I was more of a bookworm. 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. It's called the Beer Summit. Updates? 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. And the obituary said, died this day in Cumberland, Md., January 6, 1888; Aunt Jane Gates, an estimable colored woman. Henry Louis Gates Daughters Elizabeth is in her twenties and suffered a severe stroke in May 2010. In some states - like, New York would let them vote sometimes, and then take it away. And TV was on kind of like the hearth in New England. GATES: Right after the Beer Summit, it all went away. Gates wrote, executive-produced, and hosted the series, which earned the 2013 Peabody Award and a NAACP Image Award. In the face of migration and movement and so-called nontraditional family forms, both conventional and genetic genealogy allow us to freeze for a moment the flux of the modern human experience. 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). The surprising reveals, coupled with the celebrities raw reactions to the information conveyed by the host, deliver moments of high drama and genuine emotion. He wrote his first column (about Little League games) at age 12 for the Piedmont Herald in West Virginia and continued to write for his high school and college newspapers. [9] Gates accepted the offer by Cornell in 1985 and taught there until 1989. Our editors will review what youve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. GROSS: Totally stunned. Of course not. 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. 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. 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. 3. And our family - my cousin, Johnny Gates (ph), still owns that house to this day. And she would stand up and read their obituary, their eulogy. GATES: But everyone who's in one of those databases has given some kind of permission. summa cum laude in history from Yale University and his M.A. . We are unable to fully display the content of this page. GROSS: Whoa. 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. 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 another person to interpret my genetic data because it's 6 billion base pairs, right? 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). When the physical damage finally healed, his right leg was two inches shorter than his left. Black people came here - not willingly, of course. While at Yale, Gates mentored Jodie Foster, who majored in African-American Literature there and wrote her thesis on author Toni Morrison. "[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. GATES: I go, yeah, I got a brother who's a dentist, you know? 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? Yet no lens is provided through which to interpret this genealogical bombshell. ", 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. Surely, most people of African descent do not expect to find a black slave owner in their family tree. Now think about that. 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. So overseer, slave plantation - rape, right? And the reason I wanted to be a writer is that my mother wrote so beautifully and read so beautifully. 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. So I thought that I had a pretty good chance. After that I would say I was a teacher. [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]. The forms of genealogical tracing that star in Faces function doubly: both splitting and lumping. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research and professor at Harvard University, the seriess subtitles"The Promise of America, Making America, Becoming American, and Know Thyself"suggest assimilation, a melting pot rather than a tossed salad notion of the United States. GROSS: Your father died not too long ago - a few years ago. On October 23, 2006, Gates was appointed the Alphonse Fletcher Jr. University Professor at Harvard University. 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. DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. and Ph.D. in English literature from Clare College at the University of Cambridge. 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 they stayed home, and they read. And we filmed the whole thing. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. 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. It was really, like, the photograph of her - of your great-great-aunt Jane Gates. One of eight children born to Edward St. Lawrence Gates and Helen Gertrude Redman Gates, he was the youngest of seven sons. GATES: But then they did another special test. Elizabeth had suffered a stroke, her mind irreparably harmed. The fifth season of "Finding Your Roots" is currently showing on PBS. You were 9 years old when you found her picture. Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Jointly appointed to assistant professorships in English and Afro-American Studies in 1979, Gates was promoted to associate professor in 1984. And he, and you, the officer and Joe Biden sat down, had a beer or two. As soon as the Civil War ended, they became common law husband and wife GATES: Which was illegal in Mississippi. [35] As of 2021, Gates is married to historian Dr. Marial Iglesias Utset. DAVIES: Henry Louis Gates spoke with Terry Gross before a live audience in Philadelphia last May. 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. I'm Dave Davies This is FRESH AIR. GATES: Now, we don't do blood anymore, right? [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. That yearning manifests itself in many ways, from anomie to ethnic mutual-aid associations. We delineate our individual and collective identities based upon inclusion in and exclusion from groups. It was just misdiagnosed. Over . 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. In 2021, Gates received the PBS Beacon Award. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (@henrylouisgates) Instagram photos and videos henrylouisgates Verified Follow 519 posts 129K followers 173 following Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Dir. That belief is shared by Native groups that similarly objected to the Human Genome Diversity Project, as described in the work of Jenny Reardon and Kimberly TallBear. Cambridge police officers were dispatched. GATES: For which she paid cash. Gates was an Anisfield-Wolf prize winner in 1989 for The Schomburg Library of Women Writers. One wishes that Gates, an inimitable literary scholar well before he became a pathbreaking Renaissance man, might have alluded to another of Edward P. Joness works, The Known World, a historical novel exploring life in an antebellum community in which both blacks and whites hold black slaves, by way of even partial explanation. That seems to be one of the programs aspirations. In the first series, Gates learned that he has 50% European ancestry[22] and 50% African ancestry. Sign up to receive the latest updates from U.S News & World Report and our trusted partners and sponsors. GROSS: Do you know - do you want to know your medical DNA? I could've won the Nobel Prize, and somebody would say congratulations. Still, as the sociologist Troy Duster wrote in The Chronicle Review (Deep Roots and Tangled Branches, February 3, 2006) regarding the use of this analysis in the first African American Lives, these tests rel[y] excessively on the idea of 100-percent purity, a condition that could never have existed in human populations. We learn, too, that Yo-Yo Ma is 100 percent Asian, that Streep is 100 percent European, and, in a nod to comedy and to how quickly ancestry can become racial classification, that Colbert is 100 percent white man! What is one to make of an admixture test that reveals no mixture at all? And GATES: Yeah. The most likely cause of this is a content blocker on your computer or network. He was a free negro, as we would have said then. So where does that come from? But it's just not those two genetic lines. 1. The event led to public criticism of the Cambridge police department by U.S. Pres. And my grandfather was so white, we called him Casper behind his back. In 1984, Gates was recruited by Cornell University with an offer of tenure; Gates asked Yale whether the university would match Cornell's offer, but they declined. And I hope they are. Terry will be one of the guests whose family history is explored next year in the sixth season of the show. 6. There we go. GATES: Yeah, I was 15 years old. And then it was a property requirement. 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)? Historical evidence suggests that intraracial slavery was uncommon, and that when it did occur, sometimes free men and women of color purchased enslaved relatives and friends to rescue them from the cruelty of the chattel system, if not the social death of slave status. The world just isn't like that. In 2020, Gates received the Muhammad Ali Voice of HumanityAward. People might remember the Beer Summit, when you were stopped in your own home trying to unjam a lock after a long trip. In 2021, Gates received the MIPAD 100 Network's Most Influential People of African Descent Lifetime Achievement Award. GROSS: And you got this information from the 1870 census. We're listening to the interview Terry recorded with Harvard historian, author and filmmaker Henry Louis Gates before an audience at WHYY in Philadelphia last May. 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. And there were a lot of people who voted for Donald Trump as a repudiation vote. I killed my mama. 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. An X-ray showed a bright portion that revealed just how much of her brain tissue was destroyed. 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. GROSS: OK, for two weeks. My father loved sports, and I didn't care about sports that much. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. This is called an admixture test. Gates has such an eminent reputation", she said, "and so much gravitas. What percent would be from Europe? I have the Ui Neil Haplotype. GATES: Yeah. Cambridge is a long way from Piedmont, but Gates traces the journey in his 1994 memoir, Colored People. My mother was a seamstress, as you know. GROSS: It's mind-boggling. African-American - I love to joke about this. 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. 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. But I also watched TV. Not all U.S. presidents are missed once they leave the White House. This is FRESH AIR. Gates argued that the pervasiveness and centrality of signifyin in African and African American literature and music means that all such expression is essentially a kind of dialogue with the literature and music of the past. He received the 2008 Ralph Lowell Award from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the highest honor in the field of public television. 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. And I would watch this beautiful, brilliant goddess. A passerby called police, reporting a possible break-in after describing to 911 "an individual" forcing the front door open. As a Black intellectual and public figure, Gates has been an outspoken critic of the Eurocentric literary canon. Since 1995, Gates has been the jury chair for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, which honors written works that contribute to society's understanding of racism and the diversity of human culture.