In 2020, Gates received the Muhammad Ali Voice of HumanityAward. 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. (Rockefeller lost in 1972 but later served two terms as governor.). And I think that we throw terms like that around too loosely. 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.. That seems to be one of the programs aspirations. GATES: That's true. My father loved sports, and I didn't care about sports that much. She paid cash for that house in what was largely a white neighborhood. He reflects on his own history and some of the more controversial aspects of DNA testing. 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. 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). And my mother used to write the eulogies, the obituaries for all the black people in the Potomac Valley, where I grew up. GROSS: (Laughter) So I want to change the subject a little bit. Then he'd come back. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. | Cambridge MA - Facebook (Read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.s Britannica essay on Monuments of Hope.). And she's the cook for Claudette Colbert. And we filmed the whole thing. Now you can get a full sequence for less than $5,000 - some people say $1,000 or $2,000. Based on admixture testing, Longoria is told that she is 70 percent European, 27 percent Native American, and 3 percent African. But we need to get some distance from the binary opposition we were raised in: evil white people and good Black people. 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. And our family - my cousin, Johnny Gates (ph), still owns that house to this day. The recipient of fifty-six honorary degrees and numerous prizes, Professor Gates was a . GROSS: OK. 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. So I just wrote an essay that was published by Yale University Press about race. Today's most compelling personalities discover the surprising stories in their own family trees. This is FRESH AIR. GROSS: I think they're doing it through records and not through, like, secretly getting their blood samples. Family tree of Henry Louis GATES - Geneastar [25][26][27] Finding Your Roots resumed in January 2016.[28]. And when my grandparents came as immigrants, my family was able to assimilate pretty easily because we're white. GATES: I did an episode with Oprah and Quincy Jones and Bishop T.D. Sunday Notes - uristocrat.com Is this instance of intraracial slavery an anomaly? 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. 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. Does race exist? GROSS: When you were 14, you had a football injury. On April 19, 1989, he was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society. 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. 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). People might remember the Beer Summit, when you were stopped in your own home trying to unjam a lock after a long trip. Thank you for being you. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. - Britannica Jointly appointed to assistant professorships in English and Afro-American Studies in 1979, Gates was promoted to associate professor in 1984. GATES: And my father lived to be 97 1/2 without any dementia. He is a Trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. And my brother went off to dental school. 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. Crockett Jr., Stephen A. Vivian filed for divorce in 1967, and Johnny went on to marry singer June Carter Cash. We started to roll. DNA-derived genealogical information may also collide with other ways of rendering kinship and relation. That's the way it is. It's - remember, it's - my father dragged my brother and me upstairs in his parents' home and made us wait why he'd look through half a dozen of his father's scrapbooks, about which we knew nothing - complete mystery, a secret to us - looking for that obituary. Gatess own genealogical narrative, unfurled against the backdrop of images of his family gathering in the kitchen or tender interactions with his nonagenarian father, Henry Louis Gates Sr., is also quite moving. So you found out that your ancestors were, like, 18 miles away from where you lived. 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 . You have to get permission. As soon as the Civil War ended, they became common law husband and wife GATES: Which was illegal in Mississippi. Please make sure your computer, VPN, or network allows In 1980 Gates became codirector of the Black Periodical Literature Project at Yale. 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 was a graduate of Frederick Street High School and in 1998 received an honorary doctorate degree from Seton Hall University. And she dies of a broken heart because her little girl passes for white and goes off - and never sees her again. Gat. Gates currently serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the W.E.B. He notably explored genealogy as host of the series African American Lives (200608), Faces of America (2010), and Finding Your Roots (2012 ). [34] They had two daughters together before they divorced in 1999. 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. 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. 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. It was really, like, the photograph of her - of your great-great-aunt Jane Gates. Cambridge police officers were dispatched. The program documents a 3,000-mile journey Gates took through Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Tanzania, with his then-wife, Sharon Adams, and daughters, Liza and Meggie Gates. And remarkably, she's now able to. You might have breast cancer. As I have written elsewhere, this new kinship category, DNA cousins, or what Gates calls autosomal cousins, suggests that flexible kinship is being made on the new (or is it the rather old) terrain of biology. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is an American literary critic Credit: Getty What is Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s net worth? GATES: Don't you? 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? What does Henry Louis Gates, Jr., see as the most important form of resistance against hate? It's the damnedest thing I ever heard. As a result of the injury, Gates walks with a cane and his right leg is more than 2 inches shorter than his left. 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". GATES: I'll never - I love you, Mama. But they came from someplace else. He maintains that it is "ridiculous" to think that only Blacks should be scholars of African and African-American literature. Coproduced, hosted, and written by Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W.E.B. In 2020, Gates was named a Walter Channing Cabot Fellow by Harvard University. Updates? He introduced the notion ofsignifyinto represent Black literary and musical history as a continuing reflection and reinterpretation of what has come before. Black people came here - not willingly, of course. And that is a long time. And she was a beautiful woman. And I was in the hospital for six weeks. At the time, only Vivians European background had been known, and this discovery in her ancestryresurfaced thanks to a profile on Johnnys first wife in The Washington Poston May 16. 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 I sat down. 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. He's also written for Time magazine, the New Yorker, and the New York Times. And then he'd - and I read quite a lot. Henry Louis Gates, Sr. (1913 - 2010) - Genealogy - geni family tree 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. (SOUNDBITE OF ALLEN TOUSSAINT'S "EGYPTIAN FANTASY"). GROSS: Totally stunned. 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. "People wanted to kill me, man," Gates says of the reaction to that op-ed. [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. 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. Sergeant Who Arrested Gates Tells His Story : NPR President Obama's comments on Gates's arrest. "My father was so sad. American literary critic, professor and historian (born 1950), Critical studies and reviews of Gates' work. 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. So let's get back to your great-great-grandmother. And that imprinted this woman's story in my mind. A white doctor misdiagnosed the injury as psychosomatic after Gates told him he wanted to become a doctor, Gates wrote in a New York Times article, "About Men: A Giant Step," in 1990. And that is the lesson of "Finding Your Roots. GATES: He wasn't even out the door, and I moved into his bedroom. 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. I don't think that's true for very many people in this room or any - or many people who are watching this show. And I don't know if that ruined your sports career forever, but it affected your leg forever. GROSS: Terry Gross interviewed Henry Louis Gates last May when he was in Philadelphia to accept the WHYY Lifelong Learning Award. Recently, he has enraged many of his colleagues in the African-American studies fieldespecially those campaigning for government reparations for slaveryby insistently reminding them, as he did in a New York Times op-ed last year, that the folks who captured and sold Blacks into slavery in the first place were also Africans, working for profit.