Unearthing African American Roots
Harvard Scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. discusses how PBS documentaries unveiled hidden history of American celebrities

Ioana Patringenaru | Nov. 1, 2010

Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. spoke at UC San Diego last week.

Everybody these days asks Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. what it was like to have a beer at the White House with President Barack Obama. The San Diego airport, where Gates landed last week on his way to give a talk at UC San Diego, was no exception.

Gates jokes he has become “the beer man” in the eyes of the public. The Harvard researcher was reluctantly thrust in the spotlight last year when he was arrested at his own home in Cambridge, Mass., after officers came to investigate a neighbor’s report of a suspected robbery in progress. The incident resulted in President Obama, Gates, the police officer who arrested him and Vice President Joe Biden getting together over beers at the White House. The beer, by the way, was good, nice and cold, Gates told a standing-room only audience at the Price Center Thursday evening.

Gates signs books after his talk.

Related link:
Watch Henry Louis Gates' talk on UCSD-TV starting Nov. 22

Before the incident Gates was perhaps best known for a series of PBS documentaries examining the ancestry and genetic heritage of prominent African Americans, including Oprah Winfrey. That’s what he came to talk about at UCSD as part of the Helen Edison Lecture Series, the campus’ 50th anniversary and the Thurgood Marshall College’s 40th anniversary celebrations.  

During a 90-minute speech and Q&A session, Gates described his passion for genealogy and his research, which includes the history of the Middle Passage and slavery in the Americas. He also talked about his connections to the campus, including his friendship with music professor Anthony Davis and his admiration for African American poet Sherley Anne Williams, who taught here. Gates announced he set aside part of his honorarium from Thursday’s talk to create a prize named in her honor.

Gates also peppered his talk with references to celebrities, including music producer Quincy Jones, “my friend,” comedian Stephen Colbert, “my main man,” and, of course, Oprah Winfrey.

Making “African American Lives”

Joan Paggett Owens, a member of the San Diego African American Genealogy Research Group, asks Gates a question during a Q&A session.

Winfrey played a crucial role in making “African American Lives” a reality, Gates told his UCSD audience. He came up with the idea for the show after getting his own DNA analyzed in 2000. Through his connection with Quincy Jones, he was able to recruit Winfrey for the show. He then set out to raise the $6 million he needed for the project.

His pitch was simple, he said. He asked corporations how they would like to be associated with a TV show that would reveal Winfrey’s genetic heritage. “It was like the sky opened up and an ATM machine came down” he joked.

The exploration of Winfrey’s DNA in Africa was interesting, he said. But what really moved Winfrey and the other guests featured on “African American Lives” was the stories Gates uncovered of their enslaved ancestors in the United States. That is an experience that Gates, and most African Americans, share.

A passion for genealogy

The audience reacts during the talk.

Gates first became interested in genealogy at age 9, in 1960, after his grandfather’s funeral. His father took him to the Gates’ family home and showed him a picture of “the first Gates,” as the Harvard scholar put it.

Her name was Jane Gates. She had been a slave and died in 1888. Gates’ father showed him her obituary, which described her as “estimable.” That night, before bedtime, Gates opened his Webster dictionary and looked up the definition of the word. The next day, he set out to interview both his parents about the family’s history.

“Since that day, I’ve been obsessed with my own family tree,” he said.

Gates went on to Yale, where he earned a bachelor’s in history. He later became a Mellon scholar and studied at the University of Cambridge in Great Britain, where he earned a master’s and a doctorate in English literature. He currently serves as director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University.

In the late 1970s, his passion for genealogy lead him to admire “Roots” the novel by African American writer Alex Haley, which became a television series. In the book, Haley traces his ancestry all the way back to the mid-1750s and to the African country of Gambia, where he writes that his family line originated.

“Since 1977, I’ve had one profound and serious case of ‘Roots’ envy,” Gates admitted.

Genetics and Gates’ family tree

Many students turned out for the talk.

Gates was finally able to track his own roots in 2000, when he took a blood test to find out where his mother’s line came from. His results turned out to be abnormal. It took a while, but he found out that his family tree on his mother’s side included a white female ancestor.

His father’s line was complex as well.  All of Jane Gates’ children were fair-skinned. Some of them looked white. The Harvard scholar’s grandfather was nicknamed Casper, after the ghost. Later, DNA analysis showed that Gates, and all his male ancestors, carry a type of Y chromosome that can be found in 10 percent of Irish males.  Jane Gates had enough money to buy her home and one of her sons owned 200 acres of land, so Gates suspects that the funds came from the white man who fathered her children.

Finally, as part of the “African American Lives” series, Gates found out that his lineage is 49.4 percent European and 50.6 percent African. “This gave me the blues,” Gates said Friday. “But I didn’t know if I was black enough to have the blues.”

Research has shown that 58 percent of African Americans today have at least 12.5 percent of European ancestry, he said. But only 1 percent are in Gates’ position, with a lineage that is basically half white.

Genetics research shows that there is no scientific basis for racism, Gates said. It shows that everyone is descended from a handful of humans who left what is now Eritrea and Ethiopia 50,000 years ago.

“DNA analysis could bring us together,” he said. “I guess it hope it will.”

That point resonated with Nouna Bakhiet, the head of the biotechnology program at Southwestern College, who had come to listen to Gates and was waiting in line for him to sign a book after the talk. She read all his books, and turned out for the event because she found it timely and important, she said.

The San Diego African American Genealogy Research Group turned out in force to hear Gates speak too. Joan Paggett Owens explained Gates is one of her personal heroes. “I’m just so overwhelmed,” she said. “I could just cry.”