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After turning that corner, Sharon gave birth to Maggie, their first daughter, in July 1980, and Liza was born 18 months later. 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. And my mother used to write the eulogies, the obituaries for all the black people in the Potomac Valley, where I grew up. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. So obviously rape or, at best, cajoled sexuality was the cause, but there are exceptions. "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. We're all admixed. In 2021, Gates was honored by PEN America with its Audible Literary Service Award. In 2021, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania honored Gates with itsFoundersAward. As soon as the Civil War ended, they became common law husband and wife GATES: Which was illegal in Mississippi. Elizabeth had suffered a stroke, her mind irreparably harmed. It's - remember, it's - my father dragged my brother and me upstairs in his parents' home and made us wait why he'd look through half a dozen of his father's scrapbooks, about which we knew nothing - complete mystery, a secret to us - looking for that obituary. And she would stand up and read their obituary, their eulogy. Gates has such an eminent reputation", she said, "and so much gravitas. But mutations exist. We cant hold a documentary for a general audience responsible for not presenting a complex metanarrative on the philosophy of genetic science. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. In 2020, Gates earned a NAACP Image Award Nomination for Outstanding Literary Work Nonfiction for his book. President Barack Obama, a friend of Gates, said that the Cambridge Police Department had acted "stupidly" in the arrest. GROSS: OK. GROSS: Have you been medically DNA tested? The book tells stories about Gates's parents, his lifelong nickname, Skippy, and his brother, Rocky. Additionally, he has worked to bring about social, educational, and intellectual equality for Black Americans. They - but you're absolutely right. 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. (Rockefeller lost in 1972 but later served two terms as governor.). And I watched reruns of early black films like "Amos 'n' Andy" and "Beulah." GROSS: Huge story. 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? "Beneath the return to the valley of the culture wars". 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. But we can expect some acknowledgment and interpretation of technologys limits. It was astonishing. 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. 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 I want to start with the person who got you started in genealogy. javascript and allows content to be delivered from c950.chronicle.com and chronicle.blueconic.net. And I learned a lot about the medium. DNA-derived genealogical information may also collide with other ways of rendering kinship and relation. The womans suffering is assuaged at long last when she revisits the land and people that indelibly shaped her, including a local herbal healer. GATES: I go, yeah, I got a brother who's a dentist, you know? Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. 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. [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. Sign up to receive the latest updates from U.S News & World Report and our trusted partners and sponsors. "Black people were so angry at me. Today's most compelling personalities discover the surprising stories in their own family trees. He was 97, as you said. GATES: You know, I'm totally exposed. 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. He looked white. Trump, who is running for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, announced a slate of futuristic new policies in a campaign video Friday. Would you do it? I think you know where I'm heading here. [36], In 1974, Gates learned the Transcendental Meditation technique. The former vice president has become the Democratic front-runner with primary victories across the country. summa cum laude in history from Yale University and his M.A. There we go. So where does that come from? 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". And I loved the news. 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. 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. 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. In 2021, Gates became the seventh recipient of the, In 2021, Gates received the prestigious Gold Medal from. 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. 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'm here to ask, on behalf of our production staff, if you will be a guest in next season GATES: Of "Finding Your Roots." Henry was born in Patterson Creek, W.Va., on June 8, 1913. Having grown up in an African-American community, however, he identifies as Black. Police arrested Gates on July 16 on charges of disorderly conduct after a confrontation with an officer at his home in Cambridge, Mass. In 2020, Gates received the 400 Years of African American History Commission's Distinguished 400Award. Gates claimed that his arrest was a sign of racism on the part of police. JSTOR1208745. We are unable to fully display the content of this page. 3. GATES: No. GATES: Well, I was on "The View." Wants W. E. B. DuBois, Wole Soyinka and Phyllis Wheatley on the Nation's Reading Lists, As Well As Western Classics like Milton and Shakespeare". GROSS: And it was reported as if it was a break-in, and a police officer came and arrested you. He earned his B.A. And I would watch this beautiful, brilliant goddess. GROSS: So I want to squeeze in one more question. 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. The event led to public criticism of the Cambridge police department by U.S. Pres. 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. Copyright 2019 NPR. So you found out that your ancestors were, like, 18 miles away from where you lived. GROSS: Terry Gross interviewed Henry Louis Gates last May when he was in Philadelphia to accept the WHYY Lifelong Learning Award. Terry will be one of the guests whose family history is explored next year in the sixth season of the show. 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. Speaks onstage during the 'Black America Since MLK: And Still I Rise' panel discussion at the PBS portion of the 2016. And the DNA tests we were doing at that time - when they analyzed my Y DNA, it went to Ireland. GATES: Yeah, yeah. 8. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (@henrylouisgates) Instagram photos and videos henrylouisgates Verified Follow 519 posts 129K followers 173 following Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Dir. They had two geneticists. Historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. Contemporary Literature. GROSS: Let's look at your ancestry and see who's really in it. And I make it every week over and over with "Finding Your Roots.". And they fought in the Revolutionary War. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. And she come to - it's the woman who invents box pancake mix - right? 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. 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. 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. And I showed up from Yale, and he became my mentor. 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. And deep down, I realized in retrospect that my desire to make films was probably born about that time. 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. 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. And that is a long time. GATES: Otherwise they wouldn't be in a database. President Obama's comments on Gates's arrest. [25][26][27] Finding Your Roots resumed in January 2016.[28]. So you're saying I should have been an undertaker. And it's just crazy. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is an American literary critic Credit: Getty What is Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s net worth? They lived together. Professor Gates is the host of the documentary " Reconstruction: America After the Civil War. Director, Hutchins Center, African & African American Research, Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard. They had kids, and they're buried next to each other. The confrontation resulted in Gates being arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. And I gave it to her for birthday. In 1974, Carol Stacks important ethnography All Our Kin (Harper & Row) suggested the plasticity of the designation cousin well beyond consanguinity. GATES: The Gateses all looked - my father looked white. 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. A passerby called police, reporting a possible break-in after describing to 911 "an individual" forcing the front door open. 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. It was just put on the historic GATES: Register in Maryland. They spoke in front of an audience last May when Gates received WHYY's annual Lifelong Learning Award. And the last thing I did before I went to bed was - we always had a desk in our bedrooms and had a bookcase. Transcript: Q&A with Henry Louis Gates Jr. January 16, 2009 Greg Hicks: Everyone welcome, this is a very special moment for us and we really want this to be just as informal as possible. Based on admixture testing, Longoria is told that she is 70 percent European, 27 percent Native American, and 3 percent African. They came in slave ships. Race is a social construction. 9. The new season of Gates' TV series "Finding Your Roots" is now running on PBS. And she throws herself on the casket. This program examined the genealogy of 12 North Americans of diverse ancestry: Elizabeth Alexander, Mario Batali, Stephen Colbert, Louise Erdrich, Malcolm Gladwell, Eva Longoria, Yo-Yo Ma, Mike Nichols, Queen Noor of Jordan, Mehmet Oz, Meryl Streep, and Kristi Yamaguchi. Cameo as a digital presentation of a fictional version of himself as, This page was last edited on 1 March 2023, at 15:56. The two series demonstrated the many strands of ancestry, cultural heritage, and history among African Americans. As a Black intellectual and public figure, Gates has been an outspoken critic of the Eurocentric literary canon. And I hope they are. DAVIES: Henry Louis Gates speaking with Terry Gross in May of last year. 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 by in traction, I mean on my back with my foot up with weights. Yeah. Please make sure your computer, VPN, or network allows 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. This kind of research has been especially important for African-Americans whose ancestors had their names and families taken away when they were enslaved. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. GROSS: And you got this information from the 1870 census. GROSS: It has been a great honor to speak with you. And one of the, you know, wonderful people on "The View" said did I think that Donald Trump is racist. 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. And I have my mother's certificate from this vocational school where she learned to be a seamstress. 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. 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. It measures your ancestry back 500 years approximately. Black people came here - not willingly, of course. If the findings of conventional genealogical research produce fireworks, the results of the DNA analysis generate shock and awe. Both would be just as important. By Henry Louis Gates Jr. He notably explored genealogy as host of the series African American Lives (200608), Faces of America (2010), and Finding Your Roots (2012 ). 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 there were a lot of people who voted for Donald Trump as a repudiation vote. 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. 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. 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. However, in the 60s amid the Civil Rights Movement, Vivian had been the target of attention from white supremacists since they believed she looked Black. Hollywood Life, Latest Hollywood Celebrity & Entertainment News. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. And the first thing they said was, you don't have any of the genes that's going to give you Alzheimer's. An X-ray showed a bright portion that revealed just how much of her brain tissue was destroyed. Even the Native Americans came from someplace else about 16,000 years ago. And I wanted to be from them. 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. And the geneticists have found the identity finally of Jane Gates's paramour, the man GATES: Yes. It's a gift - and for my mom. As a literary theorist and critic, Gates has combined literary techniques of deconstruction with native African literary traditions. GROSS: Whoa. My mother was a seamstress, as you know. ". In addition to Rosanne, Vivian and Johnny welcomed three other daughters: Cindy, Kathy and Tara. 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. I don't think that's true for very many people in this room or any - or many people who are watching this show. His father worked in a paper mill and moonlighted as a janitor, while his mother cleaned houses. Accuracy and availability may vary. In October 1975, he was hired by Charles Davis as a secretary in the Afro-American Studies department at Yale. As a child, Gates said he wanted to be a Rhodes Scholar. From Blum, he says, he learned a lot about writing and history. [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. GROSS: (Laughter) So I want to change the subject a little bit. And my father would just make up stories and tell my brother and me. 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. [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. Root seeking, on the one hand, produces idiosyncratic narratives. And I cluster more toward the Yoruba than any - because 50 percent GATES: Of my ancestry is from sub-Saharan Africa. And I think that that's sad. 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. Biology matters. That shocking news is relayed to Gladwell in an exchange pregnant with anxiety and uneasiness on the part of both men. GATES: Well, I think that you should have the right to - you have to ask someone. [19], In 1995, Gates presented a program in the BBC series Great Railway Journeys (produced in association with PBS). DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. 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. He maintains that it is "ridiculous" to think that only Blacks should be scholars of African and African-American literature. My great-great-grandfather's now been found. [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 then it was a property requirement. 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. 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. [5], At the age of 14, Gates was injured playing touch football, fracturing the ball and socket joint of his right hip, resulting in a slipped capital femoral epiphysis. Catch #FindingYourRoots Tuesdays at 8/7c on PBS (check local listings). DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. 4. So everybody knew that this whole thing was building to the climax when Delilah - is her name - the character. On hand again is admixture analysistesting that probes a persons full nuclear DNA for genetic indicators said to be suggestive of ancestry; percentages of African, American Indian, European, or Asian descent are inferred from those informative markers. So my whole life is really an attempt to honor and please my parents and make them proud of me, you know. Sgt. . And we have a wall of degrees at home. Since 2012, he has hosted a PBS television series, entitled Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr..[24] The second season of the series, featuring 30 prominent guests across 10 episodes, with Gates as the narrator, interviewer, and genealogical investigator, aired on PBS in fall 2014. But we have a disproportionately higher risk of sickle cell. Henry Louis Gates Jr.: Head Negro In Charge. As editor-in-chief of the online magazine the Root, Gates has a background in journalism. In 1973 he entered Clare College, Cambridge, where one of his tutors was the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka. On other occasions, though it was rare, blacks did enslave other blacks for their labor. And they would be published in the newspaper. And I couldn't imagine what, but two sets of those fourth great-grandparents are from my mother's line. "[14], As a mediator between those advocating separatism and those believing in a Western canon, Gates has been criticized by both. In front of all these people and all these viewers. 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. I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross. According to a police report, Gates refused to cooperate when he was later questioned in his home, which resulted in his arrest. I love you being black. The injury was misdiagnosed by a physician, who told Gates' mother that his problem was 'psychosomatic'. 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. So overseer, slave plantation - rape, right? 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. And they have a horse-drawn carriage. And we filmed the whole thing. In the first series, Gates learned that he has 50% European ancestry[22] and 50% African ancestry. After receiving two fellowships in 1970, he took a leave of absence from Yale to visit Africa, working as an anesthetist in a hospital in Tanzania and then traveling through other African nations. You know, we used to say tribe, but now that's not politically correct - so the Yoruba ethnic group in Western Nigeria. And she was a beautiful woman. Well, I'll tell you a funny story. Rather, he works for greater recognition of Black works and their integration into a larger, pluralistic canon. doi:10.2307/1208745. And at this point, I'd run over to my mother and say, Mama, I'll never pass for white, Mama. And it turned out - my father used to say, you know, your mother's family is really distinguished, too? And the last thing I did before I went to bed on July 2, 1960, was to look up the word estimable. Once javascript and access to those URLs are allowed, please refresh this page. "[13] After his 2003 NEH lecture, Gates published in the same year a book entitled The Trials of Phillis Wheatley, about the early African-American poet. And that is the lesson of "Finding Your Roots. I'm Dave Davies This is FRESH AIR. GATES: admixture, I'm 50 percent sub-Saharan African and 50 percent European and virtually no Native American ancestry, which really pisses my family off. Now you can get a full sequence for less than $5,000 - some people say $1,000 or $2,000. That seems to be one of the programs aspirations. 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. This is FRESH AIR. In 2022, the Boston Public Library honored Gates with its Literary Lights Award. Time will tell. His name was John Redman. Joe Biden launched his presidential bid in April with a bold . [8] The first African American to be awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, Gates sailed on the Queen Elizabeth 2 for England, where he studied English literature at Clare College, Cambridge and earned his Ph.D. degree. We'd spit in a test tube. Surely, most people of African descent do not expect to find a black slave owner in their family tree. 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. But on the other hand, you can't say that biology doesn't matter because it does matter. Daughter Elizabeth Gates interviews her dad about . So everybody who showed up on this continent is from someplace else. In 2021, Gates received the MIPAD 100 Network's Most Influential People of African Descent Lifetime Achievement Award. I was more of a bookworm. The forms of genealogical tracing that star in Faces function doubly: both splitting and lumping. 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. By clicking submit, you are agreeing to our Terms and Conditions & Privacy Policy. GROSS: Totally stunned. 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. You know, and your family was, one of them anyways, was in the Revolutionary War. My father loved sports, and I didn't care about sports that much. He also learned that one of his African ancestors includes a Yoruba man who was trafficked to America from Ouidah in present-day Republic of Benin. GATES: And then there was "The Late Late Show." GATES: So obviously somebody gave her that money. The first time we met was when I interviewed him for "The Reflection Effect," an essay I wrote for O, the Oprah Magazine about the power of nostalgia to drive happiness and build resilience after loss.