Gates currently serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the W.E.B. And your father was a tailor, which is why we GATES: And my mother went to Atlantic City. GROSS: Terry Gross interviewed Henry Louis Gates last May when he was in Philadelphia to accept the WHYY Lifelong Learning Award. And I watched reruns of early black films like "Amos 'n' Andy" and "Beulah." The latter, tracing the ancestral history of contemporary figures, was especially popular. Gates claimed that his arrest was a sign of racism on the part of police. And by in traction, I mean on my back with my foot up with weights. Was this an equal sexual relationship? It was astonishing. August 22, 2013, 12:00 a.m. On April 19, 1989, he was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society. 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. GATES: I go, yeah, I got a brother who's a dentist, you know? 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? [10] At Harvard, Gates teaches undergraduate and graduate courses as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, an endowed chair he was appointed to in 2006, and as a professor of English. DNA-derived genealogical information may also collide with other ways of rendering kinship and relation. . After a month at Yale Law School, Gates withdrew from the program. In 2021, Gates became the seventh recipient of the, In 2021, Gates received the prestigious Gold Medal from. And at this point, I'd run over to my mother and say, Mama, I'll never pass for white, Mama. Henry Louis - The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard 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? I love you. In 2021, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania honored Gates with itsFoundersAward. Over . GATES: You know, I'm totally exposed. Because the series is so successful in demonstrating the intersections between world history and personal history, the lack of contextualization here is notable. 2023 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize Recipients Announced Because of the injury, Gates now uses a cane when he walks.[6][7]. Coproduced, hosted, and written by Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W.E.B. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: "Colored People" 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). And she invents this pancake mix, and they become fabulously wealthy. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). Rather, he works for greater recognition of Black works and their integration into a larger, pluralistic canon. 10 Things You Didn't Know About Henry Louis Gates Jr. And she come to - it's the woman who invents box pancake mix - right? His mother cleaned houses. GATES: Yeah. "[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. Gatess father, Henry Louis Gates, Sr., worked in a paper mill and moonlighted as a janitor; his mother, Pauline Coleman Gates, cleaned houses. The new season of his TV series "Finding Your Roots" is now showing on PBS. [34] They had two daughters together before they divorced in 1999. 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. 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. 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. . Thank you so much for accepting this award. [9] Gates accepted the offer by Cornell in 1985 and taught there until 1989. Following a two-year stay at Duke University, he was recruited to Harvard University in 1991. It measures your ancestry back 500 years approximately. As host of the PBS series Finding Your Roots, Gates tells celebrities about their family history. In 2020, Gates earned a NAACP Image Award Nomination for Outstanding Literary Work Nonfiction for his book. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities in 1991. They - but you're absolutely right. Black people came here - not willingly, of course. GATES: But everyone who's in one of those databases has given some kind of permission. "Beneath the return to the valley of the culture wars". Once javascript and access to those URLs are allowed, please refresh this page. 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. He was a free negro, as we would have said then. As a literary theorist and critic, Gates has combined literary techniques of deconstruction with native African literary traditions. In 1974, Carol Stacks important ethnography All Our Kin (Harper & Row) suggested the plasticity of the designation cousin well beyond consanguinity. After an evening at a bachelorette party, she woke up with what she thought was a hangover. In 1995, he received the Golden Plate Award of the. The recipient of fifty-six honorary degrees and numerous prizes, Professor Gates was a . 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. 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). That's how much the science of genetics has changed in terms of the retail market since 2009. As a Black intellectual and public figure, Gates has been an outspoken critic of the Eurocentric literary canon. [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. 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.. And I couldn't imagine what, but two sets of those fourth great-grandparents are from my mother's line. 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. 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. Whereas prior shows relied heavily on analysis of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and Y-chromosome (Y-DNA), yielding results that included at most about 2 percent of ones complete genetic inheritance, in Faces techniques are used that probe deeper into more of the genome. And the last thing I did before I went to bed was - we always had a desk in our bedrooms and had a bookcase. 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. Gates was arrested on charges of disorderly conduct, but the charges were dropped. Updates? It comes from slavery. He notably explored genealogy as host of the series African American Lives (200608), Faces of America (2010), and Finding Your Roots (2012 ). And I showed up from Yale, and he became my mentor. The world just isn't like that. Henry Louis Gates Photos and Premium High Res Pictures - Getty Images Now think about that. He maintains that it is "ridiculous" to think that only Blacks should be scholars of African and African-American literature. And we filmed the whole thing. They flew him in from San Francisco. He argued that the material, which the government charged was profane, had important roots in African-American Vernacular English, games, and literary traditions, and should be protected. In some states - like, New York would let them vote sometimes, and then take it away. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on Losing His Mother, the Heirloom He Adores It doesn't exist. ", 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. You have to get permission. GATES: Maybe for Christmas, OK, that's fine (laughter). 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. And he'd make a couple - a move. 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. 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. Henry Louis Gates reveals celebrities' family history in 'Finding Your Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. 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: Yeah. And you got this from the 1870 census - (reading) that Jane Gates, age 51, female, mulatto, laundress and nurse, owns real estate valued at $1,400; born in Maryland; cannot read or write. Would you do it? For $50,000, they sequenced my father, me and then 12 of the guests who were in "Faces Of America" - not a full genome but a dense genotyping. And the title is Race Is A Social Construction, But Mutations Are Real" (ph). GROSS: Let's look at your ancestry and see who's really in it. 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 my brother went off to dental school. Daughter Elizabeth Gates interviews her dad about . 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. 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. On the same night Harvard professor Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr . Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. You don't get $1,400 by saving your nickels and dimes as a slave, right? You get your Y DNA from your father, and that's what makes me a man. 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. GATES: Yeah, yeah. Hollywood Life, Latest Hollywood Celebrity & Entertainment News. 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. And if you're Ashkenazi Jewish, you might have a higher risk for those kind of things or Tay-Sachs. )supply information about human population groups dating as far back as 150,000 years, the time horizon of admixture testing is the past 500 years. And we're listening to Terry's interview with Henry Louis Gates. That yearning manifests itself in many ways, from anomie to ethnic mutual-aid associations. When we left off, Gates was talking about his own DNA mix. He earned his B.A. My mother was a seamstress, as you know. [11] Additionally, he is the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. GATES: Our TV - when we woke up, the TV was on, and nobody ever turned it off until you went to sleep. 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. 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." By Alondra Nelson. 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. Does race exist? GATES: That was one of the happiest days of my life when my brother went to dental school. 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. And there were a lot of people who voted for Donald Trump as a repudiation vote. And you realize it's Peola, grown up, coming back. 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. Barack Obama. In 2019, Gates received the Anne Izard Storytellers Choice Award, 2019 for "The Annotated African American Folktales," which he edited with Maria Tatar. Henry Louis Gates, Sr. (1913 - 2010) - Genealogy - geni family tree He is a Trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. "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. And she dies of a broken heart because her little girl passes for white and goes off - and never sees her again. His taxi driver attempted to help him gain entrance. [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. GATES: Yeah, I was 15 years old. GROSS: Huge story. And I loved the news. Is this instance of intraracial slavery an anomaly? 4. So you're saying I should have been an undertaker. 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. This is FRESH AIR. Gates has such an eminent reputation", she said, "and so much gravitas. They had two geneticists. My father loved sports, and I didn't care about sports that much. And he mustered in in Winchester, Va., on Christmas Day, 1778, and was mustered down the Continental Army in April of 1784. 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 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. So we went - my father showed us that picture and that obituary, and we went home. So I'm out there. And one of the, you know, wonderful people on "The View" said did I think that Donald Trump is racist. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. And remarkably, she's now able to. Clarke, Breena, and Susan Tifft, "A 'Race Man' Argues for a Broader Curriculum: Henry Louis Gates Jr. 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. President Obama's comments on Gates's arrest. 2. He learned the truth when he appeared on an episode of the new PBS series Finding Your Roots With Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker, with his fair skin and blue eyes, had long . 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. After a break, he'll talk about his childhood and about how DNA evidence demonstrates there's no such thing as racial purity. This is called an admixture test. And the black woman says all she wants is enough money to have a New Orleans-type funeral. And then you see this white girl next to Claudette Colbert. 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". In 2021, Gates received the PBS Beacon Award. Also, journalist Brian Palmer talks about how slavery and the Civil War are described at Confederate historic sites in the South. 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. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. According to a police report, Gates refused to cooperate when he was later questioned in his home, which resulted in his arrest. GATES: No. 9. [35] As of 2021, Gates is married to historian Dr. Marial Iglesias Utset. Omissions? February 12, 2010. Yeah. You were 9 years old when you found her picture. Surely, most people of African descent do not expect to find a black slave owner in their family tree. 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. As a child, Gates said he wanted to be a Rhodes Scholar. 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. You know, and your family was, one of them anyways, was in the Revolutionary War. GATES: Right after the Beer Summit, it all went away. GROSS: When you were 14, you had a football injury. 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? And I was exhilarated. Crockett Jr., Stephen A. He is a trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. And she throws herself on the casket. 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. I think it's vulgar and racist whether it comes out of a Black mouth or a white mouth. Such information forces you to contemplate your own history, he observes. The event led to public criticism of the Cambridge police department by U.S. Pres. Gates and daughter vie on the Vineyard. [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]. "Up until that recent piece, people would have thought of him as someone who took a cautious and nuanced approach to questions like reparations. 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. Well, I'll tell you a funny story. 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. I have a couple black friends - I went to Yale with Ben Carson and with Ben's wife. 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. Now you can get a full sequence for less than $5,000 - some people say $1,000 or $2,000. GATES: Well, I was on "The View." I have the Ui Neil Haplotype. And I was shocked by that. And that is the lesson of "Finding Your Roots. 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? 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. GATES: And think about it. Henry was born in Patterson Creek, W.Va., on June 8, 1913.