[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. Vivian filed for divorce in 1967, and Johnny went on to marry singer June Carter Cash. Contemporary Literature. And we filmed the whole thing. So we knew he was Irish. And at the time, the airwaves were so segregated, they only put black films on "The Late Late Show." Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. "My father was so sad. GROSS: Is that too personal? Isn't that a cool thing? But I saw that photograph and read her obituary on the day that we buried my father's father, Edward St. Lawrence Gates. Daughter Elizabeth Gates interviews her dad about . My dad got into a public battle with the KKK and so I knew about that, and it was scary, Rosanne said during the PBS special. And I gave it to her for birthday. 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). GROSS: So having done your, like, ancestry and everything, were you close to your parents? And I learned a lot about the medium. According to a police report, Gates refused to cooperate when he was later questioned in his home, which resulted in his arrest. GROSS: I saw his picture in the obituary. You have to get permission. 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. [33], Gates married Sharon Lynn Adams in 1979. And she was a beautiful woman. What is race? 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? GROSS: OK, for two weeks. They spoke in front of an audience last May when Gates received WHYY's annual Lifelong Learning Award. 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. GATES: I did an episode with Oprah and Quincy Jones and Bishop T.D. And I watched reruns of early black films like "Amos 'n' Andy" and "Beulah." You get your Y DNA from your father, and that's what makes me a man. And the geneticists have found the identity finally of Jane Gates's paramour, the man GATES: Yes. In 2019, Gates received the Anne Izard Storytellers Choice Award, 2019 for "The Annotated African American Folktales," which he edited with Maria Tatar. And your father was a tailor, which is why we GATES: And my mother went to Atlantic City. 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. And your driver was helping you - well, he was shoving his shoulder against the door trying to open it. We know that BRCA1, BRCA2 - they're genetic. The work extended application of the concept of "signifyin'" to analysis of African-American works. But on the other hand, you can't say that biology doesn't matter because it does matter. GROSS: So when you had your DNA done, did you have a wish for a certain area of Africa or a certain group of African people who you wanted to be your ancestors? JSTOR1208745. As of February 2022, Gates, 71, serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and as the Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.. Except in the next scene, I showed him their headstones. And one of the, you know, wonderful people on "The View" said did I think that Donald Trump is racist. Gates considers himself a literary critic and educator. His early life is described in his memoir that is entitled, Colored People (1994). GATES: Yeah. 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. And she would stand up and read their obituary, their eulogy. 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. 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 reported:[37], "I had this spiritual event where it was like the top of my head opened up. African-American - I love to joke about this. 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. We are unable to fully display the content of this page. 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. Gates currently serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the W.E.B. I was more of a bookworm. That yearning manifests itself in many ways, from anomie to ethnic mutual-aid associations. Or they stayed home, and they listened to or played music. 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. The latter, tracing the ancestral history of contemporary figures, was especially popular. 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. 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. You said that after - you had been getting death threats and these angry emails and everything. If that date is correct, it would have precedence as the first-known novel written in the United States by an African American. 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. In the show, notable guests discover their family roots based on genealogical research and DNA results. While at Yale, Gates mentored Jodie Foster, who majored in African-American Literature there and wrote her thesis on author Toni Morrison. 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. GROSS: I've interviewed many people over the years. Copyright 2019 NPR. When the physical damage finally healed, his right leg was two inches shorter than his left. Theyve Had an Inappropriate Relationship For Months, How Black Creators Can Expand Their Network with LinkedIn. And we have a wall of degrees at home. GATES: And they said, OK, we won't tell you. February 12, 2010. This is FRESH AIR. Race is a social construction. I only did black people. 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. Crockett Jr., Stephen A. And the last thing I did before I went to bed on July 2, 1960, was to look up the word estimable. 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. And another person to interpret my genetic data because it's 6 billion base pairs, right? His father worked in a paper mill and moonlighted as a janitor, while his mother cleaned houses. 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. Then he'd come back. Not all U.S. presidents are missed once they leave the White House. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. (Read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.s Britannica essay on Monuments of Hope.). 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. You know, I try to - doing "Finding Your Roots" is a way to paying homage to my mother and father every year. Because of the injury, Gates now uses a cane when he walks.[6][7]. In October 1975, he was hired by Charles Davis as a secretary in the Afro-American Studies department at Yale. Thank you. An X-ray showed a bright portion that revealed just how much of her brain tissue was destroyed. [34] They had two daughters together before they divorced in 1999. 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. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is an American treasure. And she's the cook for Claudette Colbert. Read about President Obama's comments on Gates's arrest. 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". Sign up to receive the latest updates from U.S News & World Report and our trusted partners and sponsors. Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s arrest continues to cause controversy after President Obama criticized police action, Michelle Gielan reports. 7. 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. GROSS: Terry Gross interviewed Henry Louis Gates last May when he was in Philadelphia to accept the WHYY Lifelong Learning Award. In 1980 Gates became codirector of the Black Periodical Literature Project at Yale. I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross. So overseer, slave plantation - rape, right? But they came from someplace else. Mixing cutting-edge DNA research and old-school genealogical sleuthing, FINDING YOUR ROOTS . 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). I could've won the Nobel Prize, and somebody would say congratulations. Or even to the slave narrative of Venture Smith, in which blacks are purchased by other blacks for both slavery and freedom. So you GATES: Because of this white man. There we go. Obama then held a much-publicized meeting with Gates and James Crowley, the officer who had arrested Gates, which became informally known as the beer summit because Obama invited the two for beers in the White House Rose Garden. Both would be just as important. But I think that one of the mottos of finding your roots is that there is no such thing as racial purity, that these people who have fantasies, these white supremacists, of this Aryan brotherhood, you know, this Aryan heritage that is pure and unsullied and untainted, that they're living in a dream world. In some instances, we are left wanting to know much more. But I also watched TV. Even if you were free and you were black GATES: In most states, you weren't allowed to vote. GATES: And we - they only put - remember "The Late Show"? And so he introduced me to the Yoruba people. And I would watch this beautiful, brilliant goddess. GATES: I go, yeah, I got a brother who's a dentist, you know? I'm Dave Davies This is FRESH AIR. GATES: Yeah, I was 15 years old. GATES: And, you know, what's even more amazing, it's - one, it was my mother's third great grandfather - my fourth great grandfather. 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. Hollywood Life It's incredible that the mystery to my family tree - I'm looking toward Africa, and it was 18 miles away in Moorefield, W.Va., County Courthouse. As a Black intellectual and public figure, Gates has been an outspoken critic of the Eurocentric literary canon. 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. 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. In 2012, The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. In 2021, Gates was named a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and elected to the Johnsonsians (Society). And we'd have the chess board set up. I hope you never come back, you know? GATES: Yeah. GROSS: And I read you talking about this. GATES: And then there was "The Late Late Show." 35 (1): 212227. But we need to get some distance from the binary opposition we were raised in: evil white people and good Black people. 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. So I would say, you know, no, I don't think so. Yet no lens is provided through which to interpret this genealogical bombshell. And that imprinted this woman's story in my mind. The surprising reveals, coupled with the celebrities raw reactions to the information conveyed by the host, deliver moments of high drama and genuine emotion. So I thought that I had a pretty good chance. And on my desk set a red Webster's dictionary. Would you do it? But it's just not those two genetic lines. 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. Terry will be one of the guests whose family history is explored next year in the sixth season of the show. In 1973, Gates became the first African-American to receive a Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship to study at Cambridge. This is FRESH AIR. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. The former vice president has become the Democratic front-runner with primary victories across the country.