Henry Louis Gates Photos and Premium High Res Pictures - Getty Images And I realized only recently that though I was raised to be a doctor, deep down, I really wanted to be a writer. Gates currently serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the W.E.B. 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. Ostensibly one familys illness narrative, the story is also an allegory about how the experience of migrationwhether forced through slavery, pogroms, or economic vulnerability, or motivated by hope for a better futuremay generate a latent or conscious yen for community. And then you see this white girl next to Claudette Colbert. It was astonishing. After that, everything stopped. 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. 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. 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. GATES: And then there was "The Late Late Show." In 2019, Gates received the Anne Izard Storytellers Choice Award, 2019 for "The Annotated African American Folktales," which he edited with Maria Tatar. And my brother went off to dental school. Moreover, these genetic techniques may be inconsistent with the aims of conventional genealogy. You know, we used to say tribe, but now that's not politically correct - so the Yoruba ethnic group in Western Nigeria. By Alondra Nelson. 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. 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. And I want to start with the person who got you started in genealogy. So I just wrote an essay that was published by Yale University Press about race. So we went - my father showed us that picture and that obituary, and we went home. And my grandfather was so white, we called him Casper behind his back. GATES: So obviously somebody gave her that money. That's the first descriptor that comes to mind. And my Y DNA, which is - comes in an unbroken chain, descends from this Irishman.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. - Britannica But mutations exist. And they would be published in the newspaper. Henry was born in Patterson Creek, W.Va., on June 8, 1913. And he fought in - for the Continental Army.
Henry Louis Gates's Extended Family - The Chronicle of Higher Education Over . Cambridge police officers were dispatched. "People wanted to kill me, man," Gates says of the reaction to that op-ed. 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. At the age of 14, Gates suffered a hairline fracture of the ball-and-socket joint in his hip while playing touch football. 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? Barack Obama understood that and, I think, certainly helped our nation to heal. This is FRESH AIR. In 1989, Gates won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for editing the 30 volumes of "The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers". 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. Race is a social construction. And that is the lesson of "Finding Your Roots. And the black woman says all she wants is enough money to have a New Orleans-type funeral. 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. Trump, who is running for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, announced a slate of futuristic new policies in a campaign video Friday. And when I was a young teenager, early adolescence, my father and I connected through the news. 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). His work has rooted African-American literary criticism in the African-American vernacular tradition.[12]. He is a trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. The authoritative record of NPRs programming is the audio record. You can say on the one hand that race is a social construction. GROSS: I saw his picture in the obituary. We are unable to fully display the content of this page. Kids don't even know what they are anymore, but everybody here does. 1. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities in 1991.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on Losing His Mother, the Heirloom He Adores In 2020, Gates received the 400 Years of African American History Commission's Distinguished 400Award. GROSS: I've interviewed many people over the years. And he'd make a couple - a move. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. 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 has joined the Sons of the American Revolution. And I would watch this beautiful, brilliant goddess. And you don't have a Y DNA, so that's why you're a woman. I don't think that's true for very many people in this room or any - or many people who are watching this show. One of eight children born to Edward St. Lawrence Gates and Helen Gertrude Redman Gates, he was the youngest of seven sons. On April 19, 1989, he was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society. So obviously rape or, at best, cajoled sexuality was the cause, but there are exceptions. His early life is described in his memoir that is entitled, Colored People (1994). 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. It was just put on the historic GATES: Register in Maryland. African-Americans all think that they're a descendant from a Native American. 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. And she was a beautiful woman. In 1973 he entered Clare College, Cambridge, where one of his tutors was the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka. "Beneath the return to the valley of the culture wars". The current PBS documentary miniseries Faces of America traces the family histories of 12 prominent people who, over the course of several hours and with the aid of conventional and genetic genealogy, come to fasten their varied tribulations and successes to the arc of ancestry. 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. Was this an equal sexual relationship? 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. But I think that you should have to get permission before someone is creeping around in your DNA. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. And the last thing I did before I went to bed was - we always had a desk in our bedrooms and had a bookcase. After an evening at a bachelorette party, she woke up with what she thought was a hangover. 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).
Does race exist? 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. And I was in the hospital for six weeks. Copyright 2019 NPR. And then black people would tell each other - they would say, you know, be sure to watch "The Late Late Show" tonight because "Imitation Of Life," which is my favorite film - 1934, with Claudette Colbert. The new season of his TV series "Finding Your Roots" is now showing on PBS. GROSS: And I read you talking about this. 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. So overseer, slave plantation - rape, right? GROSS: OK, for two weeks. [8] The first African American to be awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, Gates sailed on the Queen Elizabeth 2 for England, where he studied English literature at Clare College, Cambridge and earned his Ph.D. degree. GATES: OK. [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. You know, no matter how different we appear phenotypically, under the skin we're 99.99 percent the same. And she burst into tears because she used to read me that book all the time. 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. What do you think of that? In some instances, we are left wanting to know much more. Terry. Remember all the talk about post-racialism that GATES: We thought when Obama - we had turned a corner, and we could, you know, beat our - the plowshares into pruning hooks - right? And we're listening to Terry's interview with Henry Louis Gates. 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 last thing I did before I went to bed on July 2, 1960, was to look up the word estimable. 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. But we can expect some acknowledgment and interpretation of technologys limits. Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree. GROSS: So you know your medical background and if you're GATES: Yeah. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. And I was just overwhelmed with emotion. As a literary theorist and critic, Gates has combined literary techniques of deconstruction with native African literary traditions. Thank you so much for accepting this award. GATES: But I have an announcement to make GATES: For you. You may then be asked to log in, create an account if you don't already have one, 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. As soon as the Civil War ended, they became common law husband and wife GATES: Which was illegal in Mississippi. So my whole life is really an attempt to honor and please my parents and make them proud of me, you know. So everybody who showed up on this continent is from someplace else. And it turned out - my father used to say, you know, your mother's family is really distinguished, too? It's incredible. According to a police report, Gates refused to cooperate when he was later questioned in his home, which resulted in his arrest.
PDF University of Washington School of Law And I gave it to her for birthday. On other occasions, though it was rare, blacks did enslave other blacks for their labor. We defended the right of every American to vote. 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. doi:10.2307/1208745. 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. As a Black intellectual and public figure, Gates has been an outspoken critic of the Eurocentric literary canon. Well, I'll tell you a funny story. [19], In 1995, Gates presented a program in the BBC series Great Railway Journeys (produced in association with PBS). So let's get back to your great-great-grandmother. I found the first edition when I was an adult. African-American - I love to joke about this. 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. GATES: The Gateses all looked - my father looked white. We might think of Faces of America, then, as an allegory of the simultaneous diversity of our experiences and the deep interpenetration of our histories. OK. And then he'd - and I read quite a lot.
Historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. On DNA Testing And Finding His Own In some states - like, New York would let them vote sometimes, and then take it away. 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. And I don't think that he understands how much power that - to heal, to bind that the Oval Office metaphorically has. GROSS: Terry Gross interviewed Henry Louis Gates last May when he was in Philadelphia to accept the WHYY Lifelong Learning Award. Additionally, he has worked to bring about social, educational, and intellectual equality for Black Americans. 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. He received the 2008 Ralph Lowell Award from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the highest honor in the field of public television. 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. Gates was the host and co-producer of African American Lives (2006) and African American Lives 2 (2008) in which the lineage of more than a dozen notable African Americans was traced using genealogical and historical resources, as well as genealogical DNA testing. Gates claimed that his arrest was a sign of racism on the part of police. I'm Dave Davies in for Terry Gross. 1. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is an American literary critic Credit: Getty What is Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s net worth? And that is the strongest argument for brotherhood, sisterhood and the unity of the human species. It's a horrible way to start, in a way. 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.
Gates' Daughter Speaks Out - YouTube And I have my mother's certificate from this vocational school where she learned to be a seamstress. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. A collection of moments during and after Barack Obama's presidency. He looked white. The latter, tracing the ancestral history of contemporary figures, was especially popular. GROSS: OK. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. [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]. Hollywood Life Thank God. 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. GROSS: So I want to squeeze in one more question. I'm going to be black. Later, he acquired and authenticated the manuscript of The Bondwoman's Narrative by Hannah Crafts, a novel from the same period that scholars believe may have been written as early as 1853. It measures your ancestry back 500 years approximately. 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. At one point, Johnny even told the KKK in a statement that Vivian was white. They - but you're absolutely right. Sign up to receive the latest updates from U.S News & World Report and our trusted partners and sponsors. Gates was arrested on charges of disorderly conduct, but the charges were dropped. What does Henry Louis Gates, Jr., see as the most important form of resistance against hate? And at this point, I'd run over to my mother and say, Mama, I'll never pass for white, Mama. Is this instance of intraracial slavery an anomaly? In the first series, Gates learned that he has 50% European ancestry[22] and 50% African ancestry. ", The Letters page of The New York Times of April 25, 2010, featured criticism and examination of Gates's views in response to his op-ed. GATES: Maybe for Christmas, OK, that's fine (laughter). 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. In 2021, Gates became the seventh recipient of the, In 2021, Gates received the prestigious Gold Medal from. And so then they came in - this is a big deal back in 2008. And I make it every week over and over with "Finding Your Roots.". In 2010, Gates wrote an op-ed in The New York Times that discussed the role played by Africans in the Atlantic slave trade. 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. Episode 1409A -- Pictured in this screengrab: Historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. During an interview on February 22, 2021 -- Terry will be one of the guests whose family history is explored next year in the sixth season of the show.
Family tree of Henry Louis GATES - Geneastar )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. You don't get $1,400 by saving your nickels and dimes as a slave, right? That yearning manifests itself in many ways, from anomie to ethnic mutual-aid associations. GATES: And, you know, what's even more amazing, it's - one, it was my mother's third great grandfather - my fourth great grandfather. And I think that that's sad. The new season of Gates' TV series "Finding Your Roots" is now running on PBS.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: "Colored People" Malcolm Gladwell hears some shocking news in Gates's latest PBS show. 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. Even the Native Americans came from someplace else about 16,000 years ago. 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. 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. GATES: Yeah, I loved books. 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". Henry Louis Gates Jr.: Head Negro In Charge. 22,158 talking about this. Thank you. The "You. He draws on structuralism, post-structuralism, and semiotics to analyze texts and assess matters of identity politics. (January 21, 2015), Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, Potomac State College of West Virginia University. 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. He has an estimated net worth of $1million, according to Celebrity Net Worth. [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. What percent would be Native American? And so he introduced me to the Yoruba people. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. When we left off, Gates was talking about his own DNA mix. There we go. 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 I was exhilarated. And I wanted to be from them. And she would stand up and read their obituary, their eulogy. 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: OK. On your mother's side, you found out that you had three men in the family who were freed slaves - freed before 1776. But on the other hand, you can't say that biology doesn't matter because it does matter. As editor-in-chief of the online magazine the Root, Gates has a background in journalism. 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. "[13] After his 2003 NEH lecture, Gates published in the same year a book entitled The Trials of Phillis Wheatley, about the early African-American poet. [33], Gates married Sharon Lynn Adams in 1979. summa cum laude in history from Yale University and his M.A. Henry Louis Gates Daughters Elizabeth is in her twenties and suffered a severe stroke in May 2010. Our editors will review what youve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. Updates? Both conventional and genetic tracing yield unanticipated results in Faces of America. Read about President Obama's comments on Gates's arrest. 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. August 22, 2013, 12:00 a.m. So it was just the two of us and my mom, right? Gates argued that the pervasiveness and centrality of signifyin in African and African American literature and music means that all such expression is essentially a kind of dialogue with the literature and music of the past. DAVIES: Henry Louis Gates spoke with Terry Gross before a live audience in Philadelphia last May.