Isn't that a cool thing? A new season of Finding Your Roots premieres January 4, 2022! Daughter Elizabeth Gates interviews her dad about . "[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. In 2022, the Boston Public Library honored Gates with its Literary Lights Award. GATES: And my father lived to be 97 1/2 without any dementia. Gates currently serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the W.E.B. And they fought in the Revolutionary War. It measures your ancestry back 500 years approximately. As a result of the injury, Gates walks with a cane and his right leg is more than 2 inches shorter than his left. In 2021, Gates became the seventh recipient of the, In 2021, Gates received the prestigious Gold Medal from. They - but you're absolutely right. GROSS: And it was reported as if it was a break-in, and a police officer came and arrested you. African-Americans all think that they're a descendant from a Native American. 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. And the average African-American has less than 1 percent Native American ancestry, but they have 24 percent European ancestry. It's called the Beer Summit. 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. Obama and Vice President Joe Biden eventually extended an invitation to Gates and the Cambridge officer who was involved to share a beer with them at the White House, which they accepted. Gates wrote, executive-produced, and hosted the series, which earned the 2013 Peabody Award and a NAACP Image Award. People might remember the Beer Summit, when you were stopped in your own home trying to unjam a lock after a long trip. And when they analyzed my mitochondrial DNA, it went to England. It's a lot of data to process. Alexanders relation to Colbert or Longorias to Ma underscores a central theme of the series: Underlying the many faces of America is a fundamental genetic unity. GROSS: Thank you for all of all of the things you've written for your TV shows, for your movies. 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.. GATES: We know he was Irish from my DNA. DAVIES: Henry Louis Gates spoke with Terry Gross before a live audience in Philadelphia last May. And when I was a young teenager, early adolescence, my father and I connected through the news. of Hutchins Center at @harvard. Discomfort is also experienced by the viewer. I mean, they know Donald Trump. What percent would be Native American? 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. Henry Louis Gates Jr.: Head Negro In Charge. And your driver was helping you - well, he was shoving his shoulder against the door trying to open it. GATES: But then they did another special test. And you - the last scene is the funeral. Read about President Obama's comments on Gates's arrest. This is FRESH AIR. I don't think that's true for very many people in this room or any - or many people who are watching this show. On October 23, 2006, Gates was appointed the Alphonse Fletcher Jr. University Professor at Harvard University. Catch #FindingYourRoots Tuesdays at 8/7c on PBS (check local listings). More than anyone else, the historian is responsible for "entertaining the idea remotely" that Gates could become a writer. 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. [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. I mean, like, my - I'm second-generation American. In 2019, Gates received the Anne Izard Storytellers Choice Award, 2019 for "The Annotated African American Folktales," which he edited with Maria Tatar. And it's just crazy. Advertisement GATES: And think about it. The new season of Gates' TV series "Finding Your Roots" is now running on PBS. In the first series, Gates learned that he has 50% European ancestry[22] and 50% African ancestry. So everybody who showed up on this continent is from someplace else. This trip came 25 years after Gates worked at a hospital in Kilimatinde, near Dodoma, Tanzania, when he was a 19-year-old pre-medical student at Yale University. 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. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. 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. In 2021, Gates was named a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and elected to the Johnsonsians (Society). GATES: OK. As soon as the Civil War ended, they became common law husband and wife GATES: Which was illegal in Mississippi. The forms of genealogical tracing that star in Faces function doubly: both splitting and lumping. So that was a steal. It was really, like, the photograph of her - of your great-great-aunt Jane Gates. Cameo as a digital presentation of a fictional version of himself as, This page was last edited on 1 March 2023, at 15:56. But when I started the series, it wasn't called "Finding Your Roots." And she and Claudette Colbert are both unmarried mothers. 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. Police arrested Gates on July 16 on charges of disorderly conduct after a confrontation with an officer at his home in Cambridge, Mass. Reader, a collection of his writings edited by Abby Wolf, was published. And I was in the hospital for six weeks. We cant hold a documentary for a general audience responsible for not presenting a complex metanarrative on the philosophy of genetic science. GROSS: Was that reflected in the way you wanted to say goodbye to your father at the funeral? 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." So I know that moment of transcendence is real.". In 1973, Gates became the first African-American to receive a Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship to study at Cambridge. [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. In the second season of the program, Gates learned that he is part of a genetic subgroup that may be descended from or related to the fourth-century Irish king, Niall of the Nine Hostages. "People wanted to kill me, man," Gates says of the reaction to that op-ed. The former vice president has become the Democratic front-runner with primary victories across the country. ", 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. And I cluster more toward the Yoruba than any - because 50 percent GATES: Of my ancestry is from sub-Saharan Africa. In 1973 he entered Clare College, Cambridge, where one of his tutors was the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. [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. He was 97, as you said. What do you think of that? So what I did - my father and I agreed, for science, that we'd put our genomes in the public domain so that any scholar or student can study our genome. 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. But we need to get some distance from the binary opposition we were raised in: evil white people and good Black people. They had kids, and they're buried next to each other. 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. 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. And at the time, the airwaves were so segregated, they only put black films on "The Late Late Show." So reading this - that she's a mulatto; she'd been a slave - the first question that comes to my mind - and I don't know if it was the first question that came to yours - was, was she raped by the man who owned her? 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 that, everything stopped. GATES: Well, the average African-American GATES: The average African-American is 24 percent European. And my father would just make up stories and tell my brother and me. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is an American literary critic Credit: Getty What is Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s net worth? Armstrong Williams, a person I really admire and like, I ask him, and he said absolutely not. He has an estimated net worth of $1million, according to Celebrity Net Worth. 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. Season 8. And I think that that's sad. GATES: You know, I'm totally exposed. GATES: That's true. We started to roll. Professor Gates is the host of the documentary " Reconstruction: America After the Civil War. And I wanted to be from them. Trump, who is running for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, announced a slate of futuristic new policies in a campaign video Friday. And under the skin, we are almost identical genetically. GATES: And, you know, what's even more amazing, it's - one, it was my mother's third great grandfather - my fourth great grandfather. Such information forces you to contemplate your own history, he observes. 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. 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. GROSS: You had family that passed for white. 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. DAVIES: Henry Louis Gates speaking with Terry Gross in May of last year. 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. 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. His mother. Cambridge is a long way from Piedmont, but Gates traces the journey in his 1994 memoir, Colored People. It was a horrible, horrible thing. Ozzy & Sharon Osbournes Grandkids: Meet Their Grandchildren, Click to Subscribe to Get Our Free HollywoodLife Daily Newsletter, Rosanne Cash: 5 Things To Know About Johnnys Daughter Whos Speaking Out About His June Carter Affair, 'Finding Your Roots' Preview: Jeff Goldblum Reveals How His Mom Helped Him Fight A Bully, Ozzy & Sharon Osbournes Grandkids: Meet Their Grandchildren, Beautiful Nature-Inspired Baby Names Used By Celebrity Parents, Did Vanderpump Rules Tom Cheated on Ariana With Raquel? 10. So you GATES: Because of this white man. And then you see this white girl next to Claudette Colbert. 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. 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. GROSS: Is that too personal? Terry. summa cum laude in history from Yale University and his M.A. GATES: Oh, my father and I were the first father and son of any race and the first African-Americans fully sequenced. Brooke Williams. And one of the, you know, wonderful people on "The View" said did I think that Donald Trump is racist. They were buried next to each other. In July 1976, Gates was promoted to the post of lecturer in Afro-American Studies, with the understanding that he would be promoted to assistant professor upon completion of his doctoral dissertation. 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. And the obituary said, died this day in Cumberland, Md., January 6, 1888; Aunt Jane Gates, an estimable colored woman. That yearning manifests itself in many ways, from anomie to ethnic mutual-aid associations. Jointly appointed to assistant professorships in English and Afro-American Studies in 1979, Gates was promoted to associate professor in 1984. Know Thyself, the final episode, which shares its title with the slogan of Knome Inc., focuses mostly on genetic genealogy. GROSS: OK, for two weeks. Race is a social construction. That's the first descriptor that comes to mind. There we go. Gates and daughter vie on the Vineyard. Yeah. So then I became close to them but in two completely different ways. Malcolm Gladwell hears some shocking news in Gates's latest PBS show. GATES: They don't do that anymore for this particular kind of - I had a broken hip. But it's just not those two genetic lines. 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. As Elizabeth Alexander comments in Faces about her own family history, We dont even know the half of it. That profound uncertainty makes it all the more troubling that Gladwell translates the peculiar institution into a personal burden. Hollywood Life, Latest Hollywood Celebrity & Entertainment News. Of course not. But it is clear, in any case, that we fully inhabit a genealogical society"to use the anthropologist Elizabeth Povinellis phrase. 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. In 2021, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania honored Gates with itsFoundersAward. Since 1995, Gates has been the jury chair for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, which honors written works that contribute to society's understanding of racism and the diversity of human culture. [32], The incident spurred a politically charged exchange of views about race relations and law enforcement throughout the United States. And I couldn't imagine what, but two sets of those fourth great-grandparents are from my mother's line. While at Yale, Gates mentored Jodie Foster, who majored in African-American Literature there and wrote her thesis on author Toni Morrison. Is this instance of intraracial slavery an anomaly? 1. GROSS: Yeah. From Blum, he says, he learned a lot about writing and history. And my Y DNA, which is - comes in an unbroken chain, descends from this Irishman. You know, I try to - doing "Finding Your Roots" is a way to paying homage to my mother and father every year. His taxi driver attempted to help him gain entrance. Now think about that. And when this little girl's passing for - she passes for white and breaks her mother's heart. [11] Additionally, he is the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. They lived together. The authoritative record of NPRs programming is the audio record. But then President Obama called you both together. He draws on structuralism, post-structuralism, and semiotics to analyze texts and assess matters of identity politics. Rather, he works for greater recognition of Black works and their integration into a larger, pluralistic canon. 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 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. My father loved sports, and I didn't care about sports that much. 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. Brub, Michael (Spring 1994). Prosecutors later dropped the charges. It was Gates vs. Gates on Martha's Vineyard this week. If you remember, it was called "African-American Lives." I'm Dave Davies in for Terry Gross. [35] As of 2021, Gates is married to historian Dr. Marial Iglesias Utset. An X-ray showed a bright portion that revealed just how much of her brain tissue was destroyed. 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. Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s arrest continues to cause controversy after President Obama criticized police action, Michelle Gielan reports. And your father was a tailor, which is why we GATES: And my mother went to Atlantic City. At the age of 14, Gates suffered a hairline fracture of the ball-and-socket joint in his hip while playing touch football. Please make sure your computer, VPN, or network allows And she invents this pancake mix, and they become fabulously wealthy. Tune in for all-new episodes as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. explores fascinating ancestries and family mysteries for an array of . Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., called the book "an attempt to size Lincoln up through the eyes of Black Americans who visited the 'people's house' that their people had built and in whose names they were determined to win the fight for freedom and citizenship." GATES: He wasn't even out the door, and I moved into his bedroom. I can do it. GATES: Now, we don't do blood anymore, right? Video of the day: Drake and 21 Savage's "Spin Bout U" NYC's Extra Butter and Russ & Daughters Join Forces on 50th-Anniversary PUMA Clyde NYC's Extra Butter and Russ & Daughters Join Forces on 50th-Anniversary PUMA ClydeTwo quintessential Lower East Side outposts celebrate the downtown staple sneaker.HypebeastDylan Kelly Culture: Henry 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. But they came from someplace else. Gates traced the practice of signifyin to Esu, the trickster figure of Yoruba mythology, and to the figure of the signifying monkey, with which Esu is closely associated. GROSS: But you had family that passed for white. So you're saying I should have been an undertaker. 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. So my whole life is really an attempt to honor and please my parents and make them proud of me, you know. Following a two-year stay at Duke University, he was recruited to Harvard University in 1991. Henry was born in Patterson Creek, W.Va., on June 8, 1913. August 22, 2013, 12:00 a.m. 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. [9] Gates accepted the offer by Cornell in 1985 and taught there until 1989. 5. In 1980 Gates became codirector of the Black Periodical Literature Project at Yale. On April 19, 1989, he was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society. And you don't have a Y DNA, so that's why you're a woman. Or even to the slave narrative of Venture Smith, in which blacks are purchased by other blacks for both slavery and freedom. GROSS: OK. Yeah. By clicking submit, you are agreeing to our Terms and Conditions & Privacy Policy. 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. 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. Gates considers himself a literary critic and educator. Many of us were troubled. Signifyin is the practice of representing an idea indirectly, through a commentary that is often humourous, boastful, insulting, or provocative. She paid cash for that house in what was largely a white neighborhood. After turning that corner, Sharon gave birth to Maggie, their first daughter, in July 1980, and Liza was born 18 months later. 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. As a Black intellectual and public figure, Gates has been an outspoken critic of the Eurocentric literary canon. And the black woman says all she wants is enough money to have a New Orleans-type funeral. 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". As a literary historian committed to the preservation and study of historical texts, Gates has been integral to the Black Periodical Literature Project, a digital archive of Black newspapers and magazines created with financial assistance from the National Endowment for the Humanities. President Obama's comments on Gates's arrest. Gates was arrested on charges of disorderly conduct, but the charges were dropped. He is on the boards of many notable institutions, including the, In 2010, Gates became the first African American to have his, In December 2014, Gates was announced as one of 14 recipients of a 2015. The surprising reveals, coupled with the celebrities raw reactions to the information conveyed by the host, deliver moments of high drama and genuine emotion. It's beautiful. GROSS: Let's look at your ancestry and see who's really in it. 1. As editor-in-chief of the online magazine the Root, Gates has a background in journalism. In 2020, Gates earned a NAACP Image Award Nomination for Outstanding Literary Work Nonfiction for his book. And she come to - it's the woman who invents box pancake mix - right? (Read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.s Britannica essay on Monuments of Hope.). 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. I go, goodbye. GROSS: Yeah. 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. So everybody knew that this whole thing was building to the climax when Delilah - is her name - the character. javascript and allows content to be delivered from c950.chronicle.com and chronicle.blueconic.net. 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 we have a wall of degrees at home. At one point, Johnny even told the KKK in a statement that Vivian was white. 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. 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. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is an American treasure. He has learned that he is also connected to the multiracial West Virginia community of Chestnut Ridge people. February 12, 2010. His writing includes pieces in The New York Times that defend rap music and an article in Sports Illustrated that criticizes Black youth culture for glorifying basketball over education. That shocking news is relayed to Gladwell in an exchange pregnant with anxiety and uneasiness on the part of both men. 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. It's a gift - and for my mom. 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. So (laughter) given the example that President Obama set in calming down that kind of argument in America over you and this officer, what do you hear now coming from our president? 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. GROSS: Yeah. One of eight children born to Edward St. Lawrence Gates and Helen Gertrude Redman Gates, he was the youngest of seven sons. They came in slave ships. American literary critic, professor and historian (born 1950), Critical studies and reviews of Gates' work. Both would be just as important. 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). Yet no lens is provided through which to interpret this genealogical bombshell. On other occasions, though it was rare, blacks did enslave other blacks for their labor. My great-great-grandfather's now been found.
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