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. GROSS: Thank you for all of all of the things you've written for your TV shows, for your movies. Rather, he works for greater recognition of Black works and their integration into a larger, pluralistic canon. 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. GROSS: But you also wanted to know who were your African ancestors. And we have a wall of degrees at home. 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. He has learned that he is also connected to the multiracial West Virginia community of Chestnut Ridge people. GATES: And they said, OK, we won't tell you. And he fought in - for the Continental Army. Sergeant Who Arrested Gates Tells His Story : NPR 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. GROSS: Terry Gross interviewed Henry Louis Gates last May when he was in Philadelphia to accept the WHYY Lifelong Learning Award. [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. This is called an admixture test. Surely, most people of African descent do not expect to find a black slave owner in their family tree. What is race? After a month at Yale Law School, Gates withdrew from the program. Today's most compelling personalities discover the surprising stories in their own family trees. And he, and you, the officer and Joe Biden sat down, had a beer or two. According to a police report, Gates refused to cooperate when he was later questioned in his home, which resulted in his arrest. 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. So that was a steal. 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. 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 new season of Gates' TV series "Finding Your Roots" is now running on PBS. 2. And TV was on kind of like the hearth in New England. I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross. 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. After an evening at a bachelorette party, she woke up with what she thought was a hangover. Contemporary Literature. It's a horrible way to start, in a way. And another person to interpret my genetic data because it's 6 billion base pairs, right? And they have a horse-drawn carriage. It was just put on the historic GATES: Register in Maryland. Sgt. Thank God. 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. GATES: Don't you? 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. [36], In 1974, Gates learned the Transcendental Meditation technique. But on the other hand, Terry, there were a lot of people who never forgave the country for electing a black man to the White House. My mother would say, tell them about your brother who's a dentist. 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? They - but you're absolutely right. By Alondra Nelson. Testing showed he had ancestors from sub-Saharan Africa, Ireland and England. Henry Louis Gates, Sr. (1913 - 2010) - Genealogy - geni family tree You know, and your family was, one of them anyways, was in the Revolutionary War. So overseer, slave plantation - rape, right? So you GATES: Because of this white man. It was a horrible, horrible thing. 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. This kind of research has been especially important for African-Americans whose ancestors had their names and families taken away when they were enslaved. Family tree of Henry Louis GATES - Geneastar The former vice president has become the Democratic front-runner with primary victories across the country. 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? Advertisement - like the Aunt Jemima figure. How 'Finding Your Roots' became a cultural phenomenon 4. You know, I try to - doing "Finding Your Roots" is a way to paying homage to my mother and father every year. 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.. You know, no matter how different we appear phenotypically, under the skin we're 99.99 percent the same. Malcolm Gladwell hears some shocking news in Gates's latest PBS show. 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. Isn't that a cool thing? He argued that the material, which the government charged was profane, had important roots in African-American Vernacular English, games, and literary traditions, and should be protected. GATES: Well, the average African-American GATES: The average African-American is 24 percent European. Please make sure your computer, VPN, or network allows Read about President Obama's comments on Gates's arrest. He maintains that it is "ridiculous" to think that only Blacks should be scholars of African and African-American literature. What is Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s net worth? | The US Sun 6. 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. 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. summa cum laude in history from Yale University and his M.A. And your driver was helping you - well, he was shoving his shoulder against the door trying to open it. Both would be just as important. And tears just streamed down my face. I was more of a bookworm. And they got the brothers in uniforms with swords and stuff coming out of the church with this sad, black church music. doi:10.2307/1208745. People might remember the Beer Summit, when you were stopped in your own home trying to unjam a lock after a long trip. 1. GATES: I did an episode with Oprah and Quincy Jones and Bishop T.D. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is an American literary critic Credit: Getty What is Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s net worth? - like the Bible says? But I also watched TV. James . 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 can do it. DNA-derived genealogical information may also collide with other ways of rendering kinship and relation. And it's just crazy. 1. And that imprinted this woman's story in my mind. 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. Well, I'll tell you a funny story. Coming up, journalist Brian Palmer talks about how slavery and the Civil War are described at Confederate historic sites in the South. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is an American literary critic and scholar who is known for his pioneering theories of African literatures and African American literature. 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. As a prominent Black intellectual, Gates has concentrated on building academic institutions to study Black culture. 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. But we can expect some acknowledgment and interpretation of technologys limits. [23] He had known of some European ancestry, but was surprised to learn the high proportion; he also learned that he was descended from John Redman, a mulatto veteran in New England of the American Revolutionary War. 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. He rediscovered the earliest African-American novels . [35] As of 2021, Gates is married to historian Dr. Marial Iglesias Utset. You have to get permission. On October 23, 2006, Gates was appointed the Alphonse Fletcher Jr. University Professor at Harvard University. 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". 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. 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. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. | Cambridge MA - Facebook 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 might have prostate cancer that runs in your family. GROSS: OK. As I have written elsewhere, this new kinship category, DNA cousins, or what Gates calls autosomal cousins, suggests that flexible kinship is being made on the new (or is it the rather old) terrain of biology. If that date is correct, it would have precedence as the first-known novel written in the United States by an African American. 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. GATES: But then they did another special test. I regret we are out of time. Gatess own genealogical narrative, unfurled against the backdrop of images of his family gathering in the kitchen or tender interactions with his nonagenarian father, Henry Louis Gates Sr., is also quite moving. DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. 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). Thank you. Or they stayed home, and they drew. In 1989, Gates won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for editing the 30 volumes of "The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers". And when they analyzed my mitochondrial DNA, it went to England. My great-great-grandfather's now been found. (Rockefeller lost in 1972 but later served two terms as governor.). So I thought that I had a pretty good chance. Before the PBS episode, the world only knew that Vivian was reported to be of Sicilian heritage on her dads side, and German/Irish on her mothers side. 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. 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. Sunday Notes - uristocrat.com Terry. And then you see this white girl next to Claudette Colbert. After that, everything stopped. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on Losing His Mother, the Heirloom He Adores Gates hosted Faces of America, a four-part series presented by PBS in 2010. So we went - my father showed us that picture and that obituary, and we went home. But then President Obama called you both together. [33], Gates married Sharon Lynn Adams in 1979. Copyright 2019 NPR. We cant hold a documentary for a general audience responsible for not presenting a complex metanarrative on the philosophy of genetic science. Or even to the slave narrative of Venture Smith, in which blacks are purchased by other blacks for both slavery and freedom. 9. After that I would say I was a teacher. Trump, who is running for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, announced a slate of futuristic new policies in a campaign video Friday. 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. When we left off, Gates was talking about his own DNA mix. And I have my mother's certificate from this vocational school where she learned to be a seamstress. That yearning manifests itself in many ways, from anomie to ethnic mutual-aid associations. Obama and Vice President Joe Biden eventually extended an invitation to Gates and the Cambridge officer who was involved to share a beer with them at the White House, which they accepted. In Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (1992) and elsewhere, Gates argued for the inclusion of African American literature in the Western canon. [9] Gates accepted the offer by Cornell in 1985 and taught there until 1989. And we knew the name of his great-great-grandmother and the name of this white man. If the findings of conventional genealogical research produce fireworks, the results of the DNA analysis generate shock and awe. And they stayed home, and they read. GROSS: It's mind-boggling. GROSS: Is that too personal? Gates has joined the Sons of the American Revolution. Now think about that. But on the other hand, you can't say that biology doesn't matter because it does matter. And I want to start with the person who got you started in genealogy. Additionally, he has worked to bring about social, educational, and intellectual equality for Black Americans. So it was just the two of us and my mom, right? You can say on the one hand that race is a social construction. In the show, notable guests discover their family roots based on genealogical research and DNA results. In 1973, Gates became the first African-American to receive a Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship to study at Cambridge. And remarkably, she's now able to. In some instances, we are left wanting to know much more. After turning that corner, Sharon gave birth to Maggie, their first daughter, in July 1980, and Liza was born 18 months later. It's beautiful. The recipient of fifty-six honorary degrees and numerous prizes, Professor Gates was a . Barack Obama. 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. 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. Henry Louis Gates's Extended Family. 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. 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: The Gateses all looked - my father looked white. 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. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is an American treasure. They had two geneticists. But the ancestry is being investigated against the will of the people being outed. Gates says John Morton Blum, a professor in Yale's history department, was his mentor. And I watched reruns of early black films like "Amos 'n' Andy" and "Beulah." The work extended application of the concept of "signifyin'" to analysis of African-American works. Gates and daughter vie on the Vineyard - The Boston Globe Armstrong Williams, a person I really admire and like, I ask him, and he said absolutely not. Thank you so much for accepting this award. So we knew he was Irish. I love you being black. And the black woman says all she wants is enough money to have a New Orleans-type funeral. GATES: And then there was "The Late Late Show." 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. 2023 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize Recipients Announced And I think that that's sad. The latter, tracing the ancestral history of contemporary figures, was especially popular. So let's get back to your great-great-grandmother. And they fought in the Revolutionary War. 8. And my brother went off to dental school. Or they stayed home, and they listened to or played music. And the obituary said, died this day in Cumberland, Md., January 6, 1888; Aunt Jane Gates, an estimable colored woman. After a break, he'll talk about his childhood and about how DNA evidence demonstrates there's no such thing as racial purity. Season 8. And she and Claudette Colbert are both unmarried mothers. This is FRESH AIR. Vivian filed for divorce in 1967, and Johnny went on to marry singer June Carter Cash. Mixing cutting-edge DNA research and old-school genealogical sleuthing, FINDING YOUR ROOTS . When the physical damage finally healed, his right leg was two inches shorter than his left. We defended the right of every American to vote. Race is a social construction. DAVIES: Henry Louis Gates speaking with Terry Gross in May of last year. Moreover, these genetic techniques may be inconsistent with the aims of conventional genealogy. GROSS: OK, for two weeks. On other occasions, though it was rare, blacks did enslave other blacks for their labor. So I would say, you know, no, I don't think so. He has an estimated net worth of $1million, according to Celebrity Net Worth. All that was on still in 1965 in syndication. 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. And by in traction, I mean on my back with my foot up with weights. And then when we go - when you were buried, she would stand up. Gates Devastated by Arrest, Says Daughter - CBS News If you continue to experience issues, contact us at 202-466-1032 or help@chronicle.com. 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. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). Discomfort is also experienced by the viewer. He learned the truth when he appeared on an episode of the new PBS series Finding Your Roots With Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker, with his fair skin and blue eyes, had long . We started to roll. 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? You may then be asked to log in, create an account if you don't already have one, It measures your ancestry back 500 years approximately. And that is the lesson of "Finding Your Roots. 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. And our family - my cousin, Johnny Gates (ph), still owns that house to this day. The technical aspects of genetic ancestry tracing are explained, but without sufficient social context, much the way a manual can tell you how to operate a car without explaining automobiles role in modern industry, the development of suburbia, or the emergence of youth culture. Ozzy & Sharon Osbournes Grandkids: Meet Their Grandchildren, Click to Subscribe to Get Our Free HollywoodLife Daily Newsletter, Rosanne Cash: 5 Things To Know About Johnnys Daughter Whos Speaking Out About His June Carter Affair, 'Finding Your Roots' Preview: Jeff Goldblum Reveals How His Mom Helped Him Fight A Bully, Ozzy & Sharon Osbournes Grandkids: Meet Their Grandchildren, Beautiful Nature-Inspired Baby Names Used By Celebrity Parents, Did Vanderpump Rules Tom Cheated on Ariana With Raquel? And I learned a lot about the medium. So I just wrote an essay that was published by Yale University Press about race. Jointly appointed to assistant professorships in English and Afro-American Studies in 1979, Gates was promoted to associate professor in 1984. Du Bois Center there at Harvard, one of GROSS: So I want to squeeze in one more question. They spoke in front of an audience last May when Gates received WHYY's annual Lifelong Learning Award. Gates currently serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the W.E.B. He introduced the notion ofsignifyinto represent Black literary and musical history as a continuing reflection and reinterpretation of what has come before. 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. In 2020, Gates earned a NAACP Image Award Nomination for Outstanding Literary Work Nonfiction for his book. And I don't know if that ruined your sports career forever, but it affected your leg forever. Also, journalist Brian Palmer talks about how slavery and the Civil War are described at Confederate historic sites in the South. The Bondwoman's Narrative was first published in 2002 and became a bestseller. He's received 50 honorary degrees from such institutions as Harvard University and Williams College. All rights reserved. Henry Louis Gates' Daughter: "Now It's An Issue Of Race - YouTube So I want to read something that you wrote about her. President Obama's comments on Gates's arrest. It's the damnedest thing I ever heard. GROSS: Yeah. 5. JSTOR1208745. Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Elizabeth Gates, the daughter of prominent Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, is in her twenties and suffered a severe stroke just four months ago. 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 she dies of a broken heart because her little girl passes for white and goes off - and never sees her again. In 2021, Gates received the PBS Beacon Award. Many of us were troubled. While Gates has stressed the need for greater recognition of Black literature and Black culture, he does not advocate a "separatist" Black canon. (Read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.s Britannica essay on Monuments of Hope.). 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. While at Yale, Gates mentored Jodie Foster, who majored in African-American Literature there and wrote her thesis on author Toni Morrison. 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. 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. He received the 2008 Ralph Lowell Award from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the highest honor in the field of public television. But mutations exist. Yet genealogy is, at the same time, put to the task of heightening awareness of human relatedness, be it experiential or biological. And he'd make a couple - a move. 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 We'll hear more after a short break. 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. GROSS: I've interviewed many people over the years. And most DNA companies in the United States will tell you that they have never tested an African-American who is 100 percent from sub-Saharan Africa. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. It's called the Beer Summit. 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. Of course not. Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree.