And then you see this white girl next to Claudette Colbert. GATES: Yeah, I loved books. Still, as the sociologist Troy Duster wrote in The Chronicle Review (Deep Roots and Tangled Branches, February 3, 2006) regarding the use of this analysis in the first African American Lives, these tests rel[y] excessively on the idea of 100-percent purity, a condition that could never have existed in human populations. We learn, too, that Yo-Yo Ma is 100 percent Asian, that Streep is 100 percent European, and, in a nod to comedy and to how quickly ancestry can become racial classification, that Colbert is 100 percent white man! What is one to make of an admixture test that reveals no mixture at all? It's the damnedest thing I ever heard. So you're saying I should have been an undertaker. GATES: So obviously somebody gave her that money. Or even to the slave narrative of Venture Smith, in which blacks are purchased by other blacks for both slavery and freedom. 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 show makes use of gene-sequencing techniques that have become widely available since African American Lives first aired, like whole-genome sequencing, which entails the mapping of all six billion base pairs in a persons DNA. The latter, tracing the ancestral history of contemporary figures, was especially popular. And your driver was helping you - well, he was shoving his shoulder against the door trying to open it. It was really, like, the photograph of her - of your great-great-aunt Jane Gates. When the physical damage finally healed, his right leg was two inches shorter than his left. 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. Kids don't even know what they are anymore, but everybody here does. They spoke in front of an audience last May when Gates received WHYY's annual Lifelong Learning Award. And the average African-American has less than 1 percent Native American ancestry, but they have 24 percent European ancestry. doi:10.2307/1208745. Historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. JSTOR1208745. (Read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.s Britannica essay on Monuments of Hope.). In 2021, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania honored Gates with itsFoundersAward. Season 8. 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. Jointly appointed to assistant professorships in English and Afro-American Studies in 1979, Gates was promoted to associate professor in 1984. I hope you never come back, you know? 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. Gates has joined the Sons of the American Revolution. He is a trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. I was more of a bookworm. They - but you're absolutely right. GATES: Yeah. You were 9 years old when you found her picture. Hollywood Life, Latest Hollywood Celebrity & Entertainment News. He rediscovered the earliest African-American novels . "My father was so sad. He reflects on his own history and some of the more controversial aspects of DNA testing. And then when we go - when you were buried, she would stand up. A white doctor misdiagnosed the injury as psychosomatic after Gates told him he wanted to become a doctor, Gates wrote in a New York Times article, "About Men: A Giant Step," in 1990. In 2010, Gates wrote an op-ed in The New York Times that discussed the role played by Africans in the Atlantic slave trade. 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 we'd have the chess board set up. And I realized only recently that though I was raised to be a doctor, deep down, I really wanted to be a writer. "Beneath the return to the valley of the culture wars". [32], The incident spurred a politically charged exchange of views about race relations and law enforcement throughout the United States. You don't get $1,400 by saving your nickels and dimes as a slave, right? But I saw that photograph and read her obituary on the day that we buried my father's father, Edward St. Lawrence Gates. A passerby called police, reporting a possible break-in after describing to 911 "an individual" forcing the front door open. He's also written for Time magazine, the New Yorker, and the New York Times. He introduced the notion ofsignifyinto represent Black literary and musical history as a continuing reflection and reinterpretation of what has come before. 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. But then President Obama called you both together. The fifth season of "Finding Your Roots" is currently showing on PBS. Then he'd come back. Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s arrest continues to cause controversy after President Obama criticized police action, Michelle Gielan reports. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. GROSS: It's mind-boggling. 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 show, notable guests discover their family roots based on genealogical research and DNA results. 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). Gates collaborates with genetic scientists, including Eric Lander and David Altshuler, of the Broad Institute of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the Harvard professor George Church, progenitor of the Personal Genome Project; and personal genomics companies such as 23andMe and Knome Inc. "[7], Gates has argued that a separatist, Afrocentric education perpetuates racist stereotypes. Contemporary Literature. In 2021, Gates received the MIPAD 100 Network's Most Influential People of African Descent Lifetime Achievement Award. We defended the right of every American to vote. In addition to producing and hosting previous series on the history and genealogy of prominent American figures, since 2012, Gates has been host of the television series Finding Your Roots on PBS. He has an estimated net worth of $1million, according to Celebrity Net Worth. You know, we used to say tribe, but now that's not politically correct - so the Yoruba ethnic group in Western Nigeria. GROSS: Have you been medically DNA tested? Even if you were free and you were black GATES: In most states, you weren't allowed to vote. Read about President Obama's comments on Gates's arrest. Testing showed he had ancestors from sub-Saharan Africa, Ireland and England. And they got the brothers in uniforms with swords and stuff coming out of the church with this sad, black church music. And I was shocked by that. That's the way it is. And she burst into tears because she used to read me that book all the time. 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. And it's for my father. The two series demonstrated the many strands of ancestry, cultural heritage, and history among African Americans. ", The lesson of "Finding Your Roots" - we're all immigrants. GROSS: I saw his picture in the obituary. 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. So obviously rape or, at best, cajoled sexuality was the cause, but there are exceptions. And you - the last scene is the funeral. GROSS: But you also wanted to know who were your African ancestors. So we went - my father showed us that picture and that obituary, and we went home. We have the great privilege of having Professor Henry Louis Gates, of Harvard University, the Director of the W.B. And, although full genome sequencing is becoming more common and affordable, haplotype grouping relies upon the more narrow analysis of mtDNA and Y-DNA. The recipient of fifty-six honorary degrees and numerous prizes, Professor Gates was a . GROSS: Let's look at your ancestry and see who's really in it. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. And I have my mother's certificate from this vocational school where she learned to be a seamstress. 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. Not all U.S. presidents are missed once they leave the White House. So what I did - my father and I agreed, for science, that we'd put our genomes in the public domain so that any scholar or student can study our genome. 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. GATES: The Gateses all looked - my father looked white. GATES: OK. 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. And my grandfather was so white, we called him Casper behind his back. 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. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., (born September 16, 1950, Keyser, West Virginia, U.S.), American literary critic and scholar known for his pioneering theories of African and African American literature. And she come to - it's the woman who invents box pancake mix - right? They had kids, and they're buried next to each other. 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. And when my grandparents came as immigrants, my family was able to assimilate pretty easily because we're white. 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. One of eight children born to Edward St. Lawrence Gates and Helen Gertrude Redman Gates, he was the youngest of seven sons. My mother would say, tell them about your brother who's a dentist. 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. [11] Additionally, he is the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. 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. [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. DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. GATES: So if you were a Martian and came down to look at my DNA results, you'd think I was a white boy, you know? Please make sure your computer, VPN, or network allows In October 1975, he was hired by Charles Davis as a secretary in the Afro-American Studies department at Yale. Prosecutors later dropped the charges. Corrections? In 2022, the Boston Public Library honored Gates with its Literary Lights Award. In 2021, the National World War Two Museum recognized Gates with its American Spirit Award. And we filmed the whole thing. Also, journalist Brian Palmer talks about how slavery and the Civil War are described at Confederate historic sites in the South. Like Joe Louis's fights, which my father still talks about as part of the fixed repertoire of stories that texture our lives. GATES: For which she paid cash. 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: 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. And my mother used to write the eulogies, the obituaries for all the black people in the Potomac Valley, where I grew up. [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. The most likely cause of this is a content blocker on your computer or network. DNA-derived genealogical information may also collide with other ways of rendering kinship and relation. 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. 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. [3], Gates learned through research that his family is descended in part from the Yoruba people of West Africa. 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. GROSS: Your father died not too long ago - a few years ago. GATES: He wasn't even out the door, and I moved into his bedroom. On October 23, 2006, Gates was appointed the Alphonse Fletcher Jr. University Professor at Harvard University. He was a graduate of Frederick Street High School and in 1998 received an honorary doctorate degree from Seton Hall University. And I think that that's sad. And remarkably, she's now able to. Copyright 2019 NPR. GATES: We know he was Irish from my DNA. So let's get back to your great-great-grandmother. Ostensibly one familys illness narrative, the story is also an allegory about how the experience of migrationwhether forced through slavery, pogroms, or economic vulnerability, or motivated by hope for a better futuremay generate a latent or conscious yen for community. So where does that come from? It's incredible. GROSS: Is that too personal? And our family - my cousin, Johnny Gates (ph), still owns that house to this day. Brub, Michael (Spring 1994). So I just wrote an essay that was published by Yale University Press about race. It's a gift - and for my mom. 3. As a child, Gates said he wanted to be a Rhodes Scholar. Daughter Elizabeth Gates interviews her dad about . Discomfort is also experienced by the viewer. February 12, 2010. Yeah. If that date is correct, it would have precedence as the first-known novel written in the United States by an African American. [29] His op-ed begins and ends with the observation that it is very difficult to decide whether or not to give reparations to the descendants of American slaves, whether they should receive compensation for the unpaid labor of their ancestors, and their lack of rights. That's the first descriptor that comes to mind. And I don't think that he understands how much power that - to heal, to bind that the Oval Office metaphorically has. - like the Aunt Jemima figure. President Obama's comments on Gates's arrest. His mother cleaned houses. 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. 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. 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. 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 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. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities in 1991. GROSS: Was that reflected in the way you wanted to say goodbye to your father at the funeral? All rights reserved. He is a Trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. GATES: Terry Gross speechless - first time in 35 years. While Gates has stressed the need for greater recognition of Black literature and Black culture, he does not advocate a "separatist" Black canon. While at Yale, Gates mentored Jodie Foster, who majored in African-American Literature there and wrote her thesis on author Toni Morrison. 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. GATES: And my father lived to be 97 1/2 without any dementia. He was 97, as you said. 10. In 2019, Gates received the Anne Izard Storytellers Choice Award, 2019 for "The Annotated African American Folktales," which he edited with Maria Tatar. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. GROSS: I've interviewed many people over the years. Director, Hutchins Center, African & African American Research, Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard. The "You. And I watched reruns of early black films like "Amos 'n' Andy" and "Beulah." 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. In 2021, Gates was named a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and elected to the Johnsonsians (Society). Updates? I go, goodbye. GATES: Yeah, I was 15 years old. I'm going to be black. And so then they came in - this is a big deal back in 2008. What percent would be Native American? Hollywood Life And when this little girl's passing for - she passes for white and breaks her mother's heart. It's beautiful. In "Root Worker," a short . On April 19, 1989, he was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society. 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. [34] They had two daughters together before they divorced in 1999. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. After a break, he'll talk about his childhood and about how DNA evidence demonstrates there's no such thing as racial purity. 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. My father loved sports, and I didn't care about sports that much. 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). GATES: But I have an announcement to make GATES: For you. Coming up, journalist Brian Palmer talks about how slavery and the Civil War are described at Confederate historic sites in the South. And there were a lot of people who voted for Donald Trump as a repudiation vote. www.pbs.org/weta/finding-your-roots Posts Reels Videos Tagged Omissions? 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". You know, no matter how different we appear phenotypically, under the skin we're 99.99 percent the same. And tears just streamed down my face. And TV was on kind of like the hearth in New England. 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. In 2020, Gates was named a Walter Channing Cabot Fellow by Harvard University. The event led to public criticism of the Cambridge police department by U.S. Pres. And I hope they are. And the DNA tests we were doing at that time - when they analyzed my Y DNA, it went to Ireland. And the geneticists have found the identity finally of Jane Gates's paramour, the man GATES: Yes. It was a horrible, horrible thing. 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. Henry was born in Patterson Creek, W.Va., on June 8, 1913. GROSS: I think they're doing it through records and not through, like, secretly getting their blood samples. 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. My mother used to read me - the greatest book ever written to me was "The Poky Little Puppy," right? 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. I love you being black. I have the Ui Neil Haplotype. The surprising reveals, coupled with the celebrities raw reactions to the information conveyed by the host, deliver moments of high drama and genuine emotion. You know, I try to - doing "Finding Your Roots" is a way to paying homage to my mother and father every year. You can say on the one hand that race is a social construction. I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross. 5. Well, I'll tell you a funny story. Isn't that a cool thing? They had a medical doctor who specializes in sharing this information. Gates hosted Faces of America, a four-part series presented by PBS in 2010. "[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. 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. But we have a disproportionately higher risk of sickle cell. . So you found out that your ancestors were, like, 18 miles away from where you lived. It was Gates vs. Gates on Martha's Vineyard this week. People might remember the Beer Summit, when you were stopped in your own home trying to unjam a lock after a long trip. I have a couple black friends - I went to Yale with Ben Carson and with Ben's wife. Moreover, these genetic techniques may be inconsistent with the aims of conventional genealogy. Gates wrote, executive-produced, and hosted the series, which earned the 2013 Peabody Award and a NAACP Image Award.