Daughter Elizabeth Gates interviews her dad about . And the last thing I did before I went to bed on July 2, 1960, was to look up the word estimable. And a doctor from the Philippines taught me to play chess at West Virginia University Medical Center in Morgantown, W.Va. And he'd come around in rounds. They spoke in front of an audience last May when Gates received WHYY's annual Lifelong Learning Award. Gates was an Anisfield-Wolf prize winner in 1989 for The Schomburg Library of Women Writers. But mutations exist. So you GATES: Because of this white man. [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]. Thank God. 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. 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. We'll hear more after a short break. Professor Gates is the host of the documentary " Reconstruction: America After the Civil War. He reported:[37], "I had this spiritual event where it was like the top of my head opened up. And tears just streamed down my face. I'm Dave Davies This is FRESH AIR. GROSS: Huge story. Moreover, these genetic techniques may be inconsistent with the aims of conventional genealogy. My great-great-grandfather's now been found. - like the Bible says? In 2012, The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Omissions? 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. So we knew he was Irish. Is this instance of intraracial slavery an anomaly? Even the Native Americans came from someplace else about 16,000 years ago. GATES: He wasn't even out the door, and I moved into his bedroom. GATES: Don't you? GROSS: You had family that passed for white. And she's the cook for Claudette Colbert. 35 (1): 212227. I'm Dave Davies in for Terry Gross. GATES: Oh, my father and I were the first father and son of any race and the first African-Americans fully sequenced. His work has rooted African-American literary criticism in the African-American vernacular tradition.[12]. 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. And my brother went off to dental school. Elizabeth had suffered a stroke, her mind irreparably harmed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is an American treasure. Mama - I'm sorry, Mama. 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. But it is clear, in any case, that we fully inhabit a genealogical society"to use the anthropologist Elizabeth Povinellis phrase. The former vice president has become the Democratic front-runner with primary victories across the country. And she and Claudette Colbert are both unmarried mothers. . Sgt. As editor-in-chief of the online magazine the Root, Gates has a background in journalism. So you found out that your ancestors were, like, 18 miles away from where you lived. Gates was born in Keyser, West Virginia,[2] to Pauline Augusta (Coleman) Gates (19161987) and Henry Louis Gates Sr. (c. 19132010). 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 I gave it to her for birthday. Malcolm Gladwell hears some shocking news in Gates's latest PBS show. GROSS: And it was reported as if it was a break-in, and a police officer came and arrested you. Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Black America Since MLK: And Still I Rise, "Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Biography, Books, & Facts", "African American Lives The Past Is Another Country 2 4of4 YouTube", "Finding Your Roots: Decoding Our Past Through DNA", "The biggest brother: interview with Henry Louis Gates, black America's foremost intellectual", "Yale Afro-Am Chair Resigns After Remarks of Yale Pres", "Henry Louis Gates Jr. to continue at Harvard", "Henry Louis Gates is Wrong about African Involvement in the Slave Trade", Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, "Henry Louis Gates Jr. announced as editor-in-chief of the new Oxford Dictionary of African American English", "What It Means to Be Black in Latin America", "Ben Affleck's slave-owning ancestor 'censored' from genealogy show", "Ben Affleck Demanded PBS Suppress His Slave-Owning Ancestry", "Citing Ben Affleck's 'Improper Influence,' PBS Suspends 'Finding Your Roots', "PBS' 'Finding Your Roots' returning in January after Ben Affleck controversy", "West Virginia Weslesyan College biography", "Black Studies' New Star: Henry Louis Gates Jr", "Henry Louis Gates Jr. On 'The Black Church' and His Own Bargain with Jesus", "MacArthur Fellos Program: Henry Louis Gates Jr. | Literary Critic | Class of June 1981", "Golden Plate Awardees of the American Academy of Achievement", "Mister Jefferson and The Trials of Phillis Wheatley,", "2015 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award Winners Announced", "Henry Louis Gates Jr. Receives duPont Award for The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross", "Read Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s Acceptance Speech for the duPont Award", "Chicago Tribune Announces 2019 Literary and Heartland Award Winners", "Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. Named Don M. Randel Award Recipient | News | The Harvard Crimson", "Encarta Africana, the First Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Black History and Culture, Launches Today", Bibliography of Gates's publications and responses to it, African American National Biography Project, NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work Nonfiction, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Henry_Louis_Gates_Jr.&oldid=1142289654, African-American history of West Virginia, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences fellows, Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Television personalities from West Virginia, African-American television personalities, Members of the American Philosophical Society, All Wikipedia articles written in American English, Articles with unsourced statements from August 2009, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, Gates has received numerous honorary degrees, including a. 7. The two series demonstrated the many strands of ancestry, cultural heritage, and history among African Americans. And the title is Race Is A Social Construction, But Mutations Are Real" (ph). 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. It was astonishing. He is a Trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. In 2021, Gates became the seventh recipient of the, In 2021, Gates received the prestigious Gold Medal from. But we can expect some acknowledgment and interpretation of technologys limits. GROSS: Yeah. doi:10.2307/1208745. In 1980 Gates became codirector of the Black Periodical Literature Project at Yale. GROSS: Whoa. And I don't know if that ruined your sports career forever, but it affected your leg forever. 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: In 2021, Gates was named a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and elected to the Johnsonsians (Society). I mean, like, my - I'm second-generation American. GATES: I said, thank God. [3], Gates learned through research that his family is descended in part from the Yoruba people of West Africa. We defended the right of every American to vote. And I realized only recently that though I was raised to be a doctor, deep down, I really wanted to be a writer. He is a trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. It's incredible. 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. Yet genealogy is, at the same time, put to the task of heightening awareness of human relatedness, be it experiential or biological. Both conventional and genetic tracing yield unanticipated results in Faces of America. GATES: But I have an announcement to make GATES: For you. 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 lesson of "Finding Your Roots" - we're all immigrants. OK. 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. And then he'd - and I read quite a lot. In 2020, Gates earned a NAACP Image Award Nomination for Outstanding Literary Work Nonfiction for his book. 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. 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. This is FRESH AIR. Also, journalist Brian Palmer talks about how slavery and the Civil War are described at Confederate historic sites in the South. The show makes use of gene-sequencing techniques that have become widely available since African American Lives first aired, like whole-genome sequencing, which entails the mapping of all six billion base pairs in a persons DNA. GATES: I did an episode with Oprah and Quincy Jones and Bishop T.D. All rights reserved. GATES: Yeah. In 2021, Gates received the MIPAD 100 Network's Most Influential People of African Descent Lifetime Achievement Award. This is called an admixture test. Black people came here - not willingly, of course. My father loved sports, and I didn't care about sports that much. [19], In 1995, Gates presented a program in the BBC series Great Railway Journeys (produced in association with PBS). And deep down, I realized in retrospect that my desire to make films was probably born about that time. They lived together. [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. It was just put on the historic GATES: Register in Maryland. In 2020, Gates was honored with the Louis Stokes Community VisionaryAward. TERRY GROSS, BYLINE: Because you've talked to everybody about their genealogy, I want to talk with you about yours and what you've learned about yourself and the larger meaning of what you've learned about yourself. 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. The confrontation resulted in Gates being arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. As a prominent Black intellectual, Gates has concentrated on building academic institutions to study Black culture. And I sat down. 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. [35] As of 2021, Gates is married to historian Dr. Marial Iglesias Utset. We started to roll. But I think that you should have to get permission before someone is creeping around in your DNA. "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. 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. 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. GATES: And they said, OK, we won't tell you. What is race? The surprising reveals, coupled with the celebrities raw reactions to the information conveyed by the host, deliver moments of high drama and genuine emotion. Professor Gates is the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African-American Research at Harvard and has produced numerous books and documentaries about African-American history. The Bondwoman's Narrative was first published in 2002 and became a bestseller. The minister would call on her. In 2019, Gates received the Anne Izard Storytellers Choice Award, 2019 for "The Annotated African American Folktales," which he edited with Maria Tatar. [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. Police arrested Gates on July 16 on charges of disorderly conduct after a confrontation with an officer at his home in Cambridge, Mass. What percent would be from Europe? 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). Season 8. GATES: And because it was PBS, we negotiated a deal with this company Illumina which sequences everybody. And we have a wall of degrees at home. [20], In September 1995, Gates narrated a five-part abridgement (by Margaret Busby) of his memoir Colored People on BBC Radio 4.[21]. The most likely cause of this is a content blocker on your computer or network. Du Bois Center there at Harvard, one of And he, and you, the officer and Joe Biden sat down, had a beer or two. Would you do it? In October 1975, he was hired by Charles Davis as a secretary in the Afro-American Studies department at Yale. And the DNA tests we were doing at that time - when they analyzed my Y DNA, it went to Ireland. GATES: But everyone who's in one of those databases has given some kind of permission. And TV was on kind of like the hearth in New England. In 2021, Gates received the PBS Beacon Award. And I hope they are. It comes from slavery. ". GROSS: But you also wanted to know who were your African ancestors. 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. As a child, Gates said he wanted to be a Rhodes Scholar. GATES: And I gave it to my mother once. 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. 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. Read about President Obama's comments on Gates's arrest. After turning that corner, Sharon gave birth to Maggie, their first daughter, in July 1980, and Liza was born 18 months later. GATES: And we - they only put - remember "The Late Show"? So I'm out there. There we go. And GATES: Yeah. But we have a disproportionately higher risk of sickle cell. Now think about that. And they would be published in the newspaper. Henry Louis Gates Jr.: Head Negro In Charge. [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. So it was just the two of us and my mom, right? In the show, notable guests discover their family roots based on genealogical research and DNA results. He looked white. 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. One episode this season explores Gates' own DNA and family history. GATES: That's true. (SOUNDBITE OF ALLEN TOUSSAINT'S "EGYPTIAN FANTASY"). 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. So I know that moment of transcendence is real.". (Read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.s Britannica essay on Monuments of Hope.). NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. And then you see this white girl next to Claudette Colbert. 6. His father worked in a paper mill and moonlighted as a janitor, while his mother cleaned houses. Elizabeth Gates, the daughter of prominent Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, is in her twenties and suffered a severe stroke just four months ago. And you don't have a Y DNA, so that's why you're a woman. Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s arrest continues to cause controversy after President Obama criticized police action, Michelle Gielan reports. Over . And it's just crazy. 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. Gates's web series, "Black History in Two Minutes (Or So)", which he executive produces with Robert F. Smith and Dyllan McGee, earned five Webby Awards, including for Best Podcast: Documentary and Best Video Series: Education & Discovery (2020), Best Podcast: Documentary and Best Social Video: Discovery & Education (2021) and Best Social Video: Discovery & Education (2022). 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. Contemporary Literature. And another person to interpret my genetic data because it's 6 billion base pairs, right? I think you know where I'm heading here. 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). Henry was born in Patterson Creek, W.Va., on June 8, 1913. And they got the brothers in uniforms with swords and stuff coming out of the church with this sad, black church music. [11] Additionally, he is the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. GROSS: Your father died not too long ago - a few years ago. 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. It was really, like, the photograph of her - of your great-great-aunt Jane Gates. I found the first edition when I was an adult. 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. So overseer, slave plantation - rape, right? In the first series, Gates learned that he has 50% European ancestry[22] and 50% African ancestry. 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. 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. 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. 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 the black woman says all she wants is enough money to have a New Orleans-type funeral. The womans suffering is assuaged at long last when she revisits the land and people that indelibly shaped her, including a local herbal healer. You have to get permission. By clicking submit, you are agreeing to our Terms and Conditions & Privacy Policy. The event led to public criticism of the Cambridge police department by U.S. Pres. After that I would say I was a teacher. Based on admixture testing, Longoria is told that she is 70 percent European, 27 percent Native American, and 3 percent African. Once javascript and access to those URLs are allowed, please refresh this page. As a Black intellectual and public figure, Gates has been an outspoken critic of the Eurocentric literary canon. Because of the injury, Gates now uses a cane when he walks.[6][7]. He's also written for Time magazine, the New Yorker, and the New York Times. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is an American literary critic Credit: Getty What is Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s net worth? "We deconstruct ethnic identities to show that when the lights came down, everyone was sleeping with everyone else -- that's the way human history goes!" . Hollywood Life GROSS: And I read you talking about this. GATES: I go, yeah, I got a brother who's a dentist, you know? I go, goodbye. GROSS: I saw his picture in the obituary. And it turned out - my father used to say, you know, your mother's family is really distinguished, too? I think it's vulgar and racist whether it comes out of a Black mouth or a white mouth. In the series, he discussed findings with guests about their complex ancestries. That's not the way it was. Having grown up in an African-American community, however, he identifies as Black. Thank you so much for accepting this award. Now you can get a full sequence for less than $5,000 - some people say $1,000 or $2,000. Yeah. And so then they came in - this is a big deal back in 2008. President Barack Obama, a friend of Gates, said that the Cambridge Police Department had acted "stupidly" in the arrest. 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? While Gates has stressed the need for greater recognition of Black literature and Black culture, he does not advocate a "separatist" Black canon. And she burst into tears because she used to read me that book all the time. DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. 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. Stay informed daily on the latest news and advice on COVID-19 from the editors at U.S. News & World Report. 3. African-American - I love to joke about this. Will we reach consilience"William Whewells term for the combining of information from different domains toward the unity of knowledgebetween conventional and genetic genealogy (and, moreover, among the types of genetic analysis at play)? 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. Thank God. 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. Barack Obama understood that and, I think, certainly helped our nation to heal. You may then be asked to log in, create an account if you don't already have one, As a result of research he conducted as a MacArthur Fellow, Gates discovered Our Nig, written by Harriet E. Wilson in 1859 and thought to be the first novel written in the United States by an African American. 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 draws on structuralism, post-structuralism, and semiotics to analyze texts and assess matters of identity politics. 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. But I also watched TV. 1. 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". Du Bois Professor of the Humanities in 1991. In 2010, Gates wrote an op-ed in The New York Times that discussed the role played by Africans in the Atlantic slave trade. Gates developed the notion of signifyin in Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self (1987) and The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (1988). 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.
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