But the ancestry is being investigated against the will of the people being outed. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities in 1991. GATES: But then they did another special test. And my father would just make up stories and tell my brother and me. The first time we met was when I interviewed him for "The Reflection Effect," an essay I wrote for O, the Oprah Magazine about the power of nostalgia to drive happiness and build resilience after loss. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. "[30][31], Following a trip to China, Gates returned home to his residence in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near Harvard Square on July 16, 2009, only to find the front door jammed. It measures your ancestry back 500 years approximately. Is this instance of intraracial slavery an anomaly? All rights reserved. That shocking news is relayed to Gladwell in an exchange pregnant with anxiety and uneasiness on the part of both men. Isn't that a cool thing? OK. Would you do it? The injury was misdiagnosed by a physician, who told Gates' mother that his problem was 'psychosomatic'. 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. 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. That seems to be one of the programs aspirations. In 1992, he received a George Polk Award for his social commentary in The New York Times. Elizabeth Gates, the daughter of prominent Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, is in her twenties and suffered a severe stroke just four months ago. 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. I have a couple black friends - I went to Yale with Ben Carson and with Ben's wife. And the only reason that I started making the series that became "Finding Your Roots" is because of that obituary and that photograph. The womans suffering is assuaged at long last when she revisits the land and people that indelibly shaped her, including a local herbal healer. Some critics suggest that adding Black literature will diminish the value of the Western canon, while separatists say that Gates is too accommodating to the dominant white culture in his advocacy of integration of the canon. Coming up, journalist Brian Palmer talks about how slavery and the Civil War are described at Confederate historic sites in the South. GROSS: Was that reflected in the way you wanted to say goodbye to your father at the funeral? And I loved the news. Terry will be one of the guests whose family history is explored next year in the sixth season of the show. And I don't think that he understands how much power that - to heal, to bind that the Oval Office metaphorically has. After a month at Yale Law School, Gates withdrew from the program. And I wanted to be from them. And that is the lesson of "Finding Your Roots. Or they stayed home, and they drew. And they got the brothers in uniforms with swords and stuff coming out of the church with this sad, black church music. Accuracy and availability may vary. 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. According to a police report, Gates refused to cooperate when he was later questioned in his home, which resulted in his arrest. 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. 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. 4. GROSS: Yeah. Gates and daughter vie on the Vineyard. The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song was published in 2021. And I was in the hospital for six weeks. Of course not. And I hope they are. These American faces, we learn, are the descendants of colonialists, aboriginals, overseers, bondspeople, interned citizens, and religious pilgrims. 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. You said that after - you had been getting death threats and these angry emails and everything. "Up until that recent piece, people would have thought of him as someone who took a cautious and nuanced approach to questions like reparations. In July 2009 Gates was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct: After returning from traveling abroad, Gates had forced open the door to his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which precipitated a call to police from a neighbour who believed a robbery might be underway. 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)? After an evening at a bachelorette party, she woke up with what she thought was a hangover. 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 is the host of the TV genealogy series "Finding Your Roots." 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? All that was on still in 1965 in syndication. This is FRESH AIR. GATES: No. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. GROSS: OK. And she would stand up and read their obituary, their eulogy. Well, I'll tell you a funny story. As a result of the injury, Gates walks with a cane and his right leg is more than 2 inches shorter than his left. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is an American treasure. My mother would say, tell them about your brother who's a dentist. As a child, Gates said he wanted to be a Rhodes Scholar. He is on the boards of many notable institutions, including the, In 2010, Gates became the first African American to have his, In December 2014, Gates was announced as one of 14 recipients of a 2015. Yeah. 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. Corrections? 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. We cant hold a documentary for a general audience responsible for not presenting a complex metanarrative on the philosophy of genetic science. Henry Louis Gates Jr.: Head Negro In Charge. As soon as the Civil War ended, they became common law husband and wife GATES: Which was illegal in Mississippi. Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., called the book "an attempt to size Lincoln up through the eyes of Black Americans who visited the 'people's house' that their people had built and in whose names they were determined to win the fight for freedom and citizenship." In the series, he discussed findings with guests about their complex ancestries. We started to roll. GROSS: Your father died not too long ago - a few years ago. My mother was a seamstress, as you know. GATES: Very close to them, yeah, particularly to my mother. Updates? 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. He was a graduate of Frederick Street High School and in 1998 received an honorary doctorate degree from Seton Hall University. 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. I mean, like, my - I'm second-generation American. 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. Author Herb Boyd, who teaches African and African-American history at the College of New Rochelle and City College, CUNY, argued that despite the complicity of African monarchs in the Atlantic slave trade, the United States "was the greatest beneficiary, and thus should be the main compensator". 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. He is a Trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. There we go. In 2010, Gates wrote an op-ed in The New York Times that discussed the role played by Africans in the Atlantic slave trade. And the reason I wanted to be a writer is that my mother wrote so beautifully and read so beautifully. 10. Gates says John Morton Blum, a professor in Yale's history department, was his mentor. You get your Y DNA from your father, and that's what makes me a man. It was a horrible, horrible thing. I'm going to be black. 1. Wants W. E. B. DuBois, Wole Soyinka and Phyllis Wheatley on the Nation's Reading Lists, As Well As Western Classics like Milton and Shakespeare". Theyve Had an Inappropriate Relationship For Months, How Black Creators Can Expand Their Network with LinkedIn. Gates was an Anisfield-Wolf prize winner in 1989 for The Schomburg Library of Women Writers. 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. GATES: Yeah, I was 15 years old. Please make sure your computer, VPN, or network allows