We know that BRCA1, BRCA2 - they're genetic. And then when we go - when you were buried, she would stand up. It measures your ancestry back 500 years approximately. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. And deep down, I realized in retrospect that my desire to make films was probably born about that time. After receiving a doctoral degree in English language and literature in 1979, Gates taught literature and African American studies at Yale University, Cornell University, Duke University, and Harvard University, where he was appointed W.E.B. In Wednesday's press conference, President Obama called the Cambridge Police Department "stupid" for arresting Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. GROSS: Have you been medically DNA tested? 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. In the series, he discussed findings with guests about their complex ancestries. And we're listening to Terry's interview with Henry Louis Gates. President Barack Obama, a friend of Gates, said that the Cambridge Police Department had acted "stupidly" in the arrest. Tune in for all-new episodes as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. explores fascinating ancestries and family mysteries for an array of . By Alondra Nelson. 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. 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. Terry will be one of the guests whose family history is explored next year in the sixth season of the show. African-American - I love to joke about this. You know, no matter how different we appear phenotypically, under the skin we're 99.99 percent the same. GROSS: And it made me think about - because I was just reading this - it made me think about how a president can set the tone for the country on so many things, including, you know, racial issues, immigration. 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. 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. The two series demonstrated the many strands of ancestry, cultural heritage, and history among African Americans. I said, well, I've never met Donald Trump. GATES: Well, I was on "The View." And they stayed home, and they read. Police arrested Gates on July 16 on charges of disorderly conduct after a confrontation with an officer at his home in Cambridge, Mass. Now she was born in 1819; died in 1888. [7] In his major scholarly work, The Signifying Monkey, a 1989 American Book Award winner, Gates expressed what might constitute an African-American cultural aesthetic. You know, I try to - doing "Finding Your Roots" is a way to paying homage to my mother and father every year. ", The lesson of "Finding Your Roots" - we're all immigrants. I hope you never come back, you know? 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. Gates' Daughter Speaks Out CBS 2.04M subscribers Subscribe 53K views 13 years ago Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s arrest continues to cause controversy after President Obama. But we can expect some acknowledgment and interpretation of technologys limits. The confrontation resulted in Gates being arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. GROSS: I think they're doing it through records and not through, like, secretly getting their blood samples. 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. In 1974, Carol Stacks important ethnography All Our Kin (Harper & Row) suggested the plasticity of the designation cousin well beyond consanguinity. That seems to be one of the programs aspirations. )supply information about human population groups dating as far back as 150,000 years, the time horizon of admixture testing is the past 500 years. And on my desk set a red Webster's dictionary. [1] He rediscovered the earliest known African-American novels, long forgotten, and has published extensively on appreciating African-American literature as part of the Western canon. This is FRESH AIR. But then President Obama called you both together. So you're saying I should have been an undertaker. So overseer, slave plantation - rape, right? I'm here to ask, on behalf of our production staff, if you will be a guest in next season GATES: Of "Finding Your Roots." Read about President Obama's comments on Gates's arrest. And that imprinted this woman's story in my mind. I'm Dave Davies This is FRESH AIR. Thank you for being you. So my whole life is really an attempt to honor and please my parents and make them proud of me, you know. In 2021, Gates received the PBS Beacon Award. You may then be asked to log in, create an account if you don't already have one, And I was exhilarated. GROSS: Yeah. But the ancestry is being investigated against the will of the people being outed. Barack Obama understood that and, I think, certainly helped our nation to heal. Cambridge is a long way from Piedmont, but Gates traces the journey in his 1994 memoir, Colored People. His mother cleaned houses. In 2021, Gates was named a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and elected to the Johnsonsians (Society). Each of the genetic analyses used in Facesadmixture analysis, haplotype grouping, and relative mappingincorporate underlying assumptions and algorithms that may be incompatible with the other techniques. GATES: Now, we don't do blood anymore, right? Armstrong Williams, a person I really admire and like, I ask him, and he said absolutely not. And my mother used to write the eulogies, the obituaries for all the black people in the Potomac Valley, where I grew up. Gates was born in Keyser, West Virginia,[2] to Pauline Augusta (Coleman) Gates (19161987) and Henry Louis Gates Sr. (c. 19132010). [3], Gates learned through research that his family is descended in part from the Yoruba people of West Africa. [33], Gates married Sharon Lynn Adams in 1979. [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]. 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. He reflects on his own history and some of the more controversial aspects of DNA testing. OK. On April 19, 1989, he was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society. The latter, tracing the ancestral history of contemporary figures, was especially popular. 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. American literary critic, professor and historian (born 1950), Critical studies and reviews of Gates' work. The minister would call on her. 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. It was just put on the historic GATES: Register in Maryland. 6. They had two geneticists. Henry Louis Gates Daughters Elizabeth is in her twenties and suffered a severe stroke in May 2010. He argues, "It can't be real as a subject if you have to look like the subject to be an expert in the subject,"[13] adding, "It's as ridiculous as if someone said I couldn't appreciate Shakespeare because I'm not Anglo-Saxon. Gates considers himself a literary critic and educator. And I was shocked by that. In 2019, Gates received the Anne Izard Storytellers Choice Award, 2019 for "The Annotated African American Folktales," which he edited with Maria Tatar. And that is a long time. On October 23, 2006, Gates was appointed the Alphonse Fletcher Jr. University Professor at Harvard University. 4. The former vice president has become the Democratic front-runner with primary victories across the country. "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. And I hope they are. When I became a teenager, my father and I bonded. Based on admixture testing, Longoria is told that she is 70 percent European, 27 percent Native American, and 3 percent African. In 2021, Gates received the MIPAD 100 Network's Most Influential People of African Descent Lifetime Achievement Award. Kids don't even know what they are anymore, but everybody here does. And she burst into tears because she used to read me that book all the time. And she dies of a broken heart because her little girl passes for white and goes off - and never sees her again. 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. And I showed up from Yale, and he became my mentor. GATES: But everyone who's in one of those databases has given some kind of permission. 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. GATES: We know he was Irish from my DNA. The fifth season of Gates' TV series "Finding Your Roots" is now running on PBS. The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song was published in 2021. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is an American literary critic Credit: Getty What is Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s net worth? He was a graduate of Frederick Street High School and in 1998 received an honorary doctorate degree from Seton Hall University. In 2020, Gates received the 400 Years of African American History Commission's Distinguished 400Award. Now you can get a full sequence for less than $5,000 - some people say $1,000 or $2,000. He grew up in neighboring Piedmont. Corrections? And when this little girl's passing for - she passes for white and breaks her mother's heart. Once javascript and access to those URLs are allowed, please refresh this page. And I have my mother's certificate from this vocational school where she learned to be a seamstress. And my grandfather was so white, we called him Casper behind his back. In "Root Worker," a short . And the only reason that I started making the series that became "Finding Your Roots" is because of that obituary and that photograph. Sign up to receive the latest updates from U.S News & World Report and our trusted partners and sponsors. GATES: I did an episode with Oprah and Quincy Jones and Bishop T.D. 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. Then he'd come back. Coproduced, hosted, and written by Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W.E.B. And I would watch this beautiful, brilliant goddess. Coming up, journalist Brian Palmer talks about how slavery and the Civil War are described at Confederate historic sites in the South. As soon as the Civil War ended, they became common law husband and wife GATES: Which was illegal in Mississippi. Season 8. Gatess father, Henry Louis Gates, Sr., worked in a paper mill and moonlighted as a janitor; his mother, Pauline Coleman Gates, cleaned houses. 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? While Gates has stressed the need for greater recognition of Black literature and Black culture, he does not advocate a "separatist" Black canon. He is a trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. The book tells of Gates's childhood growing up in the 1950s in a close-knit extended family and an equally close-knit small-town community. She is author of the forthcoming Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Politics of Health and Race, and is at work on a book about genetic ancestry tracing and African diaspora culture. His taxi driver attempted to help him gain entrance. 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. And the average African-American has less than 1 percent Native American ancestry, but they have 24 percent European ancestry. And then it was a property requirement. We delineate our individual and collective identities based upon inclusion in and exclusion from groups. African-Americans all think that they're a descendant from a Native American. [9] Gates accepted the offer by Cornell in 1985 and taught there until 1989. "[7], Gates has argued that a separatist, Afrocentric education perpetuates racist stereotypes. 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. He maintains that it is "ridiculous" to think that only Blacks should be scholars of African and African-American literature. GROSS: Yeah. Accuracy and availability may vary. 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? I only did black people. GATES: And they said, OK, we won't tell you. So I'm telling this story over and over of my - of rediscovering my own lost roots. He has insisted that Black literature must be evaluated by the aesthetic criteria of its culture of origin, not criteria imported from Western or European cultural traditions that express a "tone deafness to the Black cultural voice" and result in "intellectual racism". [4] He also learned that he has 50% European ancestry, including Irish forebears; he was surprised his European ancestry turned out to be so substantial. I think it's vulgar and racist whether it comes out of a Black mouth or a white mouth. At the age of 14, Gates suffered a hairline fracture of the ball-and-socket joint in his hip while playing touch football. It's incredible. 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. Joness tale offers some insight into the appeal of genealogy, another effort at reconnection with home and kin, and ballast against the tumult of modern living. In Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (1992) and elsewhere, Gates argued for the inclusion of African American literature in the Western canon. 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: But you also wanted to know who were your African ancestors. 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: 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. They were buried next to each other. 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. GATES: OK. A collection of moments during and after Barack Obama's presidency. As we honor the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King today, we're going to listen to an interview Terry recorded with historian Henry Louis Gates. Would you do it? These American faces, we learn, are the descendants of colonialists, aboriginals, overseers, bondspeople, interned citizens, and religious pilgrims. 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). I love you. Discomfort is also experienced by the viewer. The injury was misdiagnosed by a physician, who told Gates' mother that his problem was 'psychosomatic'. In 2020, Gates was honored with the Louis Stokes Community VisionaryAward. Brooke Williams.