My mother used to read me - the greatest book ever written to me was "The Poky Little Puppy," right? or subscribe. We'd spit in a test tube. You know, no matter how different we appear phenotypically, under the skin we're 99.99 percent the same. GATES: Yeah, I was 15 years old. You know, and your family was, one of them anyways, was in the Revolutionary War. His mother. But it is clear, in any case, that we fully inhabit a genealogical society"to use the anthropologist Elizabeth Povinellis phrase. GROSS: So you assume it was not a consensual relationship, but she managed to own her own home five years after being freed from slavery. GROSS: So when you had your DNA done, did you have a wish for a certain area of Africa or a certain group of African people who you wanted to be your ancestors? What do you think of that? GROSS: Was that reflected in the way you wanted to say goodbye to your father at the funeral? I don't think that's true for very many people in this room or any - or many people who are watching this show. The world just isn't like that. Gates and daughter vie on the Vineyard - The Boston Globe But they came from someplace else. The work extended application of the concept of "signifyin'" to analysis of African-American works. This is FRESH AIR. We delineate our individual and collective identities based upon inclusion in and exclusion from groups. "[7], Gates has argued that a separatist, Afrocentric education perpetuates racist stereotypes. - like the Aunt Jemima figure. 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. The Bondwoman's Narrative was first published in 2002 and became a bestseller. If you remember, it was called "African-American Lives." Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s arrest continues to cause controversy after President Obama criticized police action, Michelle Gielan reports. Opinion | The 'Lost Cause' That Built Jim Crow - The New York Times In 1992, he received a George Polk Award for his social commentary in The New York Times. After turning that corner, Sharon gave birth to Maggie, their first daughter, in July 1980, and Liza was born 18 months later. GATES: Oh, my father and I were the first father and son of any race and the first African-Americans fully sequenced. So let's get back to your great-great-grandmother. [33], Gates married Sharon Lynn Adams in 1979. Finding Your Roots | Season 8 That's the way it is. [35] As of 2021, Gates is married to historian Dr. Marial Iglesias Utset. - like the Bible says? And the title is Race Is A Social Construction, But Mutations Are Real" (ph). And so he introduced me to the Yoruba people. 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. 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. 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. In Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (1992) and elsewhere, Gates argued for the inclusion of African American literature in the Western canon. And I have my mother's certificate from this vocational school where she learned to be a seamstress. And we filmed the whole thing. His name was John Redman. We started to roll. So my whole life is really an attempt to honor and please my parents and make them proud of me, you know. And the geneticists have found the identity finally of Jane Gates's paramour, the man GATES: Yes. In 2009, when I did "Faces Of America," a retail value of full genomic sequencing was $300,000. Henry Louis Gates Jr.: Head Negro In Charge - Boston Magazine GROSS: Totally stunned. GATES: And because it was PBS, we negotiated a deal with this company Illumina which sequences everybody. Rather, he works for greater recognition of Black works and their integration into a larger, pluralistic canon. 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. As of February 2022, Gates, 71, serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and as the Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.. 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. We are unable to fully display the content of this page. Gates says John Morton Blum, a professor in Yale's history department, was his mentor. 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. Barack Obama. So everybody who showed up on this continent is from someplace else. And we knew the name of his great-great-grandmother and the name of this white man. In 1995, he received the Golden Plate Award of the. And the last thing I did before I went to bed on July 2, 1960, was to look up the word estimable. Gates considers himself a literary critic and educator. He grew up in neighboring Piedmont. He loved the news. But I saw that photograph and read her obituary on the day that we buried my father's father, Edward St. Lawrence Gates. You don't get $1,400 by saving your nickels and dimes as a slave, right? doi:10.2307/1208745. 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. All rights reserved. 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. . 35 (1): 212227. Race is a social construction. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (@henrylouisgates) - Instagram After an evening at a bachelorette party, she woke up with what she thought was a hangover. Even if you were free and you were black GATES: In most states, you weren't allowed to vote. He introduced the notion ofsignifyinto represent Black literary and musical history as a continuing reflection and reinterpretation of what has come before. GATES: So obviously somebody gave her that money. And she invents this pancake mix, and they become fabulously wealthy. Malcolm Gladwell hears some shocking news in Gates's latest PBS show. 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'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. Mama - I'm sorry, Mama. They were buried next to each other. Not all U.S. presidents are missed once they leave the White House. 266. GATES: No. GROSS: And then your slightly more contemporary ancestors not having any rights in the country, you know, or very few rights - not being able to vote, having to live in segregation. (SOUNDBITE OF ALLEN TOUSSAINT'S "EGYPTIAN FANTASY"). In the face of migration and movement and so-called nontraditional family forms, both conventional and genetic genealogy allow us to freeze for a moment the flux of the modern human experience. In 1980 Gates became codirector of the Black Periodical Literature Project at Yale. summa cum laude in history from Yale University and his M.A. GATES: And, you know, what's even more amazing, it's - one, it was my mother's third great grandfather - my fourth great grandfather. On October 23, 2006, Gates was appointed the Alphonse Fletcher Jr. University Professor at Harvard University. 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 earned a NAACP Image Award Nomination for Outstanding Literary Work Nonfiction for his book. "[14], As a mediator between those advocating separatism and those believing in a Western canon, Gates has been criticized by both. He's also written for Time magazine, the New Yorker, and the New York Times. The surprising reveals, coupled with the celebrities raw reactions to the information conveyed by the host, deliver moments of high drama and genuine emotion. And she burst into tears because she used to read me that book all the time. African-Americans all think that they're a descendant from a Native American. 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. 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. At one point, Johnny even told the KKK in a statement that Vivian was white. After a month at Yale Law School, Gates withdrew from the program. 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). He was a free negro, as we would have said then. 1. DAVIES: Henry Louis Gates spoke with Terry Gross before a live audience in Philadelphia last May. 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. Once javascript and access to those URLs are allowed, please refresh this page. GATES: I'll never - I love you, Mama. 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 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. 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. [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. What percent would be Native American? The event led to public criticism of the Cambridge police department by U.S. Pres. [18] To build Harvard's visual, documentary, and literary archives of African-American texts, Gates arranged for the purchase of The Image of the Black in Western Art, a collection assembled by Dominique de Mnil in Houston. Historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. On DNA Testing And Finding His Own GROSS: It's mind-boggling. Henry Louis Gates Photos and Premium High Res Pictures - Getty Images 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." In the years that followed he earned a reputation as a literary archaeologist by recovering and collecting thousands of lost literary works (short stories, poems, reviews, and notices) by African American authors dating from the early 19th to the mid-20th century. As host of the PBS series Finding Your Roots, Gates tells celebrities about their family history. By Alondra Nelson. Because of the injury, Gates now uses a cane when he walks.[6][7]. What does Henry Louis Gates, Jr., see as the most important form of resistance against hate? He looked white. You know, we used to say tribe, but now that's not politically correct - so the Yoruba ethnic group in Western Nigeria. And on my desk set a red Webster's dictionary. 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). 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. Was Johnny Cash's first wife, Vivian, Black? Roseanne Cash learned the One wishes that Gates, an inimitable literary scholar well before he became a pathbreaking Renaissance man, might have alluded to another of Edward P. Joness works, The Known World, a historical novel exploring life in an antebellum community in which both blacks and whites hold black slaves, by way of even partial explanation. It's incredible. And I would watch this beautiful, brilliant goddess. And I loved the news. And then it was a property requirement. 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. OK. GROSS: So having done your, like, ancestry and everything, were you close to your parents? 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. 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. Or they stayed home, and they listened to or played music. 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). He is a trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. We fought to keep the pipeline of opportunity open, and, despite our ideological differences, we found a way to link arms against every form of bigotry.. They had two geneticists. Does race exist? But we need to get some distance from the binary opposition we were raised in: evil white people and good Black people. President Obama's comments on Gates's arrest. Even the Native Americans came from someplace else about 16,000 years ago. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. - The National Endowment for the Humanities Is this instance of intraracial slavery an anomaly? 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. Henry Louis Gates Jr. - Wikipedia All that was on still in 1965 in syndication. And one of the, you know, wonderful people on "The View" said did I think that Donald Trump is racist. of Hutchins Center at @harvard. Because the series is so successful in demonstrating the intersections between world history and personal history, the lack of contextualization here is notable. DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. I was more of a bookworm. Gates was born in Keyser, West Virginia,[2] to Pauline Augusta (Coleman) Gates (19161987) and Henry Louis Gates Sr. (c. 19132010). Crockett Jr., Stephen A. Over . It's a horrible way to start, in a way. On the same night Harvard professor Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr . And the last thing I did before I went to bed was - we always had a desk in our bedrooms and had a bookcase. ", 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: Yeah, yeah. They spoke in front of an audience last May when Gates received WHYY's annual Lifelong Learning Award. 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. But it's just not those two genetic lines. 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. Well, I'll tell you a funny story. Isn't that a cool thing? I found the first edition when I was an adult. A Stroke -- in Your Twenties? - CBS News February 12, 2010. 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). "We deconstruct ethnic identities to show that when the lights came down, everyone was sleeping with everyone else -- that's the way human history goes!" . He notably explored genealogy as host of the series African American Lives (200608), Faces of America (2010), and Finding Your Roots (2012 ). 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. 5. Episode 1409A -- Pictured in this screengrab: Historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. During an interview on February 22, 2021 -- 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. Mixing cutting-edge DNA research and old-school genealogical sleuthing, FINDING YOUR ROOTS . 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. GROSS: I think they're doing it through records and not through, like, secretly getting their blood samples. The new season of his TV series "Finding Your Roots" is now showing on PBS. 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. GROSS: So I want to squeeze in one more question. And I think that that's sad. It's beautiful. 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. GROSS: Your father died not too long ago - a few years ago. He's received 50 honorary degrees from such institutions as Harvard University and Williams College. What is race? Know Thyself, the final episode, which shares its title with the slogan of Knome Inc., focuses mostly on genetic genealogy. And your driver was helping you - well, he was shoving his shoulder against the door trying to open it. And most DNA companies in the United States will tell you that they have never tested an African-American who is 100 percent from sub-Saharan Africa. Moreover, these genetic techniques may be inconsistent with the aims of conventional genealogy. The former vice president has become the Democratic front-runner with primary victories across the country. After that I would say I was a teacher. African-American - I love to joke about this. GATES: And we - they only put - remember "The Late Show"? and Ph.D. in English literature from Clare College at the University of Cambridge. He was a graduate of Frederick Street High School and in 1998 received an honorary doctorate degree from Seton Hall University. But mutations exist. 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. It doesn't exist. My Daddy, the Jailbird - The Daily Beast And they got the brothers in uniforms with swords and stuff coming out of the church with this sad, black church music. But when I started the series, it wasn't called "Finding Your Roots." The injury was misdiagnosed by a physician, who told Gates' mother that his problem was 'psychosomatic'. 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. And it turned out - my father used to say, you know, your mother's family is really distinguished, too? The book tells stories about Gates's parents, his lifelong nickname, Skippy, and his brother, Rocky. Our editors will review what youve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on Losing His Mother, the Heirloom He Adores Would you do it? And the first thing they said was, you don't have any of the genes that's going to give you Alzheimer's. And she would stand up and read their obituary, their eulogy. [20], In September 1995, Gates narrated a five-part abridgement (by Margaret Busby) of his memoir Colored People on BBC Radio 4.[21]. And she was a beautiful woman. 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. By Henry Louis Gates Jr. 2023 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize Recipients Announced Family tree of Henry Louis GATES - Geneastar Then he'd come back. (January 21, 2015), Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, Potomac State College of West Virginia University. You said that after - you had been getting death threats and these angry emails and everything. 8. GROSS: It has been a great honor to speak with you. He earned his B.A. 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. Omissions? GROSS: And it was reported as if it was a break-in, and a police officer came and arrested you. The latter, tracing the ancestral history of contemporary figures, was especially popular. There we go. That shocking news is relayed to Gladwell in an exchange pregnant with anxiety and uneasiness on the part of both men. GATES: We know he was Irish from my DNA. Gates's critically acclaimed six-part PBS documentary series, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, traced 500 years of African-American history to the second inauguration of President Barack Obama. 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. 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. And remarkably, she's now able to. Catch #FindingYourRoots Tuesdays at 8/7c on PBS (check local listings). And the average African-American has less than 1 percent Native American ancestry, but they have 24 percent European ancestry. These American faces, we learn, are the descendants of colonialists, aboriginals, overseers, bondspeople, interned citizens, and religious pilgrims. 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. So where does that come from? GROSS: Yeah. GATES: But everyone who's in one of those databases has given some kind of permission. It was a horrible, horrible thing. DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. You can say on the one hand that race is a social construction. They lived together. DNA-derived genealogical information may also collide with other ways of rendering kinship and relation. 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 . Gat. We cant hold a documentary for a general audience responsible for not presenting a complex metanarrative on the philosophy of genetic science.