There we go. And it's for my father. The latter, tracing the ancestral history of contemporary figures, was especially popular. That yearning manifests itself in many ways, from anomie to ethnic mutual-aid associations. 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. And the average African-American has less than 1 percent Native American ancestry, but they have 24 percent European ancestry. People might remember the Beer Summit, when you were stopped in your own home trying to unjam a lock after a long trip. He introduced the notion ofsignifyinto represent Black literary and musical history as a continuing reflection and reinterpretation of what has come before. And the only reason that I started making the series that became "Finding Your Roots" is because of that obituary and that photograph. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. GATES: Yeah, I loved books. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (born September 16, 1950) is an American literary critic, professor, historian, and filmmaker, who serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. 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. Also, journalist Brian Palmer talks about how slavery and the Civil War are described at Confederate historic sites in the South. In 2021, Gates became the seventh recipient of the, In 2021, Gates received the prestigious Gold Medal from. So I'm out there. In the series, he discussed findings with guests about their complex ancestries. And the title is Race Is A Social Construction, But Mutations Are Real" (ph). Over . My mother was a seamstress, as you know. In October 1975, he was hired by Charles Davis as a secretary in the Afro-American Studies department at Yale. The minister would call on her. [9] Gates accepted the offer by Cornell in 1985 and taught there until 1989. It's called the Beer Summit. Reader, a collection of his writings edited by Abby Wolf, was published. I said, well, I've never met Donald Trump. A passerby called police, reporting a possible break-in after describing to 911 "an individual" forcing the front door open. 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. 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 . And GATES: Yeah. And by in traction, I mean on my back with my foot up with weights. And my mother used to write the eulogies, the obituaries for all the black people in the Potomac Valley, where I grew up. Many of us were troubled. In "Root Worker," a short . Vivian filed for divorce in 1967, and Johnny went on to marry singer June Carter Cash. I regret we are out of time. We started to roll. And that is the lesson of "Finding Your Roots. We'd spit in a test tube. He grew up in neighboring Piedmont. In 2012, The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Armstrong Williams, a person I really admire and like, I ask him, and he said absolutely not. [36], In 1974, Gates learned the Transcendental Meditation technique. 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. In 2020, Gates earned a NAACP Image Award Nomination for Outstanding Literary Work Nonfiction for his book. You know, I try to - doing "Finding Your Roots" is a way to paying homage to my mother and father every year. 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. In front of all these people and all these viewers. And he'd make a couple - a move. 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. American playwright, actor, screenwriter, producer, and director. And deep down, I realized in retrospect that my desire to make films was probably born about that time. He loved the news. 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. 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. GROSS: I saw his picture in the obituary. GATES: And then when they did my admixture, I'm 50 percent sub-Saharan African and 50 percent European and virtually no Native American ancestry, which really pisses my family off. In Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (1992) and elsewhere, Gates argued for the inclusion of African American literature in the Western canon. He was a free negro, as we would have said then. And on my desk set a red Webster's dictionary. Not all U.S. presidents are missed once they leave the White House. 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. You don't get $1,400 by saving your nickels and dimes as a slave, right? And I hope they are. The two series demonstrated the many strands of ancestry, cultural heritage, and history among African Americans. (SOUNDBITE OF ALLEN TOUSSAINT'S "EGYPTIAN FANTASY"). He's received 50 honorary degrees from such institutions as Harvard University and Williams College. American literary critic, professor and historian (born 1950), Critical studies and reviews of Gates' work. If you continue to experience issues, contact us at 202-466-1032 or help@chronicle.com. It was just misdiagnosed. 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). So reading this - that she's a mulatto; she'd been a slave - the first question that comes to my mind - and I don't know if it was the first question that came to yours - was, was she raped by the man who owned her? They came in slave ships. [23] He had known of some European ancestry, but was surprised to learn the high proportion; he also learned that he was descended from John Redman, a mulatto veteran in New England of the American Revolutionary War. In the years that followed he earned a reputation as a literary archaeologist by recovering and collecting thousands of lost literary works (short stories, poems, reviews, and notices) by African American authors dating from the early 19th to the mid-20th century. [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. When I was a boy, I was closer to my mother than my father. When I did Morgan Freeman's family tree, it was obvious through his DNA that he was descended from a white man who was an overseer on a plantation in Mississippi. Gates was an Anisfield-Wolf prize winner in 1989 for The Schomburg Library of Women Writers. GROSS: Do you know - do you want to know your medical DNA? And that is the strongest argument for brotherhood, sisterhood and the unity of the human species. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. We are unable to fully display the content of this page. GATES: Yeah. 9. In Wednesday's press conference, President Obama called the Cambridge Police Department "stupid" for arresting Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. His mother cleaned houses. So you GATES: Because of this white man. So what I did - my father and I agreed, for science, that we'd put our genomes in the public domain so that any scholar or student can study our genome. GROSS: And I read you talking about this. A collection of moments during and after Barack Obama's presidency. "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. GROSS: And you got this information from the 1870 census. This is FRESH AIR. 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. GROSS: Your father died not too long ago - a few years ago. Or they stayed home, and they listened to or played music. And she come to - it's the woman who invents box pancake mix - right? And he fought in - for the Continental Army. 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. Such information forces you to contemplate your own history, he observes. [1] He rediscovered the earliest known African-American novels, long forgotten, and has published extensively on appreciating African-American literature as part of the Western canon. [35] As of 2021, Gates is married to historian Dr. Marial Iglesias Utset. After turning that corner, Sharon gave birth to Maggie, their first daughter, in July 1980, and Liza was born 18 months later. 4. www.pbs.org/weta/finding-your-roots Posts Reels Videos Tagged "Up until that recent piece, people would have thought of him as someone who took a cautious and nuanced approach to questions like reparations. And he, and you, the officer and Joe Biden sat down, had a beer or two. GROSS: And then your slightly more contemporary ancestors not having any rights in the country, you know, or very few rights - not being able to vote, having to live in segregation. 1. Contemporary Literature. 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. GATES: They don't do that anymore for this particular kind of - I had a broken hip. Still, as the sociologist Troy Duster wrote in The Chronicle Review (Deep Roots and Tangled Branches, February 3, 2006) regarding the use of this analysis in the first African American Lives, these tests rel[y] excessively on the idea of 100-percent purity, a condition that could never have existed in human populations. We learn, too, that Yo-Yo Ma is 100 percent Asian, that Streep is 100 percent European, and, in a nod to comedy and to how quickly ancestry can become racial classification, that Colbert is 100 percent white man! What is one to make of an admixture test that reveals no mixture at all? Yet no lens is provided through which to interpret this genealogical bombshell. GROSS: Terry Gross interviewed Henry Louis Gates last May when he was in Philadelphia to accept the WHYY Lifelong Learning Award. Gates and daughter vie on the Vineyard. Cameo as a digital presentation of a fictional version of himself as, This page was last edited on 1 March 2023, at 15:56. Copyright 2019 NPR. GROSS: Yeah. These American faces, we learn, are the descendants of colonialists, aboriginals, overseers, bondspeople, interned citizens, and religious pilgrims. As soon as the Civil War ended, they became common law husband and wife GATES: Which was illegal in Mississippi. And my grandfather was so white, we called him Casper behind his back. In 1992, he received a George Polk Award for his social commentary in The New York Times. GATES: And my father lived to be 97 1/2 without any dementia. And the black woman says all she wants is enough money to have a New Orleans-type funeral. 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: He wrote his first column (about Little League games) at age 12 for the Piedmont Herald in West Virginia and continued to write for his high school and college newspapers. 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. 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. 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. I don't think that's true for very many people in this room or any - or many people who are watching this show. 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. Like Joe Louis's fights, which my father still talks about as part of the fixed repertoire of stories that texture our lives. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. GROSS: Huge story. Based on admixture testing, Longoria is told that she is 70 percent European, 27 percent Native American, and 3 percent African. Season 8. GATES: Yeah, I was 15 years old. I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross. If that date is correct, it would have precedence as the first-known novel written in the United States by an African American.
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