GATES: Maybe for Christmas, OK, that's fine (laughter). We're all admixed. It was Gates vs. Gates on Martha's Vineyard this week. And it's for my father. He grew up in neighboring Piedmont. And the title is Race Is A Social Construction, But Mutations Are Real" (ph). The recipient of fifty-six honorary degrees and numerous prizes, Professor Gates was a . So we went - my father showed us that picture and that obituary, and we went home. 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. "[14], As a mediator between those advocating separatism and those believing in a Western canon, Gates has been criticized by both. GROSS: So having done your, like, ancestry and everything, were you close to your parents? And when my grandparents came as immigrants, my family was able to assimilate pretty easily because we're white. Gates currently serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the W.E.B. GATES: And because it was PBS, we negotiated a deal with this company Illumina which sequences everybody. After a break, he'll talk about his childhood and about how DNA evidence demonstrates there's no such thing as racial purity. GATES: Our TV - when we woke up, the TV was on, and nobody ever turned it off until you went to sleep. GATES: Yeah, yeah. A white doctor misdiagnosed the injury as psychosomatic after Gates told him he wanted to become a doctor, Gates wrote in a New York Times article, "About Men: A Giant Step," in 1990. GROSS: OK, for two weeks. 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. He loved the news. 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. In 2010, Gates wrote an op-ed in The New York Times that discussed the role played by Africans in the Atlantic slave trade. That's the first descriptor that comes to mind. And then it was a property requirement. Such information forces you to contemplate your own history, he observes. Yeah. So I'm out there. [4] He also learned that he has 50% European ancestry, including Irish forebears; he was surprised his European ancestry turned out to be so substantial. JSTOR1208745. "Finding Your Roots" has become a phenomenon -- and it all began with host Henry Louis Gates Jr. receiving a piece of angry fan mail. As soon as the Civil War ended, they became common law husband and wife GATES: Which was illegal in Mississippi. GATES: I did an episode with Oprah and Quincy Jones and Bishop T.D. Director, Hutchins Center, African & African American Research, Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard. If the findings of conventional genealogical research produce fireworks, the results of the DNA analysis generate shock and awe. And I want to start with the person who got you started in genealogy. 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). As a prominent Black intellectual, Gates has concentrated on building academic institutions to study Black culture. 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. And the obituary said, died this day in Cumberland, Md., January 6, 1888; Aunt Jane Gates, an estimable colored woman. In 2009, when I did "Faces Of America," a retail value of full genomic sequencing was $300,000. Because of the injury, Gates now uses a cane when he walks.[6][7]. And he'd make a couple - a move. Thank God. While Gates has stressed the need for greater recognition of Black literature and Black culture, he does not advocate a "separatist" Black canon. They had two geneticists. Over . And that is the strongest argument for brotherhood, sisterhood and the unity of the human species. If you remember, it was called "African-American Lives." 6. 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. He reported:[37], "I had this spiritual event where it was like the top of my head opened up. "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!" . 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. Kids don't even know what they are anymore, but everybody here does. I mean, they know Donald Trump. But they came from someplace else. "Up until that recent piece, people would have thought of him as someone who took a cautious and nuanced approach to questions like reparations. And consequently, you are now a member of the Sons of the American Revolution. [33], Gates married Sharon Lynn Adams in 1979. And we have a wall of degrees at home. It's a horrible way to start, in a way. His work has rooted African-American literary criticism in the African-American vernacular tradition.[12]. Gates and daughter vie on the Vineyard. The world just isn't like that. I have the Ui Neil Haplotype. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities in 1991. [20], In September 1995, Gates narrated a five-part abridgement (by Margaret Busby) of his memoir Colored People on BBC Radio 4.[21]. Black people came here - not willingly, of course. GROSS: Yeah. . In 2012, The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. A collection of moments during and after Barack Obama's presidency. So we knew he was Irish. Coproduced, hosted, and written by Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W.E.B. Gates developed the notion of signifyin in Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self (1987) and The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (1988). Following a two-year stay at Duke University, he was recruited to Harvard University in 1991. [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. In 1974, Carol Stacks important ethnography All Our Kin (Harper & Row) suggested the plasticity of the designation cousin well beyond consanguinity. [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. And by in traction, I mean on my back with my foot up with weights. Gates's prominence led to his being called as a witness on behalf of the controversial Florida rap group 2 Live Crew in an obscenity case. 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. Time will tell. 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. "[7], Gates has argued that a separatist, Afrocentric education perpetuates racist stereotypes. The injury was misdiagnosed by a physician, who told Gates' mother that his problem was 'psychosomatic'. After that, everything stopped. Was this an equal sexual relationship? Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. 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. That's how much the science of genetics has changed in terms of the retail market since 2009. In 2020, Gates was named a Walter Channing Cabot Fellow by Harvard University. 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. And she would stand up and read their obituary, their eulogy. As a child, Gates said he wanted to be a Rhodes Scholar. In July 2022, Gates announced that he would serve as editor-in-chief of the Oxford Dictionary of African American English, a new glossary of language that will contain popular phrases used by historical Black figures and modern-day Black Americans. 266. Terry will be one of the guests whose family history is explored next year in the sixth season of the show. GROSS: But you had family that passed for white. NPR's Michel Martin speaks with professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. about the forthcoming episode of Finding Your Roots which features actor Joe Manganiello discovering he is of African descent. On April 19, 1989, he was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. Armstrong Williams, a person I really admire and like, I ask him, and he said absolutely not. You have to get permission. Even if you were free and you were black GATES: In most states, you weren't allowed to vote. 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. It was a horrible, horrible thing. But we need to get some distance from the binary opposition we were raised in: evil white people and good Black people. Discomfort is also experienced by the viewer. GATES: Yeah. And it turned out - my father used to say, you know, your mother's family is really distinguished, too? Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s arrest continues to cause controversy after President Obama criticized police action, Michelle Gielan reports. Cambridge police officers were dispatched. 1. And when I was a young teenager, early adolescence, my father and I connected through the news. 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: That's true. 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. August 22, 2013, 12:00 a.m. 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. Then he'd come back. 8. We are unable to fully display the content of this page. 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. "[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. [34] They had two daughters together before they divorced in 1999. GROSS: Was that reflected in the way you wanted to say goodbye to your father at the funeral? Signifyin is the practice of representing an idea indirectly, through a commentary that is often humourous, boastful, insulting, or provocative. No one's ever asked me that, but the answer's yes because I studied with a person who has been on your show, Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian playwright, when I went to the University of Cambridge. 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 . And GATES: Yeah. In addition to producing and hosting previous series on the history and genealogy of prominent American figures, since 2012, Gates has been host of the television series Finding Your Roots on PBS. And I think that that's sad. And on my desk set a red Webster's dictionary. 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 1995, he received the Golden Plate Award of the. 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. And they stayed home, and they read. He has learned that he is also connected to the multiracial West Virginia community of Chestnut Ridge people. It's a gift - and for my mom. His mother. 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. GROSS: So you know your medical background and if you're GATES: Yeah. So that was a steal. And my father would just make up stories and tell my brother and me. But it's just not those two genetic lines. And you don't have a Y DNA, so that's why you're a woman. But then President Obama called you both together. "Beneath the return to the valley of the culture wars". And she burst into tears because she used to read me that book all the time. [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. He was a graduate of Frederick Street High School and in 1998 received an honorary doctorate degree from Seton Hall University. In 1989, Gates won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for editing the 30 volumes of "The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers". 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. Historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. Barack Obama understood that and, I think, certainly helped our nation to heal. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. ", 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. It's a lot of data to process. In front of all these people and all these viewers. [25][26][27] Finding Your Roots resumed in January 2016.[28]. Gates says John Morton Blum, a professor in Yale's history department, was his mentor. Elizabeth Gates, the daughter of prominent Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, is in her twenties and suffered a severe stroke just four months ago. You were 9 years old when you found her picture. (January 21, 2015), Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, Potomac State College of West Virginia University. As a Black intellectual and public figure, Gates has been an outspoken critic of the Eurocentric literary 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. The Native American writer Erdrich refuses to assent to genetic ancestry testing, because she understands her DNA to belong to her community. . After an evening at a bachelorette party, she woke up with what she thought was a hangover. African-Americans all think that they're a descendant from a Native American. 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. Now she was born in 1819; died in 1888. Testing showed he had ancestors from sub-Saharan Africa, Ireland and England. GROSS: (Laughter) So I want to change the subject a little bit. In October 1975, he was hired by Charles Davis as a secretary in the Afro-American Studies department at Yale. And she and Claudette Colbert are both unmarried mothers. So everybody knew that this whole thing was building to the climax when Delilah - is her name - the character. GATES: You know, I'm totally exposed. 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. I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross. 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. I go, goodbye. Coming up, journalist Brian Palmer talks about how slavery and the Civil War are described at Confederate historic sites in the South. GROSS: But you also wanted to know who were your African ancestors. What do you think of that? And I sat down. [19], In 1995, Gates presented a program in the BBC series Great Railway Journeys (produced in association with PBS). And it's just crazy. If that date is correct, it would have precedence as the first-known novel written in the United States by an African American. 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. Stay informed daily on the latest news and advice on COVID-19 from the editors at U.S. News & World Report. And I think that we throw terms like that around too loosely. He earned his B.A. GROSS: Whoa. It was better to be free than be a slave, but you were free but not free. 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. And he mustered in in Winchester, Va., on Christmas Day, 1778, and was mustered down the Continental Army in April of 1784.