henry louis gates jr daughters
His early life is described in his memoir that is entitled, Colored People (1994). As editor-in-chief of the online magazine the Root, Gates has a background in journalism. And I think that that's sad. And my brother went off to dental school. I told them that I did not want to know if I had any of the sort of - I don't know - the slam-dunk genes for Alzheimer's disease. Crockett Jr., Stephen A. Before the PBS episode, the world only knew that Vivian was reported to be of Sicilian heritage on her dads side, and German/Irish on her mothers side. 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. 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. [3], Gates learned through research that his family is descended in part from the Yoruba people of West Africa. GATES: They don't do that anymore for this particular kind of - I had a broken hip. And he, and you, the officer and Joe Biden sat down, had a beer or two. 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. On April 19, 1989, he was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society. GATES: He wasn't even out the door, and I moved into his bedroom. James . The series is the latest iteration of Gatess innovative, fascinating foray into the nexus of genealogy and genetic ancestry testing that began four years ago with African American Lives (and continued with African American Lives 2 and Oprahs Roots). And the only reason that I started making the series that became "Finding Your Roots" is because of that obituary and that photograph. That's how much the science of genetics has changed in terms of the retail market since 2009. Gates was an Anisfield-Wolf prize winner in 1989 for The Schomburg Library of Women Writers. But on the other hand, you can't say that biology doesn't matter because it does matter. I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross. 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. 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)? Now think about that. While at Yale, Gates mentored Jodie Foster, who majored in African-American Literature there and wrote her thesis on author Toni Morrison. And I make it every week over and over with "Finding Your Roots.". My great-great-grandfather's now been found. 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. In 2009, when I did "Faces Of America," a retail value of full genomic sequencing was $300,000. And I'm wondering if being laid up from an injury for a while affected your desire to - and your time to immerse yourself in books. 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. Please make sure your computer, VPN, or network allows Eric Foner, professor of history at Columbia University, considered Gates's emphasis on there being "little discussion" of African involvement in the slave trade to be unfounded, stating that "today, virtually every history of slavery and every American history textbook includes this information". Police arrested Gates on July 16 on charges of disorderly conduct after a confrontation with an officer at his home in Cambridge, Mass. The womans suffering is assuaged at long last when she revisits the land and people that indelibly shaped her, including a local herbal healer. This trip came 25 years after Gates worked at a hospital in Kilimatinde, near Dodoma, Tanzania, when he was a 19-year-old pre-medical student at Yale University. Other works by Gates included Speaking of Race, Speaking of Sex: Hate Speech, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties (1994), Colored People: A Memoir (1994), The Future of the Race (1996; with Cornel West), Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (1997), The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: Americas First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers (2003), America Behind the Color Line: Dialogues with African Americans (2004), In Search of Our Roots (2009), and Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (2019). GROSS: I saw his picture in the obituary. 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. Mixing cutting-edge DNA research and old-school genealogical sleuthing, FINDING YOUR ROOTS . 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. 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.. Or even to the slave narrative of Venture Smith, in which blacks are purchased by other blacks for both slavery and freedom. Theyve Had an Inappropriate Relationship For Months, How Black Creators Can Expand Their Network with LinkedIn. His father worked in a paper mill and moonlighted as a janitor, while his mother cleaned houses. 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. 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. Joness tale offers some insight into the appeal of genealogy, another effort at reconnection with home and kin, and ballast against the tumult of modern living. After an evening at a bachelorette party, she woke up with what she thought was a hangover. 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. JSTOR1208745. 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. 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. People might remember the Beer Summit, when you were stopped in your own home trying to unjam a lock after a long trip. Because of the injury, Gates now uses a cane when he walks.[6][7]. (Rockefeller lost in 1972 but later served two terms as governor.). So then I became close to them but in two completely different ways. 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: But I have an announcement to make GATES: For you. And it's just crazy. GATES: Don't you? 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. After a month at Yale Law School, Gates withdrew from the program. In 1992, he received a George Polk Award for his social commentary in The New York Times. Thank you. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities in 1991. "[7], Gates has argued that a separatist, Afrocentric education perpetuates racist stereotypes. Du Bois Center there at Harvard, one of Would you do it? He rediscovered the earliest African-American novels . And I watched reruns of early black films like "Amos 'n' Andy" and "Beulah." 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 my Y DNA, which is - comes in an unbroken chain, descends from this Irishman. "[14], As a mediator between those advocating separatism and those believing in a Western canon, Gates has been criticized by both. After that, everything stopped. 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. "Finding Your Roots" has become a phenomenon -- and it all began with host Henry Louis Gates Jr. receiving a piece of angry fan mail. Daughter Elizabeth Gates interviews her dad about . Gates wrote, executive-produced, and hosted the series, which earned the 2013 Peabody Award and a NAACP Image Award. [19], In 1995, Gates presented a program in the BBC series Great Railway Journeys (produced in association with PBS). 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. In July 2009 Gates was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct: After returning from traveling abroad, Gates had forced open the door to his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which precipitated a call to police from a neighbour who believed a robbery might be underway. That belief is shared by Native groups that similarly objected to the Human Genome Diversity Project, as described in the work of Jenny Reardon and Kimberly TallBear. [9] Gates accepted the offer by Cornell in 1985 and taught there until 1989. In 2021, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania honored Gates with itsFoundersAward. I killed my mama. Henry Louis Gates Daughters Elizabeth is in her twenties and suffered a severe stroke in May 2010. 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. The work extended application of the concept of "signifyin'" to analysis of African-American works. In 2020, Gates was named a Walter Channing Cabot Fellow by Harvard University. She paid cash for that house in what was largely a white neighborhood. The new season of his TV series "Finding Your Roots" is now showing on PBS. My father loved sports, and I didn't care about sports that much. Gates says John Morton Blum, a professor in Yale's history department, was his mentor. And I want to start with the person who got you started in genealogy. In July 2022, Gates announced that he would serve as editor-in-chief of the Oxford Dictionary of African American English, a new glossary of language that will contain popular phrases used by historical Black figures and modern-day Black Americans. He draws on structuralism, post-structuralism, and semiotics to analyze texts and assess matters of identity politics. I hope you never come back, you know? You have to get permission. This is FRESH AIR. So I'm telling this story over and over of my - of rediscovering my own lost roots. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is an American literary critic Credit: Getty What is Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s net worth? 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. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). It was Gates vs. Gates on Martha's Vineyard this week. GATES: Terry Gross speechless - first time in 35 years. Not all U.S. presidents are missed once they leave the White House. Is this instance of intraracial slavery an anomaly? Or they stayed home, and they listened to or played music. 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. 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. I said, well, I've never met Donald Trump. 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. [25][26][27] Finding Your Roots resumed in January 2016.[28]. [32], The incident spurred a politically charged exchange of views about race relations and law enforcement throughout the United States. 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: Yeah, yeah. GROSS: OK. or subscribe. I love you. 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 . 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. Gates claimed that his arrest was a sign of racism on the part of police. You know, I try to - doing "Finding Your Roots" is a way to paying homage to my mother and father every year. 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. And I gave it to her for birthday. And I don't know if that ruined your sports career forever, but it affected your leg forever. And she burst into tears because she used to read me that book all the time. [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 that was a steal. doi:10.2307/1208745. And I loved the news. I'm Dave Davies in for Terry Gross. 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 deep down, I realized in retrospect that my desire to make films was probably born about that time. Black people came here - not willingly, of course. GROSS: Have you been medically DNA tested? GROSS: And you got this information from the 1870 census. As a literary theorist and critic, Gates has combined literary techniques of deconstruction with native African literary traditions. And you realize it's Peola, grown up, coming back. GROSS: But you had family that passed for white. )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. Hollywood Life, Latest Hollywood Celebrity & Entertainment News. The fifth season of Gates' TV series "Finding Your Roots" is now running on PBS. And another person to interpret my genetic data because it's 6 billion base pairs, right? Biology matters. What percent would be Native American? Gat. We have the great privilege of having Professor Henry Louis Gates, of Harvard University, the Director of the W.B. GROSS: It's mind-boggling. 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. So you found out that your ancestors were, like, 18 miles away from where you lived. 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. Because the series is so successful in demonstrating the intersections between world history and personal history, the lack of contextualization here is notable. Does race exist? His taxi driver attempted to help him gain entrance. GROSS: But you also wanted to know who were your African ancestors. In 1974, Carol Stacks important ethnography All Our Kin (Harper & Row) suggested the plasticity of the designation cousin well beyond consanguinity. GROSS: Yeah. Yet genealogy is, at the same time, put to the task of heightening awareness of human relatedness, be it experiential or biological. And by in traction, I mean on my back with my foot up with weights. GROSS: It has been a great honor to speak with you. They had a medical doctor who specializes in sharing this information. 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. 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 she dies of a broken heart because her little girl passes for white and goes off - and never sees her again. GATES: I'll never - I love you, Mama. And one of the, you know, wonderful people on "The View" said did I think that Donald Trump is racist. That's a long time when you're young. Jakes and Chris Tucker. What percent would be from Europe? Now she was born in 1819; died in 1888. When my daughters were born, I had them tested for sickle cell because - black people are not the only people in the world that have sickle cell. 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. Omissions? It was astonishing. 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. He has an estimated net worth of $1million, according to Celebrity Net Worth. Gates considers himself a literary critic and educator. They lived together. That yearning manifests itself in many ways, from anomie to ethnic mutual-aid associations. Signifyin is the practice of representing an idea indirectly, through a commentary that is often humourous, boastful, insulting, or provocative. DNA-derived genealogical information may also collide with other ways of rendering kinship and relation. The authoritative record of NPRs programming is the audio record. And he'd make a couple - a move. But we have a disproportionately higher risk of sickle cell. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. But they came from someplace else. (SOUNDBITE OF ALLEN TOUSSAINT'S "EGYPTIAN FANTASY"). GATES: For which she paid cash. [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. So everybody who showed up on this continent is from someplace else. The event led to public criticism of the Cambridge police department by U.S. Pres. I think you know where I'm heading here. 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. Terry will be one of the guests whose family history is explored next year in the sixth season of the show. 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 the geneticists have found the identity finally of Jane Gates's paramour, the man GATES: Yes. In the show, notable guests discover their family roots based on genealogical research and DNA results. Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s arrest continues to cause controversy after President Obama criticized police action, Michelle Gielan reports. American playwright, actor, screenwriter, producer, and director. 2. And if you're Ashkenazi Jewish, you might have a higher risk for those kind of things or Tay-Sachs. And so then they came in - this is a big deal back in 2008. And they would be published in the newspaper. Moreover, these genetic techniques may be inconsistent with the aims of conventional genealogy. Barack Obama understood that and, I think, certainly helped our nation to heal. 3. But it's just not those two genetic lines. And at the time, the airwaves were so segregated, they only put black films on "The Late Late Show." and Ph.D. in English literature from Clare College at the University of Cambridge. Gates's critically acclaimed six-part PBS documentary series, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, traced 500 years of African-American history to the second inauguration of President Barack Obama. GATES: So if you were a Martian and came down to look at my DNA results, you'd think I was a white boy, you know? Hollywood Life And you - the last scene is the funeral. We'd spit in a test tube. 6. GATES: Our TV - when we woke up, the TV was on, and nobody ever turned it off until you went to sleep. DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. So it was just the two of us and my mom, right? My mother was a seamstress, as you know. At the age of 14, Gates suffered a hairline fracture of the ball-and-socket joint in his hip while playing touch football. That's the way it is. And on my desk set a red Webster's dictionary. They came in slave ships. 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. 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. 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". Catch #FindingYourRoots Tuesdays at 8/7c on PBS (check local listings). If you continue to experience issues, contact us at 202-466-1032 or help@chronicle.com. 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. By clicking submit, you are agreeing to our Terms and Conditions & Privacy Policy. In 1995, he received the Golden Plate Award of the. In 2021, Gates became the seventh recipient of the, In 2021, Gates received the prestigious Gold Medal from. But the ancestry is being investigated against the will of the people being outed. The Bondwoman's Narrative was first published in 2002 and became a bestseller. I regret we are out of time. And I cluster more toward the Yoruba than any - because 50 percent GATES: Of my ancestry is from sub-Saharan Africa. After a break, he'll talk about his childhood and about how DNA evidence demonstrates there's no such thing as racial purity. I mean, they know Donald Trump. And I don't think that he understands how much power that - to heal, to bind that the Oval Office metaphorically has. 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? 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. 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. Once javascript and access to those URLs are allowed, please refresh this page. 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. Henry Louis Gates Jr.: Head Negro In Charge. Both conventional and genetic tracing yield unanticipated results in Faces of America. "[30][31], Following a trip to China, Gates returned home to his residence in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near Harvard Square on July 16, 2009, only to find the front door jammed. So let's get back to your great-great-grandmother. Gates was born in Keyser, West Virginia,[2] to Pauline Augusta (Coleman) Gates (19161987) and Henry Louis Gates Sr. (c. 19132010). 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. So my whole life is really an attempt to honor and please my parents and make them proud of me, you know. President Barack Obama, a friend of Gates, said that the Cambridge Police Department had acted "stupidly" in the arrest. Surely, most people of African descent do not expect to find a black slave owner in their family tree. Speaks onstage during the 'Black America Since MLK: And Still I Rise' panel discussion at the PBS portion of the 2016. Today's most compelling personalities discover the surprising stories in their own family trees. And we have a wall of degrees at home. 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." In front of all these people and all these viewers. Coproduced, hosted, and written by Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W.E.B. ". GROSS: Whoa. 8. In 2021, Gates was named a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and elected to the Johnsonsians (Society). It doesn't exist. When we left off, Gates was talking about his own DNA mix. GROSS: So you assume it was not a consensual relationship, but she managed to own her own home five years after being freed from slavery. And the last thing I did before I went to bed was - we always had a desk in our bedrooms and had a bookcase. GROSS: Do you know - do you want to know your medical DNA? And they have a horse-drawn carriage. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. Even if you were free and you were black GATES: In most states, you weren't allowed to vote. My mother used to read me - the greatest book ever written to me was "The Poky Little Puppy," right? By Henry Louis Gates Jr. It's a gift - and for my mom. 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. 1. I was more of a bookworm. Stay informed daily on the latest news and advice on COVID-19 from the editors at U.S. News & World Report. And your driver was helping you - well, he was shoving his shoulder against the door trying to open it. GROSS: And it was reported as if it was a break-in, and a police officer came and arrested you. And she invents this pancake mix, and they become fabulously wealthy. I only did black people. In 2020, Gates received the 400 Years of African American History Commission's Distinguished 400Award. But I think that you should have to get permission before someone is creeping around in your DNA. GATES: So obviously somebody gave her that money. And then when we go - when you were buried, she would stand up. 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: Yeah, I loved books. Season 8. They spoke in front of an audience last May when Gates received WHYY's annual Lifelong Learning Award. While assignment to the haplogroup L3x, for example, indicates an ancestor in what is now Ethiopia at least 50,000 years ago, this interesting detail does not fill in the contours of the family tree.