[32], The incident spurred a politically charged exchange of views about race relations and law enforcement throughout the United States. And I want to start with the person who got you started in genealogy. In some states - like, New York would let them vote sometimes, and then take it away. "[7], Gates has argued that a separatist, Afrocentric education perpetuates racist stereotypes. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities in 1991. GATES: Our TV - when we woke up, the TV was on, and nobody ever turned it off until you went to sleep. "My father was so sad. And TV was on kind of like the hearth in New England. doi:10.2307/1208745. African-Americans all think that they're a descendant from a Native American. GROSS: OK. ", The lesson of "Finding Your Roots" - we're all immigrants. Joness tale offers some insight into the appeal of genealogy, another effort at reconnection with home and kin, and ballast against the tumult of modern living. In Wednesday's press conference, President Obama called the Cambridge Police Department "stupid" for arresting Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. And he, and you, the officer and Joe Biden sat down, had a beer or two. DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. 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. You may then be asked to log in, create an account if you don't already have one, GATES: That's true. 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. 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. This is called an admixture test. Gates considers himself a literary critic and educator. 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". [11] Additionally, he is the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. GATES: You know, I'm totally exposed. GROSS: Let's look at your ancestry and see who's really in it. If you continue to experience issues, contact us at 202-466-1032 or help@chronicle.com. summa cum laude in history from Yale University and his M.A. And I wanted to be from them. So I'm telling this story over and over of my - of rediscovering my own lost roots. They came in slave ships. The authoritative record of NPRs programming is the audio record. 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. August 22, 2013, 12:00 a.m. Barack Obama understood that and, I think, certainly helped our nation to heal. So everybody who showed up on this continent is from someplace else. In 2021, Gates was named a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and elected to the Johnsonsians (Society). GATES: And I gave it to my mother once. 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. Hollywood Life, Latest Hollywood Celebrity & Entertainment News. As editor-in-chief of the online magazine the Root, Gates has a background in journalism. The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, African American who fought in the Revolutionary War, Alfred I. duPontColumbia University Award, Association for the Study of African American Life and History, The National Institute of Social Sciences, Who's Black and Why: A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race. After that I would say I was a teacher. Biology matters. What percent would be from Europe? President Barack Obama, a friend of Gates, said that the Cambridge Police Department had acted "stupidly" in the arrest. And we'd have the chess board set up. They had two geneticists. Also, journalist Brian Palmer talks about how slavery and the Civil War are described at Confederate historic sites in the South. Yet no lens is provided through which to interpret this genealogical bombshell. And she come to - it's the woman who invents box pancake mix - right? By clicking submit, you are agreeing to our Terms and Conditions & Privacy Policy. This is FRESH AIR. 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. That's not the way it was. 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.. 8. And there were a lot of people who voted for Donald Trump as a repudiation vote. According to a police report, Gates refused to cooperate when he was later questioned in his home, which resulted in his arrest. As a child, Gates said he wanted to be a Rhodes Scholar. Having grown up in an African-American community, however, he identifies as Black. Both conventional and genetic tracing yield unanticipated results in Faces of America. And that is the lesson of "Finding Your Roots. 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. And she was a beautiful woman. That shocking news is relayed to Gladwell in an exchange pregnant with anxiety and uneasiness on the part of both men. 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. 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. We know that BRCA1, BRCA2 - they're genetic. "[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. But I think that one of the mottos of finding your roots is that there is no such thing as racial purity, that these people who have fantasies, these white supremacists, of this Aryan brotherhood, you know, this Aryan heritage that is pure and unsullied and untainted, that they're living in a dream world. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is an American treasure. And so then they came in - this is a big deal back in 2008. Stay informed daily on the latest news and advice on COVID-19 from the editors at U.S. News & World Report. Cambridge is a long way from Piedmont, but Gates traces the journey in his 1994 memoir, Colored People. Except in the next scene, I showed him their headstones. Graduated from Piedmont High School in 1968, Gates attended Potomac State College of West Virginia University before transferring to Yale University, from which, in 1973, he earned a bachelor of arts degree in history, summa cum laude, and he gained membership in Phi Beta Kappa. He has learned that he is also connected to the multiracial West Virginia community of Chestnut Ridge people. Gates serves as the chair for the Selection Committee for the Alphonse Fletcher Sr. Fellowship Program that is sponsored by the Fletcher Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Fletcher Asset Management. And it's just crazy. So it was just the two of us and my mom, right? One episode this season explores Gates' own DNA and family history. Some critics suggest that adding Black literature will diminish the value of the Western canon, while separatists say that Gates is too accommodating to the dominant white culture in his advocacy of integration of the canon. 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. 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. In 2022, the Boston Public Library honored Gates with its Literary Lights Award. Corrections? But on the other hand, you can't say that biology doesn't matter because it does matter. This ancestor was Vivians maternal great-great grandmother, a Black woman named Sarah Shields, whom Rosanne learned about for the first time ever during an episode of the PBS show Finding Your Rootsthat aired in Feb. 2021. When I became a teenager, my father and I bonded. 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. 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. The daughter of prominent black scholar and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. said her father's arrest last week at his Cambridge home has deeply saddened him. 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. And I learned a lot about the medium. 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. They lived together. GROSS: I saw his picture in the obituary. Does race exist? And they got the brothers in uniforms with swords and stuff coming out of the church with this sad, black church music. 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. They had kids, and they're buried next to each other. In front of all these people and all these viewers. Thank you for being you. You know, and your family was, one of them anyways, was in the Revolutionary War. He is a trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. 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 Native American writer Erdrich refuses to assent to genetic ancestry testing, because she understands her DNA to belong to her community. Gates was an Anisfield-Wolf prize winner in 1989 for The Schomburg Library of Women Writers. You have to get permission. I have the Ui Neil Haplotype. [9] Gates accepted the offer by Cornell in 1985 and taught there until 1989. He earned his B.A. GROSS: Yeah. In 2020, Gates was honored with the Louis Stokes Community VisionaryAward. Following a two-year stay at Duke University, he was recruited to Harvard University in 1991. And my grandfather was so white, we called him Casper behind his back. 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 you got this information from the 1870 census. 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? You might have breast cancer. They were buried next to each other. 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. And I loved the news. One of eight children born to Edward St. Lawrence Gates and Helen Gertrude Redman Gates, he was the youngest of seven sons. And another person to interpret my genetic data because it's 6 billion base pairs, right? As a prominent Black intellectual, Gates has concentrated on building academic institutions to study Black culture. And when I was a young teenager, early adolescence, my father and I connected through the news. As a result of the injury, Gates walks with a cane and his right leg is more than 2 inches shorter than his left. Terry. And before I started school - I started school when I was, well, 5, turning 6 - I would get dressed up, and I would go to church with my mom. What is race? 6. ". GATES: Well, I think that you should have the right to - you have to ask someone. 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. This is FRESH AIR. And she invents this pancake mix, and they become fabulously wealthy. Reader, a collection of his writings edited by Abby Wolf, was published. In October 1975, he was hired by Charles Davis as a secretary in the Afro-American Studies department at Yale. Henry Louis Gates Daughters Elizabeth is in her twenties and suffered a severe stroke in May 2010. His taxi driver attempted to help him gain entrance. GATES: Terry Gross speechless - first time in 35 years. DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. And deep down, I realized in retrospect that my desire to make films was probably born about that time. And he'd make a couple - a move. Not all U.S. presidents are missed once they leave the White House. Know Thyself, the final episode, which shares its title with the slogan of Knome Inc., focuses mostly on genetic genealogy. Yet genealogy is, at the same time, put to the task of heightening awareness of human relatedness, be it experiential or biological. GATES: For which she paid cash. On the same night Harvard professor Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr . 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". And they fought in the Revolutionary War. But we can expect some acknowledgment and interpretation of technologys limits. GATES: OK. In 1989, Gates won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for editing the 30 volumes of "The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers". I killed my mama. Please make sure your computer, VPN, or network allows He wrote his first column (about Little League games) at age 12 for the Piedmont Herald in West Virginia and continued to write for his high school and college newspapers. And when this little girl's passing for - she passes for white and breaks her mother's heart. Or they stayed home, and they listened to or played music. GATES: Well, I was on "The View." GATES: Don't you? Clarke, Breena, and Susan Tifft, "A 'Race Man' Argues for a Broader Curriculum: Henry Louis Gates Jr. 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. What percent would be Native American? My mother used to read me - the greatest book ever written to me was "The Poky Little Puppy," right? I was more of a bookworm. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. But they came from someplace else. Season 8. It was just misdiagnosed. Mixing cutting-edge DNA research and old-school genealogical sleuthing, FINDING YOUR ROOTS . Advertisement [34] They had two daughters together before they divorced in 1999. In 2021, Gates received the MIPAD 100 Network's Most Influential People of African Descent Lifetime Achievement Award. Gates has joined the Sons of the American Revolution. Additionally, he has worked to bring about social, educational, and intellectual equality for Black Americans. 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? of Hutchins Center at @harvard. 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. Rather, he works for greater recognition of Black works and their integration into a larger, pluralistic canon. If the findings of conventional genealogical research produce fireworks, the results of the DNA analysis generate shock and awe. The injury was misdiagnosed by a physician, who told Gates' mother that his problem was 'psychosomatic'. "Up until that recent piece, people would have thought of him as someone who took a cautious and nuanced approach to questions like reparations. After an evening at a bachelorette party, she woke up with what she thought was a hangover. 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. GROSS: Huge story. GROSS: You had family that passed for white. In 2021, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania honored Gates with itsFoundersAward. "Black people were so angry at me. American literary critic, professor and historian (born 1950), Critical studies and reviews of Gates' work. In 2021, Gates became the seventh recipient of the, In 2021, Gates received the prestigious Gold Medal from. DAVIES: Henry Louis Gates speaking with Terry Gross in May of last year. GROSS: When you were 14, you had a football injury. It was astonishing. There we go. 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. We started to roll. At the time, only Vivians European background had been known, and this discovery in her ancestryresurfaced thanks to a profile on Johnnys first wife in The Washington Poston May 16. Now she was born in 1819; died in 1888. His mother. 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. So I want to read something that you wrote about her. He rediscovered the earliest African-American novels . It's called the Beer Summit. A collection of moments during and after Barack Obama's presidency. Each of the genetic analyses used in Facesadmixture analysis, haplotype grouping, and relative mappingincorporate underlying assumptions and algorithms that may be incompatible with the other techniques. GATES: And then there was "The Late Late Show." GROSS: But it's making me think of how much death figured into your formative thoughts - the death of your grandfather, which led you to see the picture of your great-great-grandmother, everybody's deaths through your mother memorialized in those obituaries. It's a lot of data to process. And he fought in - for the Continental Army. 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 I don't know if that ruined your sports career forever, but it affected your leg forever. He grew up in neighboring Piedmont. OK. [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. 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. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Or even to the slave narrative of Venture Smith, in which blacks are purchased by other blacks for both slavery and freedom. I can do it. When the physical damage finally healed, his right leg was two inches shorter than his left. On other occasions, though it was rare, blacks did enslave other blacks for their labor. And I cluster more toward the Yoruba than any - because 50 percent GATES: Of my ancestry is from sub-Saharan Africa. And I'm wondering if being laid up from an injury for a while affected your desire to - and your time to immerse yourself in books. So then I became close to them but in two completely different ways. When I did Morgan Freeman's family tree, it was obvious through his DNA that he was descended from a white man who was an overseer on a plantation in Mississippi. And the DNA tests we were doing at that time - when they analyzed my Y DNA, it went to Ireland. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. GROSS: So having done your, like, ancestry and everything, were you close to your parents? The new season of Gates' TV series "Finding Your Roots" is now running on PBS.
