But when I started the series, it wasn't called "Finding Your Roots." I love you being black. I'm going to be black. He was 97, as you said. GATES: I go, yeah, I got a brother who's a dentist, you know? GATES: Yeah, yeah. DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. 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. In 2021, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania honored Gates with itsFoundersAward. The minister would call on her. 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. Speaks onstage during the 'Black America Since MLK: And Still I Rise' panel discussion at the PBS portion of the 2016. I only did black people. GATES: Maybe for Christmas, OK, that's fine (laughter). 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. It's a lot of data to process. We'll hear more after a short break. And by in traction, I mean on my back with my foot up with weights. And my mother used to write the eulogies, the obituaries for all the black people in the Potomac Valley, where I grew up. Yet no lens is provided through which to interpret this genealogical bombshell. [35] As of 2021, Gates is married to historian Dr. Marial Iglesias Utset. [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. 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. 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 And I gave it to her for birthday. The fifth season of "Finding Your Roots" is currently showing on PBS. In 1973 he entered Clare College, Cambridge, where one of his tutors was the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka. 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. By Alondra Nelson. GROSS: OK, for two weeks. As Faces of America concludes, the connections among several of the participants are revealed using a technique developed by Altschuler and his colleague Mark Daly that is similar to 23andMes Relative Finder. These DNA cousins share several million of the three billion base pairs, suggesting a common ancestor a few or tens of generations in the past. 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 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. GATES: OK. Tune in for all-new episodes as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. explores fascinating ancestries and family mysteries for an array of . 2. 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. It's the damnedest thing I ever heard. GROSS: You had family that passed for white. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. And she invents this pancake mix, and they become fabulously wealthy. I regret we are out of time. Based on admixture testing, Longoria is told that she is 70 percent European, 27 percent Native American, and 3 percent African. Our editors will review what youve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. 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. GATES: I said, thank God. And that is the strongest argument for brotherhood, sisterhood and the unity of the human species. Obama then held a much-publicized meeting with Gates and James Crowley, the officer who had arrested Gates, which became informally known as the beer summit because Obama invited the two for beers in the White House Rose Garden. GATES: Terry Gross speechless - first time in 35 years. GROSS: When you were 14, you had a football injury. And the last thing I did before I went to bed was - we always had a desk in our bedrooms and had a bookcase. I mean, they know Donald Trump. "Finding Your Roots" has become a phenomenon -- and it all began with host Henry Louis Gates Jr. receiving a piece of angry fan mail. Following a two-year stay at Duke University, he was recruited to Harvard University in 1991. And I learned a lot about the medium. Prosecutors later dropped the charges. GATES: And they said, OK, we won't tell you. So overseer, slave plantation - rape, right? . Yeah. And I was just overwhelmed with emotion. But mutations exist. 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. 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 maintains that it is "ridiculous" to think that only Blacks should be scholars of African and African-American literature. He's received 50 honorary degrees from such institutions as Harvard University and Williams College. 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 there were a lot of people who voted for Donald Trump as a repudiation vote. Police arrested Gates on July 16 on charges of disorderly conduct after a confrontation with an officer at his home in Cambridge, Mass. 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? African-American - I love to joke about this. Even with the aid of cutting-edge 21st-century genealogydigitized archival records and genetic analysiswe may never know the ins and outs of how Gladwells fifth-great-grandmother came to be a slaveholder. We delineate our individual and collective identities based upon inclusion in and exclusion from groups. GROSS: I saw his picture in the obituary. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. What percent would be from Europe? 6.4K views 13 years ago Elizabeth Gates, the daughter of arrested Professor Henry Louis Gates, takes a few minutes to call CNN from Martha's Vineyard and talk to Don Lemon about the. 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: Well, I think that you should have the right to - you have to ask someone. You said that after - you had been getting death threats and these angry emails and everything. I could've won the Nobel Prize, and somebody would say congratulations. GATES: But everyone who's in one of those databases has given some kind of permission. Gates claimed that his arrest was a sign of racism on the part of police. He received the 2008 Ralph Lowell Award from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the highest honor in the field of public television. 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. You can say on the one hand that race is a social construction. Terry will be one of the guests whose family history is explored next year in the sixth season of the show. 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. [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. "[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 remarkably, she's now able to. 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. Joe Biden launched his presidential bid in April with a bold . And I couldn't imagine what, but two sets of those fourth great-grandparents are from my mother's line. GROSS: Is that too personal? Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. 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. 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. The two series demonstrated the many strands of ancestry, cultural heritage, and history among African Americans. Cambridge police officers were dispatched. He loved the news. An X-ray showed a bright portion that revealed just how much of her brain tissue was destroyed. After a month at Yale Law School, Gates withdrew from the program. That's the first descriptor that comes to mind. And she's the cook for Claudette Colbert. And he mustered in in Winchester, Va., on Christmas Day, 1778, and was mustered down the Continental Army in April of 1784. Read about President Obama's comments on Gates's arrest. And he'd make a couple - a move. Thank God. Faces expands on those outings in topic and technique, branching out from the genealogies of prominent blacks to those of a multiracial, multiethnic group of notables, including the actors Eva Longoria and Meryl Streep, the writers Louise Erdrich and Malcolm Gladwell, the musician Yo-Yo Ma, the poet and scholar Elizabeth Alexander, the comedian Stephen Colbert, and Gates himself. He has learned that he is also connected to the multiracial West Virginia community of Chestnut Ridge people. GROSS: OK. And she throws herself on the casket. Stay informed daily on the latest news and advice on COVID-19 from the editors at U.S. News & World Report. And TV was on kind of like the hearth in New England. They were buried next to each other. The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song was published in 2021. They had a medical doctor who specializes in sharing this information. 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? And we filmed the whole thing. As a Black intellectual and public figure, Gates has been an outspoken critic of the Eurocentric literary canon. In 2006, Gates wrote and produced the PBS documentary "African American Lives," the first documentary series to use genealogy and genetic science to provide an understanding of African-American history. Was this an equal sexual relationship? That shocking news is relayed to Gladwell in an exchange pregnant with anxiety and uneasiness on the part of both men. President Obama's comments on Gates's arrest. Or they stayed home, and they drew. But I also watched TV. GROSS: Was that reflected in the way you wanted to say goodbye to your father at the funeral? So you're saying I should have been an undertaker. And I think that we throw terms like that around too loosely. All that was on still in 1965 in syndication. GATES: And my father lived to be 97 1/2 without any dementia. And I want to start with the person who got you started in genealogy. And she and Claudette Colbert are both unmarried mothers. When we left off, Gates was talking about his own DNA mix. African-Americans all think that they're a descendant from a Native American. In 2019, Gates received the Anne Izard Storytellers Choice Award, 2019 for "The Annotated African American Folktales," which he edited with Maria Tatar. The authoritative record of NPRs programming is the audio record. 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. GATES: Very close to them, yeah, particularly to my mother. It was a horrible, horrible thing. Black people came here - not willingly, of course. I'm Dave Davies This is FRESH AIR. One episode this season explores Gates' own DNA and family history. 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. GATES: Right after the Beer Summit, it all went away. The book tells stories about Gates's parents, his lifelong nickname, Skippy, and his brother, Rocky. [4] He also learned that he has 50% European ancestry, including Irish forebears; he was surprised his European ancestry turned out to be so substantial. That seems to be one of the programs aspirations. And you - the last scene is the funeral. 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. 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. 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". Having grown up in an African-American community, however, he identifies as Black. [11] Additionally, he is the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. And they got the brothers in uniforms with swords and stuff coming out of the church with this sad, black church music. You know, we used to say tribe, but now that's not politically correct - so the Yoruba ethnic group in Western Nigeria. But we have a disproportionately higher risk of sickle cell. The latter, tracing the ancestral history of contemporary figures, was especially popular. I killed my mama. Except in the next scene, I showed him their headstones. President Barack Obama, a friend of Gates, said that the Cambridge Police Department had acted "stupidly" in the arrest. And your father was a tailor, which is why we GATES: And my mother went to Atlantic City. You get your Y DNA from your father, and that's what makes me a man. And under the skin, we are almost identical genetically. GROSS: OK. On your mother's side, you found out that you had three men in the family who were freed slaves - freed before 1776. I'm Dave Davies in for Terry Gross. And she dies of a broken heart because her little girl passes for white and goes off - and never sees her again. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities in 1991. GATES: Well, I was on "The View." My mother was a seamstress, as you know. And they fought in the Revolutionary War. 3. 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. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. Soyinka persuaded Gates to study literature instead of history; he also taught him much about the culture of the Yoruba, one of the largest Nigerian ethnic groups. www.pbs.org/weta/finding-your-roots Posts Reels Videos Tagged 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. (Note: Clotel (1853) by William Wells Brown is recognized as the first novel published by an African-American author, but it was both written and published in London.) It's beautiful. And then it was a property requirement.