One of eight children born to Edward St. Lawrence Gates and Helen Gertrude Redman Gates, he was the youngest of seven sons. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. 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. Thank you for being you. That yearning manifests itself in many ways, from anomie to ethnic mutual-aid associations. 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. And then he'd - and I read quite a lot. He is a trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. We'd spit in a test tube. Black people came here - not willingly, of course. GROSS: You had family that passed for white. 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: I said, well, I've never met Donald Trump. After that I would say I was a teacher. 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). 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. 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. And I cluster more toward the Yoruba than any - because 50 percent GATES: Of my ancestry is from sub-Saharan Africa. And at the time, the airwaves were so segregated, they only put black films on "The Late Late Show." [9] Gates accepted the offer by Cornell in 1985 and taught there until 1989. And they stayed home, and they read. 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. It doesn't exist. It was astonishing. After an evening at a bachelorette party, she woke up with what she thought was a hangover. On other occasions, though it was rare, blacks did enslave other blacks for their labor. Or even to the slave narrative of Venture Smith, in which blacks are purchased by other blacks for both slavery and freedom. 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. 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. The forms of genealogical tracing that star in Faces function doubly: both splitting and lumping. 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. (January 21, 2015), Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, Potomac State College of West Virginia University. It was better to be free than be a slave, but you were free but not free. Thank you so much for accepting this award. GATES: That's true. 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. What do you think of that? Henry was born in Patterson Creek, W.Va., on June 8, 1913. or subscribe. [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. In 1995, he received the Golden Plate Award of the. Know Thyself, the final episode, which shares its title with the slogan of Knome Inc., focuses mostly on genetic genealogy. If you remember, it was called "African-American Lives." 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. Or they stayed home, and they drew. 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. And that is the lesson of "Finding Your Roots. DAVIES: Henry Louis Gates speaking with Terry Gross in May of last year. 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. Sign up to receive the latest updates from U.S News & World Report and our trusted partners and sponsors. In Wednesday's press conference, President Obama called the Cambridge Police Department "stupid" for arresting Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities in 1991. His name was John Redman. In 2020, Gates received the Muhammad Ali Voice of HumanityAward. 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". "Finding Your Roots" has become a phenomenon -- and it all began with host Henry Louis Gates Jr. receiving a piece of angry fan mail. 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. And our family - my cousin, Johnny Gates (ph), still owns that house to this day. 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. I mean, like, my - I'm second-generation American. And my mother used to write the eulogies, the obituaries for all the black people in the Potomac Valley, where I grew up. In 2021, Gates was named a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and elected to the Johnsonsians (Society). And most DNA companies in the United States will tell you that they have never tested an African-American who is 100 percent from sub-Saharan Africa. 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. 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. It was really, like, the photograph of her - of your great-great-aunt Jane Gates. 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. Prosecutors later dropped the charges. And the DNA tests we were doing at that time - when they analyzed my Y DNA, it went to Ireland. In 2009, when I did "Faces Of America," a retail value of full genomic sequencing was $300,000. Or they stayed home, and they listened to or played music. And tears just streamed down my face. And she invents this pancake mix, and they become fabulously wealthy. As a result of the injury, Gates walks with a cane and his right leg is more than 2 inches shorter than his left. Gates currently serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the W.E.B. Cambridge police officers were dispatched. GATES: He wasn't even out the door, and I moved into his bedroom. In addition to Rosanne, Vivian and Johnny welcomed three other daughters: Cindy, Kathy and Tara. GATES: Oh, my father and I were the first father and son of any race and the first African-Americans fully sequenced. GATES: And we - they only put - remember "The Late Show"? But when I started the series, it wasn't called "Finding Your Roots." [36], In 1974, Gates learned the Transcendental Meditation technique. He was there in exile because he had been in prison and to be offering civil war for 27 months and was given a fellowship at the University of Cambridge. OK. I think it's vulgar and racist whether it comes out of a Black mouth or a white mouth. I love you. In some states - like, New York would let them vote sometimes, and then take it away. 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? So you GATES: Because of this white man. He has an estimated net worth of $1million, according to Celebrity Net Worth. Terry spoke to Henry Louis Gates in front of an audience last May when he was in Philadelphia to receive WHYY's annual Lifelong Learning Award. My mother would say, tell them about your brother who's a dentist. "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. ". You know, we used to say tribe, but now that's not politically correct - so the Yoruba ethnic group in Western Nigeria. 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. Cameo as a digital presentation of a fictional version of himself as, This page was last edited on 1 March 2023, at 15:56. 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. Thank you. GATES: I go, yeah, I got a brother who's a dentist, you know? From Blum, he says, he learned a lot about writing and history. By Henry Louis Gates Jr. But we have a disproportionately higher risk of sickle cell. - like the Bible says? The series combines the work of expert researchers in genealogy, history, and historical research in genetics to tell guests about the lives and histories of their ancestors. Our editors will review what youve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. GATES: No. 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. In 1992, he received a George Polk Award for his social commentary in The New York Times. 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. We know that BRCA1, BRCA2 - they're genetic. www.pbs.org/weta/finding-your-roots Posts Reels Videos Tagged [34] They had two daughters together before they divorced in 1999. And GATES: Yeah. 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. And my father would just make up stories and tell my brother and me. Over . After receiving two fellowships in 1970, he took a leave of absence from Yale to visit Africa, working as an anesthetist in a hospital in Tanzania and then traveling through other African nations. He reflects on his own history and some of the more controversial aspects of DNA testing. On the same night Harvard professor Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr . [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. GATES: Right after the Beer Summit, it all went away. Whereas prior shows relied heavily on analysis of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and Y-chromosome (Y-DNA), yielding results that included at most about 2 percent of ones complete genetic inheritance, in Faces techniques are used that probe deeper into more of the genome. The work extended application of the concept of "signifyin'" to analysis of African-American works. By clicking submit, you are agreeing to our Terms and Conditions & Privacy Policy. Gat. By Alondra Nelson. In 2012, The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. doi:10.2307/1208745. Please make sure your computer, VPN, or network allows Biology matters. GROSS: Whoa. 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 the show, notable guests discover their family roots based on genealogical research and DNA results. You don't get $1,400 by saving your nickels and dimes as a slave, right? 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. 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. At Yale University in 1973, he was one of 12 students selected as a Scholar of the House, a program that allows seniors to write a book or compose a symphony or follow a similar passion instead of taking classes. That's a long time when you're young. GROSS: So you know your medical background and if you're GATES: Yeah. 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. It's a lot of data to process. The Bondwoman's Narrative was first published in 2002 and became a bestseller. 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. And another person to interpret my genetic data because it's 6 billion base pairs, right? 3. 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. And she's the cook for Claudette Colbert. Amid discussion of Malcolm Gladwells roots, Gates discloses that the best-selling authors Jamaican maternal ancestor, a free woman of color, owned slaves of African descent. This is FRESH AIR. And remarkably, she's now able to. And the black woman says all she wants is enough money to have a New Orleans-type funeral. This is called an admixture test. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. Theyve Had an Inappropriate Relationship For Months, How Black Creators Can Expand Their Network with LinkedIn. 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.
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