Catch #FindingYourRoots Tuesdays at 8/7c on PBS (check local listings). I love you being black. 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. And he mustered in in Winchester, Va., on Christmas Day, 1778, and was mustered down the Continental Army in April of 1784. Moreover, these genetic techniques may be inconsistent with the aims of conventional genealogy. I could've won the Nobel Prize, and somebody would say congratulations. Both conventional and genetic tracing yield unanticipated results in Faces of America. 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. [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. So we knew he was Irish. In front of all these people and all these viewers. I go, goodbye. My mother would say, tell them about your brother who's a dentist. 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 he'd make a couple - a move. Barack Obama. Now she was born in 1819; died in 1888. And my Y DNA, which is - comes in an unbroken chain, descends from this Irishman. It's the damnedest thing I ever heard. 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. His early life is described in his memoir that is entitled, Colored People (1994). You know, no matter how different we appear phenotypically, under the skin we're 99.99 percent the same. And I learned a lot about the medium. In the series, he discussed findings with guests about their complex ancestries. I was more of a bookworm. February 12, 2010. 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. He is a trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. That's how much the science of genetics has changed in terms of the retail market since 2009. For example, while haplogroupssets of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), which are gene-sequence variants that are inherited together and categorized by letter and number (A, L3D, R, U5b, etc. And then when we go - when you were buried, she would stand up. And I was exhilarated. The Native American writer Erdrich refuses to assent to genetic ancestry testing, because she understands her DNA to belong to her community. Updates? 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 the geneticists have found the identity finally of Jane Gates's paramour, the man GATES: Yes. And they got the brothers in uniforms with swords and stuff coming out of the church with this sad, black church music. Even the Native Americans came from someplace else about 16,000 years ago. He was 97, as you said. And he, and you, the officer and Joe Biden sat down, had a beer or two. In a February episode of the PBS show, "Finding Your Roots," host and historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. presented Rosanne Cash with her DNA results and family genealogy. And deep down, I realized in retrospect that my desire to make films was probably born about that time. That's a long time when you're young. This is FRESH AIR. Today's most compelling personalities discover the surprising stories in their own family trees. 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. Jr. (Design School Visiting Committee 1984-89) in honor of their daughters, Brooke Higgins Bing Williams, Harvard College 1988, and Eden Branford Bing Williams, Harvard . Terry. doi:10.2307/1208745. So everybody who showed up on this continent is from someplace else. My father loved sports, and I didn't care about sports that much. 5. Malcolm Gladwell hears some shocking news in Gates's latest PBS show. GROSS: OK, for two weeks. 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 have a couple black friends - I went to Yale with Ben Carson and with Ben's wife. And she and Claudette Colbert are both unmarried mothers. American playwright, actor, screenwriter, producer, and director. Gates was also involved with various television documentaries that were aired by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). 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. His work has rooted African-American literary criticism in the African-American vernacular tradition.[12]. GATES: Terry Gross speechless - first time in 35 years. But we have a disproportionately higher risk of sickle cell. And we knew the name of his great-great-grandmother and the name of this white man. 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. GROSS: I think they're doing it through records and not through, like, secretly getting their blood samples. Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The new season of Gates' TV series "Finding Your Roots" is now running on PBS. Like Joe Louis's fights, which my father still talks about as part of the fixed repertoire of stories that texture our lives. javascript and allows content to be delivered from c950.chronicle.com and chronicle.blueconic.net. 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. So let's get back to your great-great-grandmother. In "Root Worker," a short . You have to get permission. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities in 1991. 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. If you remember, it was called "African-American Lives." 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? Discomfort is also experienced by the viewer. Copyright 2019 NPR. Know Thyself, the final episode, which shares its title with the slogan of Knome Inc., focuses mostly on genetic genealogy. 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". I think it's vulgar and racist whether it comes out of a Black mouth or a white mouth. But I think that you should have to get permission before someone is creeping around in your DNA. In 1995, he received the Golden Plate Award of the. Does race exist? 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. 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. Henrys research also led him to discover a census from 1870, which revealed that Rosannes great-great grandfather a man named Lafayette Robsinson was mixed-race. Upon learning this, Rosanne recalled the long-running rumors of her mothers background and said, So, it was, at least, a small part true., Related: The fifth season of Gates' TV series "Finding Your Roots" is now running on PBS. GROSS: It's mind-boggling. And they stayed home, and they read. But it is clear, in any case, that we fully inhabit a genealogical society"to use the anthropologist Elizabeth Povinellis phrase. The new season of his TV series "Finding Your Roots" is now showing on PBS. And I was just overwhelmed with emotion. That's the way it is. In 2021, Gates became the seventh recipient of the, In 2021, Gates received the prestigious Gold Medal from. GROSS: OK. In 1980 Gates became codirector of the Black Periodical Literature Project at Yale. So I thought that I had a pretty good chance. GROSS: Whoa. 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. [7] In his major scholarly work, The Signifying Monkey, a 1989 American Book Award winner, Gates expressed what might constitute an African-American cultural aesthetic. But mutations exist. 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. 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. And it turned out - my father used to say, you know, your mother's family is really distinguished, too? Now you can get a full sequence for less than $5,000 - some people say $1,000 or $2,000. . So I'm telling this story over and over of my - of rediscovering my own lost roots. His mother. [34] They had two daughters together before they divorced in 1999. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. 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. Race is a social construction. We defended the right of every American to vote. 6. 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. GATES: Oh, my father and I were the first father and son of any race and the first African-Americans fully sequenced. 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: This is FRESH AIR. GATES: And then there was "The Late Late Show." GROSS: And it's a way of outing people as not being who they think they are and not recognizing that we're all descended from so many different people. In the face of migration and movement and so-called nontraditional family forms, both conventional and genetic genealogy allow us to freeze for a moment the flux of the modern human experience. GATES: Very close to them, yeah, particularly to my mother. 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. 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. 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. I hope you never come back, you know? 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. You can say on the one hand that race is a social construction. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. I'm Dave Davies This is FRESH AIR. We are unable to fully display the content of this page. Yeah. And the first thing they said was, you don't have any of the genes that's going to give you Alzheimer's. He introduced the notion ofsignifyinto represent Black literary and musical history as a continuing reflection and reinterpretation of what has come before. Thank you so much for accepting this award. And your father was a tailor, which is why we GATES: And my mother went to Atlantic City. They - but you're absolutely right. 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. Because of the injury, Gates now uses a cane when he walks.[6][7]. And she come to - it's the woman who invents box pancake mix - right? And the average African-American has less than 1 percent Native American ancestry, but they have 24 percent European ancestry. I regret we are out of time. On April 19, 1989, he was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society. GATES: Don't you? It was just put on the historic GATES: Register in Maryland. The former vice president has become the Democratic front-runner with primary victories across the country. 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: I'll never - I love you, Mama. [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. Gates says John Morton Blum, a professor in Yale's history department, was his mentor. You know, I try to - doing "Finding Your Roots" is a way to paying homage to my mother and father every year. We'll hear more after a short break. Contemporary Literature. He was a free negro, as we would have said then. 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. One episode this season explores Gates' own DNA and family history. When we left off, Gates was talking about his own DNA mix. 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. It was Gates vs. Gates on Martha's Vineyard this week. And I hope they are. According to a police report, Gates refused to cooperate when he was later questioned in his home, which resulted in his arrest. Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s arrest continues to cause controversy after President Obama criticized police action, Michelle Gielan reports.