GROSS: OK. And TV was on kind of like the hearth in New England. Armstrong Williams, a person I really admire and like, I ask him, and he said absolutely not. So where does that come from? GATES: And I gave it to my mother once. Many of us were troubled. It was just misdiagnosed. And I wanted to be from them. I go, goodbye. And I think that we throw terms like that around too loosely. Race is a social construction. 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 1992, he received a George Polk Award for his social commentary in The New York Times. It was just put on the historic GATES: Register in Maryland. An X-ray showed a bright portion that revealed just how much of her brain tissue was destroyed. On April 19, 1989, he was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society. Gates has joined the Sons of the American Revolution. "[7], Gates has argued that a separatist, Afrocentric education perpetuates racist stereotypes. In 1973 he entered Clare College, Cambridge, where one of his tutors was the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka. Gates was born in Keyser, West Virginia,[2] to Pauline Augusta (Coleman) Gates (19161987) and Henry Louis Gates Sr. (c. 19132010). The event led to public criticism of the Cambridge police department by U.S. Pres. You were 9 years old when you found her picture. GATES: Yeah. 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. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research and professor at Harvard University, the seriess subtitles"The Promise of America, Making America, Becoming American, and Know Thyself"suggest assimilation, a melting pot rather than a tossed salad notion of the United States. ", The lesson of "Finding Your Roots" - we're all immigrants. Advertisement 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. So let's get back to your great-great-grandmother. My mother would say, tell them about your brother who's a dentist. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Contemporary Literature. African-American - I love to joke about this. Professor Gates is the host of the documentary " Reconstruction: America After the Civil War. By Henry Louis Gates Jr. 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. It doesn't exist. GATES: And we - they only put - remember "The Late Show"? 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). Gates and daughter vie on the Vineyard. [33], Gates married Sharon Lynn Adams in 1979. Would you do it? We're all admixed. They had a medical doctor who specializes in sharing this information. 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.. And then he'd - and I read quite a lot. After that, everything stopped. In 1980 Gates became codirector of the Black Periodical Literature Project at Yale. As soon as the Civil War ended, they became common law husband and wife GATES: Which was illegal in Mississippi. 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 I watched reruns of early black films like "Amos 'n' Andy" and "Beulah." Gates wrote a book about Jay Rockefeller's campaign to be governor of West Virginia. Crockett Jr., Stephen A. Obama then held a much-publicized meeting with Gates and James Crowley, the officer who had arrested Gates, which became informally known as the beer summit because Obama invited the two for beers in the White House Rose Garden. And the first thing they said was, you don't have any of the genes that's going to give you Alzheimer's. Later, he acquired and authenticated the manuscript of The Bondwoman's Narrative by Hannah Crafts, a novel from the same period that scholars believe may have been written as early as 1853. Yeah. DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. Following a two-year stay at Duke University, he was recruited to Harvard University in 1991. www.pbs.org/weta/finding-your-roots Posts Reels Videos Tagged Sgt. "[14], As a mediator between those advocating separatism and those believing in a Western canon, Gates has been criticized by both. 1. 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 you realize it's Peola, grown up, coming back. 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). As host of the PBS series Finding Your Roots, Gates tells celebrities about their family history. They had two geneticists. DAVIES: Henry Louis Gates spoke with Terry Gross before a live audience in Philadelphia last May. Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Mama - I'm sorry, Mama. So I want to read something that you wrote about her. And I showed up from Yale, and he became my mentor. That's how much the science of genetics has changed in terms of the retail market since 2009. And my brother went off to dental school. So what that means is that it's the percent of - if you had a perfect family tree, what percent would be from sub-Saharan Africa? 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. And I loved the news. (Read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.s Britannica essay on Monuments of Hope.). So you found out that your ancestors were, like, 18 miles away from where you lived. GATES: He wasn't even out the door, and I moved into his bedroom. He draws on structuralism, post-structuralism, and semiotics to analyze texts and assess matters of identity politics. On other occasions, though it was rare, blacks did enslave other blacks for their labor. 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. DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. 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? This kind of research has been especially important for African-Americans whose ancestors had their names and families taken away when they were enslaved. The confrontation resulted in Gates being arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. Gates wrote, executive-produced, and hosted the series, which earned the 2013 Peabody Award and a NAACP Image Award. Of course not. His father worked in a paper mill and moonlighted as a janitor, while his mother cleaned houses. You know, I try to - doing "Finding Your Roots" is a way to paying homage to my mother and father every year. GATES: Oh, my father and I were the first father and son of any race and the first African-Americans fully sequenced. When I became a teenager, my father and I bonded. [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. [36], In 1974, Gates learned the Transcendental Meditation technique. [11] Additionally, he is the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. And I was in the hospital for six weeks. It was astonishing. And under the skin, we are almost identical genetically. He is a Trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. If the findings of conventional genealogical research produce fireworks, the results of the DNA analysis generate shock and awe. And I learned a lot about the medium. . Mixing cutting-edge DNA research and old-school genealogical sleuthing, FINDING YOUR ROOTS . And what's the real showstopper for me is the fact that my three sets of my fourth great grandparents lived 18 miles from where I was born. The book tells stories about Gates's parents, his lifelong nickname, Skippy, and his brother, Rocky. The most likely cause of this is a content blocker on your computer or network. GATES: Right after the Beer Summit, it all went away. NPR's Michel Martin speaks with professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. about the forthcoming episode of Finding Your Roots which features actor Joe Manganiello discovering he is of African descent. Trump, who is running for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, announced a slate of futuristic new policies in a campaign video Friday. 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. He looked white. At one point, Johnny even told the KKK in a statement that Vivian was white. And I cluster more toward the Yoruba than any - because 50 percent GATES: Of my ancestry is from sub-Saharan Africa. The current PBS documentary miniseries Faces of America traces the family histories of 12 prominent people who, over the course of several hours and with the aid of conventional and genetic genealogy, come to fasten their varied tribulations and successes to the arc of ancestry. GROSS: So given this kind of really rich mix that you've just described and all the surprises that you've just described, what does race mean to you? I have the Ui Neil Haplotype. They spoke in front of an audience last May when Gates received WHYY's annual Lifelong Learning Award. He introduced the notion ofsignifyinto represent Black literary and musical history as a continuing reflection and reinterpretation of what has come before. After turning that corner, Sharon gave birth to Maggie, their first daughter, in July 1980, and Liza was born 18 months later. I mean, like, my - I'm second-generation American. But then President Obama called you both together. And so he introduced me to the Yoruba people. We started to roll. This is FRESH AIR. Thank God. Then he'd come back. And she invents this pancake mix, and they become fabulously wealthy. 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. Gates developed the notion of signifyin in Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self (1987) and The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (1988). In 2021, Gates received the PBS Beacon Award. Jakes and Chris Tucker. When we left off, Gates was talking about his own DNA mix. Yet no lens is provided through which to interpret this genealogical bombshell. In "Root Worker," a short . While assignment to the haplogroup L3x, for example, indicates an ancestor in what is now Ethiopia at least 50,000 years ago, this interesting detail does not fill in the contours of the family tree. 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. But it is clear, in any case, that we fully inhabit a genealogical society"to use the anthropologist Elizabeth Povinellis phrase. They came in slave ships. 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? He applied the notion to the interpretation of slave narratives and showed how it informs the works of Phillis Wheatley, Zora Neale Hurston, Frederick Douglass, the early African American writers of periodical fiction, Ralph Ellison, Ishmael Reed, Alice Walker, and Soyinka. Reader, a collection of his writings edited by Abby Wolf, was published. They flew him in from San Francisco. And your driver was helping you - well, he was shoving his shoulder against the door trying to open it. And the only reason that I started making the series that became "Finding Your Roots" is because of that obituary and that photograph. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. And we'd have the chess board set up. GROSS: It's mind-boggling. I could've won the Nobel Prize, and somebody would say congratulations. GROSS: So I want to squeeze in one more question. I killed my mama. And I think that that's sad. He notably explored genealogy as host of the series African American Lives (200608), Faces of America (2010), and Finding Your Roots (2012 ). We delineate our individual and collective identities based upon inclusion in and exclusion from groups. 6. 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. 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: No. And the DNA tests we were doing at that time - when they analyzed my Y DNA, it went to Ireland. 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. He rediscovered the earliest African-American novels . GATES: Well, I was on "The View." But on the other hand, Terry, there were a lot of people who never forgave the country for electing a black man to the White House. Barack Obama. Episode 1409A -- Pictured in this screengrab: Historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. During an interview on February 22, 2021 -- In front of all these people and all these viewers. (SOUNDBITE OF ALLEN TOUSSAINT'S "EGYPTIAN FANTASY"). Gates currently serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the W.E.B. I found the first edition when I was an adult. The technical aspects of genetic ancestry tracing are explained, but without sufficient social context, much the way a manual can tell you how to operate a car without explaining automobiles role in modern industry, the development of suburbia, or the emergence of youth culture. GROSS: Yeah. 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. I think it's vulgar and racist whether it comes out of a Black mouth or a white mouth. February 12, 2010. The former vice president has become the Democratic front-runner with primary victories across the country. 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. Terry. 5. 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". Henry Louis Gates Jr.: Head Negro In Charge. Also, journalist Brian Palmer talks about how slavery and the Civil War are described at Confederate historic sites in the South. So I just wrote an essay that was published by Yale University Press about race. And you - the last scene is the funeral. GROSS: And you got this information from the 1870 census. This is called an admixture test. 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. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. GROSS: Yeah. But when I started the series, it wasn't called "Finding Your Roots." GATES: And they said, OK, we won't tell you.