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: And it's a way of outing people as not being who they think they are and not recognizing that we're all descended from so many different people. Corrections? The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song was published in 2021. When we left off, Gates was talking about his own DNA mix. They spoke in front of an audience last May when Gates received WHYY's annual Lifelong Learning Award. My mother used to read me - the greatest book ever written to me was "The Poky Little Puppy," right? 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). My Daddy, the Jailbird - The Daily Beast And they stayed home, and they read. In some instances, we are left wanting to know much more. GATES: And they said, OK, we won't tell you. After a month at Yale Law School, Gates withdrew from the program. GATES: That was one of the happiest days of my life when my brother went to dental school. Gates wrote, executive-produced, and hosted the series, which earned the 2013 Peabody Award and a NAACP Image Award. Trump, who is running for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, announced a slate of futuristic new policies in a campaign video Friday. In 1974, Carol Stacks important ethnography All Our Kin (Harper & Row) suggested the plasticity of the designation cousin well beyond consanguinity. Season 8. Gates was the host and co-producer of African American Lives (2006) and African American Lives 2 (2008) in which the lineage of more than a dozen notable African Americans was traced using genealogical and historical resources, as well as genealogical DNA testing. Over . It was just misdiagnosed. Director, Hutchins Center, African & African American Research, Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard. His father worked in a paper mill and moonlighted as a janitor, while his mother cleaned houses. And I don't know if that ruined your sports career forever, but it affected your leg forever. And another person to interpret my genetic data because it's 6 billion base pairs, right? Gates traced the practice of signifyin to Esu, the trickster figure of Yoruba mythology, and to the figure of the signifying monkey, with which Esu is closely associated. Rather, he works for greater recognition of Black works and their integration into a larger, pluralistic canon. And it's for my father. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. GROSS: Have you been medically DNA tested? "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 she throws herself on the casket. 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. As a Black intellectual and public figure, Gates has been an outspoken critic of the Eurocentric literary canon. GROSS: I saw his picture in the obituary. GATES: For which she paid cash. I think it's vulgar and racist whether it comes out of a Black mouth or a white mouth. GATES: Now, we don't do blood anymore, right? The book tells stories about Gates's parents, his lifelong nickname, Skippy, and his brother, Rocky. In some states - like, New York would let them vote sometimes, and then take it away. Cambridge is a long way from Piedmont, but Gates traces the journey in his 1994 memoir, Colored People. Reader, a collection of his writings edited by Abby Wolf, was published. After turning that corner, Sharon gave birth to Maggie, their first daughter, in July 1980, and Liza was born 18 months later. Gates also notes that it is equally difficult to decide who should get such reparations and who should pay them, as slavery was legal under the laws of the colonies and the United States. of Hutchins Center at @harvard. Was this an equal sexual relationship? Stay informed daily on the latest news and advice on COVID-19 from the editors at U.S. News & World Report. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. This kind of research has been especially important for African-Americans whose ancestors had their names and families taken away when they were enslaved. In 2010, Gates wrote an op-ed in The New York Times that discussed the role played by Africans in the Atlantic slave trade. Isn't that a cool thing? ". [9] Gates accepted the offer by Cornell in 1985 and taught there until 1989. GATES: I'll never - I love you, Mama. And she and Claudette Colbert are both unmarried mothers. As a literary historian committed to the preservation and study of historical texts, Gates has been integral to the Black Periodical Literature Project, a digital archive of Black newspapers and magazines created with financial assistance from the National Endowment for the Humanities. If you remember, it was called "African-American Lives." And I sat down. The Native American writer Erdrich refuses to assent to genetic ancestry testing, because she understands her DNA to belong to her community. 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. 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. And on my desk set a red Webster's dictionary. In the early 1980s Gates rediscovered the earliest novel by an African American, Harriet E. Wilsons Our Nig (1859), by proving that the work was in fact written by an African American woman and not, as had been widely assumed, by a white man from the North. As a prominent Black intellectual, Gates has concentrated on building academic institutions to study Black culture. 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. GROSS: (Laughter) So I want to change the subject a little bit. GROSS: So I want to squeeze in one more question. The most likely cause of this is a content blocker on your computer or network. GROSS: Huge story. 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. 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. And the last thing I did before I went to bed on July 2, 1960, was to look up the word estimable. A passerby called police, reporting a possible break-in after describing to 911 "an individual" forcing the front door open. 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. And he'd make a couple - a move. The minister would call on her. They came in slave ships. They flew him in from San Francisco. 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. That's a long time when you're young. ", 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. GATES: Maybe for Christmas, OK, that's fine (laughter). And I would watch this beautiful, brilliant goddess. Gates wrote a book about Jay Rockefeller's campaign to be governor of West Virginia. So where does that come from? Du Bois Professor of the Humanities in 1991. 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). Please make sure your computer, VPN, or network allows He notably explored genealogy as host of the series African American Lives (200608), Faces of America (2010), and Finding Your Roots (2012 ). NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. In 2009, when I did "Faces Of America," a retail value of full genomic sequencing was $300,000. [32], The incident spurred a politically charged exchange of views about race relations and law enforcement throughout the United States. Henry Louis Gates Bio, Wiki, Age, Wife, Finding Your Roots, and Net Worth At Yale University in 1973, he was one of 12 students selected as a Scholar of the House, a program that allows seniors to write a book or compose a symphony or follow a similar passion instead of taking classes. 266. 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. The work extended application of the concept of "signifyin'" to analysis of African-American works. It was Gates vs. Gates on Martha's Vineyard this week. Police arrested Gates on July 16 on charges of disorderly conduct after a confrontation with an officer at his home in Cambridge, Mass. And the title is Race Is A Social Construction, But Mutations Are Real" (ph). But it is clear, in any case, that we fully inhabit a genealogical society"to use the anthropologist Elizabeth Povinellis phrase. Many of us were troubled. 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. GATES: I said, thank God. And you don't have a Y DNA, so that's why you're a woman. 2. This is FRESH AIR. And I was just overwhelmed with emotion. But we need to get some distance from the binary opposition we were raised in: evil white people and good Black people. If you continue to experience issues, contact us at 202-466-1032 or help@chronicle.com. In 2021, Gates was named a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and elected to the Johnsonsians (Society). [34] They had two daughters together before they divorced in 1999. 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. 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. We delineate our individual and collective identities based upon inclusion in and exclusion from groups. It was really, like, the photograph of her - of your great-great-aunt Jane Gates. 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). Henry Louis Gates, Jr. - Britannica He was a free negro, as we would have said then. After a break, he'll talk about his childhood and about how DNA evidence demonstrates there's no such thing as racial purity. "Beneath the return to the valley of the culture wars". And GATES: Yeah. This is FRESH AIR. It was better to be free than be a slave, but you were free but not free. . It's beautiful. 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. And my father would just make up stories and tell my brother and me. 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. TERRY GROSS, BYLINE: Because you've talked to everybody about their genealogy, I want to talk with you about yours and what you've learned about yourself and the larger meaning of what you've learned about yourself. GATES: And I gave it to my mother once. Mixing cutting-edge DNA research and old-school genealogical sleuthing, FINDING YOUR ROOTS . 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. But I think that you should have to get permission before someone is creeping around in your DNA. ", The lesson of "Finding Your Roots" - we're all immigrants. We might think of Faces of America, then, as an allegory of the simultaneous diversity of our experiences and the deep interpenetration of our histories. And I make it every week over and over with "Finding Your Roots.". 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. 6. So let's get back to your great-great-grandmother. 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? Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. One episode this season explores Gates' own DNA and family history. Sign up to receive the latest updates from U.S News & World Report and our trusted partners and sponsors. An X-ray showed a bright portion that revealed just how much of her brain tissue was destroyed. And before I started school - I started school when I was, well, 5, turning 6 - I would get dressed up, and I would go to church with my mom. [10] At Harvard, Gates teaches undergraduate and graduate courses as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, an endowed chair he was appointed to in 2006, and as a professor of English. He has learned that he is also connected to the multiracial West Virginia community of Chestnut Ridge people. Vivian filed for divorce in 1967, and Johnny went on to marry singer June Carter Cash. In the first series, Gates learned that he has 50% European ancestry[22] and 50% African ancestry. 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. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). "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. The series combines the work of expert researchers in genealogy, history, and historical research in genetics to tell guests about the lives and histories of their ancestors. PDF University of Washington School of Law Of course not. It's called the Beer Summit. Advertisement GATES: And then when they did my admixture, I'm 50 percent sub-Saharan African and 50 percent European and virtually no Native American ancestry, which really pisses my family off. But they came from someplace else. GROSS: OK. 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. The fifth season of Gates' TV series "Finding Your Roots" is now running on PBS. As soon as the Civil War ended, they became common law husband and wife GATES: Which was illegal in Mississippi. 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. 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. 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. 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. Now she was born in 1819; died in 1888. And he fought in - for the Continental Army. I killed my mama. 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)? GROSS: It has been a great honor to speak with you. He was 97, as you said. 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. And I showed up from Yale, and he became my mentor. So it was just the two of us and my mom, right? The current PBS documentary miniseries Faces of America traces the family histories of 12 prominent people who, over the course of several hours and with the aid of conventional and genetic genealogy, come to fasten their varied tribulations and successes to the arc of ancestry. That's the first descriptor that comes to mind. Gates was an Anisfield-Wolf prize winner in 1989 for The Schomburg Library of Women Writers. Or even to the slave narrative of Venture Smith, in which blacks are purchased by other blacks for both slavery and freedom. As host of the PBS series Finding Your Roots, Gates tells celebrities about their family history. His name was John Redman. 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. In 2020, Gates received the 400 Years of African American History Commission's Distinguished 400Award. Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Ph.D. in English literature from Clare College at the University of Cambridge. Crockett Jr., Stephen A. And I don't think that he understands how much power that - to heal, to bind that the Oval Office metaphorically has. And under the skin, we are almost identical genetically. - like the Bible says? Thank you. We're all admixed. In 2020, Gates received the Muhammad Ali Voice of HumanityAward. I don't think that's true for very many people in this room or any - or many people who are watching this show. In 1973, Gates became the first African-American to receive a Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship to study at Cambridge. 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. In 1980 Gates became codirector of the Black Periodical Literature Project at Yale. He received the 2008 Ralph Lowell Award from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the highest honor in the field of public television. Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. You know, no matter how different we appear phenotypically, under the skin we're 99.99 percent the same. On other occasions, though it was rare, blacks did enslave other blacks for their labor. Updates? And we're listening to Terry's interview with Henry Louis Gates. Yet no lens is provided through which to interpret this genealogical bombshell. But the ancestry is being investigated against the will of the people being outed. 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. February 12, 2010. Black people came here - not willingly, of course. 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. We'd spit in a test tube. 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". After receiving two fellowships in 1970, he took a leave of absence from Yale to visit Africa, working as an anesthetist in a hospital in Tanzania and then traveling through other African nations. And he mustered in in Winchester, Va., on Christmas Day, 1778, and was mustered down the Continental Army in April of 1784. GROSS: Thank you for all of all of the things you've written for your TV shows, for your movies. Then he'd come back. That's how much the science of genetics has changed in terms of the retail market since 2009. And I gave it to her for birthday. We'll hear more after a short break. If the findings of conventional genealogical research produce fireworks, the results of the DNA analysis generate shock and awe. We cant hold a documentary for a general audience responsible for not presenting a complex metanarrative on the philosophy of genetic science. Now think about that. Gates and daughter vie on the Vineyard - The Boston Globe When my daughters were born, I had them tested for sickle cell because - black people are not the only people in the world that have sickle cell. Coproduced, hosted, and written by Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W.E.B. In 2020, Gates was named a Walter Channing Cabot Fellow by Harvard University. And our family - my cousin, Johnny Gates (ph), still owns that house to this day. Gates was also involved with various television documentaries that were aired by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). And so he introduced me to the Yoruba people. And tears just streamed down my face. And I couldn't imagine what, but two sets of those fourth great-grandparents are from my mother's line. And at the time, the airwaves were so segregated, they only put black films on "The Late Late Show." 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. While at Yale, Gates mentored Jodie Foster, who majored in African-American Literature there and wrote her thesis on author Toni Morrison. But I also watched TV. "[7], Gates has argued that a separatist, Afrocentric education perpetuates racist stereotypes. Both conventional and genetic tracing yield unanticipated results in Faces of America. GATES: They don't do that anymore for this particular kind of - I had a broken hip. And I wanted to be from them. And when they analyzed my mitochondrial DNA, it went to England. GATES: Terry Gross speechless - first time in 35 years. She paid cash for that house in what was largely a white neighborhood. 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). My great-great-grandfather's now been found. So obviously rape or, at best, cajoled sexuality was the cause, but there are exceptions.