Genealogy and African American History

Genealogy and African American History: Henry Louis Gates

Author, documentarian and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., gives a stirring address on race in the United States with a look at the genealogy and genetics in African-American history. Gates is presented by the Council of Provosts and Thurgood Marshall College at UC San Diego. Series: Helen Edison Lecture Series.

Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr.,

(born September 16, 1950) is an American literary critic, educator, scholar, writer, editor, and public intellectual. He was the first African American to receive the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship. He has received numerous honorary degrees and awards for his teaching, research, and development of academic institutions to study black culture. In 2002, Gates was selected to give the Jefferson Lecture, in recognition of his “distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.”

Gates has hosted several PBS television miniseries, including the history and travel program Wonders of the African World and the biographical African American Lives and Faces of America. Gates sits on the boards of many notable arts, cultural, and research institutions. He serves as the Alphonse FletcherUniversity Professor at Harvard University, where he is director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.

Awards and honors

• Gates has been the recipient of 51 honorary degrees and numerous academic and social action awards.
• Gates was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1981.
• He was listed in Time among its “25 Most Influential Americans” in 1997. Ebony magazine listed him among its “100 Most Influential Black Americans” in 2005, and in 2009, Ebony included him on its “Power 150” list.
• In 2002 the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Gates for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government’s highest honor for achievement in the humanities.  Gates’ lecture was entitled “Mister Jefferson and the Trials of Phillis Wheatley.”   It was the basis of his later book The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America’s First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers (2003).
• Gates received the National Humanities Medal in 1998 and the 2008 Ralph Lowell Award from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the highest honor in the field of public television, in 2009. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999.
• On October 23, 2006, Gates was appointed the Alphonse Fletcher Jr. University Professor at Harvard University. He has been the Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research since arriving at Harvard in 1991.
• In January 2008, he co-founded The Root, a website dedicated to African-American perspectives and published by The Washington Post Company.
• Gates serves as the Chair for the Selection Committee for the Alphonse Fletcher, Sr., Fellowship Program, sponsored by the Fletcher Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Fletcher Asset Management.
• He is on the boards of many notable institutions including the New York Public Library, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Aspen Institute, the Brookings Institution, the Studio Museum of Harlem, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, HEAF (the Harlem Educational Activities Fund), and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, located in Stanford, California.   He is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations.
• In 2006, Gates was inducted into the Sons of the American Revolution after tracing his lineage back to John Redman, a free African American who fought in the Revolutionary War.
• In 2010, Gates became the first African American to have his genome fully sequenced. He is also half of the first father-son pair to have their genomes fully sequenced. Knome performed the analysis as part of the “Faces of America” project.