATES: And my mother went to Atlantic City. His father worked in a paper mill and moonlighted as a janitor, while his mother cleaned houses. GATES: And, you know, what's even more amazing, it's - one, it was my mother's third great grandfather - my fourth great grandfather. 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? 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. President Barack Obama, a friend of Gates, said that the Cambridge Police Department had acted "stupidly" in the arrest. The injury was misdiagnosed by a physician, who told Gates' mother that his problem was 'psychosomatic'. GROSS: OK. GATES: admixture, I'm 50 percent sub-Saharan African and 50 percent European and virtually no Native American ancestry, which really pisses my family off. Gates has such an eminent reputation", she said, "and so much gravitas. 22,158 talking about this. His mother cleaned houses. (Rockefeller lost in 1972 but later served two terms as governor.). 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. Henry Louis Gates's Extended Family. He was 97, as you said. That's how much the science of genetics has changed in terms of the retail market since 2009. 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. He introduced the notion ofsignifyinto represent Black literary and musical history as a continuing reflection and reinterpretation of what has come before. And I couldn't imagine what, but two sets of those fourth great-grandparents are from my mother's line. The latter, tracing the ancestral history of contemporary figures, was especially popular. Know Thyself, the final episode, which shares its title with the slogan of Knome Inc., focuses mostly on genetic genealogy. 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. 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. He also learned that one of his African ancestors includes a Yoruba man who was trafficked to America from Ouidah in present-day Republic of Benin. I have a couple black friends - I went to Yale with Ben Carson and with Ben's wife. And I was in the hospital for six weeks. Tune in for all-new episodes as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. explores fascinating ancestries and family mysteries for an array of . GROSS: I've interviewed many people over the years. And that is the strongest argument for brotherhood, sisterhood and the unity of the human species. 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. But when I started the series, it wasn't called "Finding Your Roots." James . 8. And at this point, I'd run over to my mother and say, Mama, I'll never pass for white, Mama. And I learned a lot about the medium. Daughter Elizabeth Gates interviews her dad about . [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. You know, I try to - doing "Finding Your Roots" is a way to paying homage to my mother and father every year. And then when we go - when you were buried, she would stand up. According to a police report, Gates refused to cooperate when he was later questioned in his home, which resulted in his 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. GATES: And they said, OK, we won't tell you. In 1980 Gates became codirector of the Black Periodical Literature Project at Yale. And then it was a property requirement. Our editors will review what youve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is an American literary critic Credit: Getty What is Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s net worth? summa cum laude in history from Yale University and his M.A. What do you think of that? It measures your ancestry back 500 years approximately. Or they stayed home, and they drew. Today's most compelling personalities discover the surprising stories in their own family trees. Race is a social construction. 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: I did an episode with Oprah and Quincy Jones and Bishop T.D. Barack Obama understood that and, I think, certainly helped our nation to heal. Clarke, Breena, and Susan Tifft, "A 'Race Man' Argues for a Broader Curriculum: Henry Louis Gates Jr. And the only reason that I started making the series that became "Finding Your Roots" is because of that obituary and that photograph. Police arrested Gates on July 16 on charges of disorderly conduct after a confrontation with an officer at his home in Cambridge, Mass. In 1973, Gates became the first African-American to receive a Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship to study at Cambridge. They were buried next to each other. In Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (1992) and elsewhere, Gates argued for the inclusion of African American literature in the Western canon. His taxi driver attempted to help him gain entrance. And she was a beautiful woman. [29] His op-ed begins and ends with the observation that it is very difficult to decide whether or not to give reparations to the descendants of American slaves, whether they should receive compensation for the unpaid labor of their ancestors, and their lack of rights. 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. It's a gift - and for my mom. Updates? 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. Rather, he works for greater recognition of Black works and their integration into a larger, pluralistic canon. I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross. Black people came here - not willingly, of course. The fifth season of Gates' TV series "Finding Your Roots" is now running on PBS. GATES: That's true. In 2020, Gates earned a NAACP Image Award Nomination for Outstanding Literary Work Nonfiction for his book. Thank you so much for accepting this award. [3], Gates learned through research that his family is descended in part from the Yoruba people of West Africa. GROSS: Whoa. Gates wrote a book about Jay Rockefeller's campaign to be governor of West Virginia. Joe Biden launched his presidential bid in April with a bold . One of eight children born to Edward St. Lawrence Gates and Helen Gertrude Redman Gates, he was the youngest of seven sons. It's a horrible way to start, in a way. By Henry Louis Gates Jr. GATES: Yeah. 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 Root Worker, a short story by Edward P. Jones, a chronically ill African-American woman who migrated to Washington, D.C., from North Carolina returns to the South with her husband and daughter, a physician, in search of the cure that has eluded her for decades in the North. 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. But I think that Donald Trump's rhetoric and some of his actions - for instance, after Charlottesville - encourage unfavorable race relations in the United States. 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. You know, we used to say tribe, but now that's not politically correct - so the Yoruba ethnic group in Western Nigeria. GATES: And we - they only put - remember "The Late Show"? For $50,000, they sequenced my father, me and then 12 of the guests who were in "Faces Of America" - not a full genome but a dense genotyping. He was a graduate of Frederick Street High School and in 1998 received an honorary doctorate degree from Seton Hall University. 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. Root seeking, on the one hand, produces idiosyncratic narratives.