In an article for Newsweek, journalist Lisa Miller reported on the reaction to Gates' article: The enemy of individuality is groupthink, Gates says, and here he holds everyone accountable. The new season of his TV series "Finding Your Roots" is now showing on PBS. It's a horrible way to start, in a way. 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 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. And the title is Race Is A Social Construction, But Mutations Are Real" (ph). So let's get back to your great-great-grandmother. I mean, they know Donald Trump. His taxi driver attempted to help him gain entrance. 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." If you continue to experience issues, contact us at 202-466-1032 or help@chronicle.com. ", 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. And she burst into tears because she used to read me that book all the time. [33], Gates married Sharon Lynn Adams in 1979. And the geneticists have found the identity finally of Jane Gates's paramour, the man GATES: Yes. The new season of Gates' TV series "Finding Your Roots" is now running on PBS. The arrest attracted national attention after U.S. President Barack Obama controversially declared that the Cambridge police "acted stupidly" in arresting the 59-year-old Gates. 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. 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. You know, we used to say tribe, but now that's not politically correct - so the Yoruba ethnic group in Western Nigeria. Moreover, these genetic techniques may be inconsistent with the aims of conventional genealogy. In 2012, The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Both conventional and genetic tracing yield unanticipated results in Faces of America. Cambridge police officers were dispatched. I have a couple black friends - I went to Yale with Ben Carson and with Ben's wife. Gates graduated as valedictorian of his high school class in 1968 and attended a local junior college before enrolling at Yale University, where he received a bachelors degree in history in 1973. 266. GATES: I said, thank God. 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. By Henry Louis Gates Jr. GROSS: But it's making me think of how much death figured into your formative thoughts - the death of your grandfather, which led you to see the picture of your great-great-grandmother, everybody's deaths through your mother memorialized in those obituaries. And she invents this pancake mix, and they become fabulously wealthy. His name was John Redman. When I was a boy, I was closer to my mother than my father. That yearning manifests itself in many ways, from anomie to ethnic mutual-aid associations. 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 at the time, the airwaves were so segregated, they only put black films on "The Late Late Show." 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. GATES: And, you know, what's even more amazing, it's - one, it was my mother's third great grandfather - my fourth great grandfather. In front of all these people and all these viewers. As a result of the injury, Gates walks with a cane and his right leg is more than 2 inches shorter than his left. 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. And we'd have the chess board set up. They were buried next to each other. You know, I try to - doing "Finding Your Roots" is a way to paying homage to my mother and father every year. He is a trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. 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). Brub, Michael (Spring 1994). 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. 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? - like the Bible says? And I was just overwhelmed with emotion. GROSS: I saw his picture in the obituary. African-American - I love to joke about this. I don't think that's true for very many people in this room or any - or many people who are watching this show. (January 21, 2015), Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, Potomac State College of West Virginia University. 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. Clarke, Breena, and Susan Tifft, "A 'Race Man' Argues for a Broader Curriculum: Henry Louis Gates Jr. And they would be published in the newspaper. 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. The minister would call on her. 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. and Ph.D. in English literature from Clare College at the University of Cambridge. - like the Aunt Jemima figure. They had a medical doctor who specializes in sharing this information. 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 . GROSS: So I want to squeeze in one more question. GATES: And then there was "The Late Late Show." Gates and daughter vie on the Vineyard. GATES: And they said, OK, we won't tell you. It was really, like, the photograph of her - of your great-great-aunt Jane Gates. And I sat down. But the ancestry is being investigated against the will of the people being outed. He has learned that he is also connected to the multiracial West Virginia community of Chestnut Ridge people. If you remember, it was called "African-American Lives." American literary critic, professor and historian (born 1950), Critical studies and reviews of Gates' work. I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross. The confrontation resulted in Gates being arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. They spoke in front of an audience last May when Gates received WHYY's annual Lifelong Learning Award. Now she was born in 1819; died in 1888. GROSS: And you got this information from the 1870 census. Even the Native Americans came from someplace else about 16,000 years ago. So we went - my father showed us that picture and that obituary, and we went home. And he'd make a couple - a move. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This is FRESH AIR. This is FRESH AIR. I can do it. And I watched reruns of early black films like "Amos 'n' Andy" and "Beulah." For $50,000, they sequenced my father, me and then 12 of the guests who were in "Faces Of America" - not a full genome but a dense genotyping. 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. We delineate our individual and collective identities based upon inclusion in and exclusion from groups. So obviously rape or, at best, cajoled sexuality was the cause, but there are exceptions. DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. The fifth season of "Finding Your Roots" is currently showing on PBS. And they got the brothers in uniforms with swords and stuff coming out of the church with this sad, black church music. The former vice president has become the Democratic front-runner with primary victories across the country. Now you can get a full sequence for less than $5,000 - some people say $1,000 or $2,000. Thank God. GATES: And because it was PBS, we negotiated a deal with this company Illumina which sequences everybody. And I want to start with the person who got you started in genealogy. [36], In 1974, Gates learned the Transcendental Meditation technique. In 2020, Gates received the 400 Years of African American History Commission's Distinguished 400Award. And I learned a lot about the medium. 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. I'm going to be black. Such information forces you to contemplate your own history, he observes. The world just isn't like that. Alondra Nelson is an associate professor of sociology at Columbia University, where she also holds an appointment in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. I could've won the Nobel Prize, and somebody would say congratulations. "Black people were so angry at me. 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. 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. People might remember the Beer Summit, when you were stopped in your own home trying to unjam a lock after a long trip. So where does that come from? And I don't think that he understands how much power that - to heal, to bind that the Oval Office metaphorically has. Gates was also involved with various television documentaries that were aired by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). 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. And when my grandparents came as immigrants, my family was able to assimilate pretty easily because we're white. Biology matters. GATES: No. He has affirmed the value of the Western tradition, but has envisioned a more inclusive canon of diverse works sharing common cultural connections: "Every Black American text must confess to a complex ancestry, one high and low (that is, literary and vernacular) but also one white and black there can be no doubt that white texts inform and influence black texts (and vice versa), so that a thoroughly integrated canon of American literature is not only politically sound, it is intellectually sound as well. This is FRESH AIR. As a prominent Black intellectual, Gates has concentrated on building academic institutions to study Black culture. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. After a break, he'll talk about his childhood and about how DNA evidence demonstrates there's no such thing as racial purity. [11] Additionally, he is the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. Du Bois Center there at Harvard, one of And my grandfather was so white, we called him Casper behind his back. And remarkably, she's now able to. Gatess father, Henry Louis Gates, Sr., worked in a paper mill and moonlighted as a janitor; his mother, Pauline Coleman Gates, cleaned houses. 8. That's not the way it was. In 2019, Gates received the Anne Izard Storytellers Choice Award, 2019 for "The Annotated African American Folktales," which he edited with Maria Tatar. And under the skin, we are almost identical genetically. 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. And she throws herself on the casket. In 2021, Gates was honored by PEN America with its Audible Literary Service Award. And when they analyzed my mitochondrial DNA, it went to England. He was a graduate of Frederick Street High School and in 1998 received an honorary doctorate degree from Seton Hall University. Crockett Jr., Stephen A. A new season of Finding Your Roots premieres January 4, 2022! This is FRESH AIR. GATES: OK. What do you think of that? Henrys research also led him to discover a census from 1870, which revealed that Rosannes great-great grandfather a man named Lafayette Robsinson was mixed-race. Upon learning this, Rosanne recalled the long-running rumors of her mothers background and said, So, it was, at least, a small part true., Related: DAVIES: Henry Louis Gates speaking with Terry Gross in May of last year. 10. He is a Trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. They lived together. (Rockefeller lost in 1972 but later served two terms as governor.). In 2020, Gates received the Muhammad Ali Voice of HumanityAward. Mama - I'm sorry, Mama. 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. GROSS: OK. 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. The "You. On October 23, 2006, Gates was appointed the Alphonse Fletcher Jr. University Professor at Harvard University. [34] They had two daughters together before they divorced in 1999. He introduced the notion ofsignifyinto represent Black literary and musical history as a continuing reflection and reinterpretation of what has come before. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. If that date is correct, it would have precedence as the first-known novel written in the United States by an African American. As Faces of America concludes, the connections among several of the participants are revealed using a technique developed by Altschuler and his colleague Mark Daly that is similar to 23andMes Relative Finder. These DNA cousins share several million of the three billion base pairs, suggesting a common ancestor a few or tens of generations in the past. By clicking submit, you are agreeing to our Terms and Conditions & Privacy Policy. 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. 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. OK. GROSS: Thank you for all of all of the things you've written for your TV shows, for your movies. 9. GATES: I'll never - I love you, Mama. Trump, who is running for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, announced a slate of futuristic new policies in a campaign video Friday. All rights reserved. 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. Elizabeth Gates, the daughter of prominent Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, is in her twenties and suffered a severe stroke just four months ago. And your driver was helping you - well, he was shoving his shoulder against the door trying to open it. Terry. 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. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is an American literary critic Credit: Getty What is Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s net worth? Armstrong Williams, a person I really admire and like, I ask him, and he said absolutely not. This is called an admixture test. He was 97, as you said. 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. Gates currently serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the W.E.B. And I don't know if that ruined your sports career forever, but it affected your leg forever. As a result of research he conducted as a MacArthur Fellow, Gates discovered Our Nig, written by Harriet E. Wilson in 1859 and thought to be the first novel written in the United States by an African American. And that night - and then daddy showed my brother and me, Dr. Paul Gates now, chief of dentistry at Bronx-Lebanon Hospital GATES: Well, it's the spirit of my mother. August 22, 2013, 12:00 a.m. We have the great privilege of having Professor Henry Louis Gates, of Harvard University, the Director of the W.B. Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 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. 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. In 2020, Gates was honored with the Louis Stokes Community VisionaryAward. On other occasions, though it was rare, blacks did enslave other blacks for their labor. And GATES: Yeah. Yet no lens is provided through which to interpret this genealogical bombshell. And you don't have a Y DNA, so that's why you're a woman. Prosecutors later dropped the charges. And she would stand up and read their obituary, their eulogy. GATES: Yeah, yeah. GROSS: I think they're doing it through records and not through, like, secretly getting their blood samples. GATES: We know he was Irish from my DNA. GATES: Yeah, I was 15 years old. So we knew he was Irish. The work extended application of the concept of "signifyin'" to analysis of African-American works. Barack Obama. Know Thyself, the final episode, which shares its title with the slogan of Knome Inc., focuses mostly on genetic genealogy. 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. GATES: That was one of the happiest days of my life when my brother went to dental school. The show's third season was postponed after it was discovered that actor Ben Affleck had persuaded Gates to omit information about his slave-owning ancestors. 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). Thank God. 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. Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s arrest continues to cause controversy after President Obama criticized police action, Michelle Gielan reports. Terry spoke to Henry Louis Gates in front of an audience last May when he was in Philadelphia to receive WHYY's annual Lifelong Learning Award. Gates claimed that his arrest was a sign of racism on the part of police. Yet genealogy is, at the same time, put to the task of heightening awareness of human relatedness, be it experiential or biological. He introduced the notion of signifyin to represent African and African American literary and musical history as a continuing reflection and reinterpretation of what has come before. Gates was arrested on charges of disorderly conduct, but the charges were dropped. You might have breast cancer. We cant hold a documentary for a general audience responsible for not presenting a complex metanarrative on the philosophy of genetic science. It's a gift - and for my mom. And your father was a tailor, which is why we GATES: And my mother went to Atlantic City. 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. Gates wrote a book about Jay Rockefeller's campaign to be governor of West Virginia. 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. My father loved sports, and I didn't care about sports that much. Isn't that a cool thing? GATES: Well, I think that you should have the right to - you have to ask someone. Gates wrote, executive-produced, and hosted the series, which earned the 2013 Peabody Award and a NAACP Image Award.