Henry Louis Gates

from Intermission April 2022

Spotlight

Finding Your ROOTS

At nine years old, Henry Louis Gates attended the burial of his paternal grandfather, Edward St. Lawrence Gates. Surprisingly, Edward St. Lawrence Gates, as opposed to his African American grandson, had such light skin, he passed for white. His family even referred to him as “Casper.”

After the services, Henry Louis Gates’ father took Gates and his brother to his grandfather’s home. Upstairs, his father opened a large armoire. He started rifling through the armoire, looking through family scrapbooks and newspaper clippings. Finally, he found what he had been after and handed a particular scrapbook to his sons.

In it was an obituary dated January 6, 1888, that read, “Died this day in Cumberland, Maryland, Jane Gates, an estimable colored woman.” Then, his father pulled out a picture from between the leaves of the scrapbook and he said, “This is your great, great grandmother. This is the oldest Gates we’ve ever found. She was a slave. She was a midwife. I never want you to forget her name, and I never want you to forget her face.”

This experience planted a seed in Gates’ head that would decide the trajectory of his life. He wanted to know how a man that passed for white could be his grandfather. He also wanted to know what his connection was to a woman who had been a slave and a midwife. If she had been estimable, perhaps he could be estimable too.

Beyond great, great grandparents little could be found about the Gates family tree. In 1977, the series “Roots” was popular, and Gates had what he referred to as “roots envy.” He wanted to untangle the mystery behind his own roots. Out of the blue, he received a letter from a geneticist, telling him that it was possible to find one’s roots through DNA testing. Gates jumped at the chance to be a part of the project and trace his family tree back to Africa.

Soon after getting his results, Gates had a stroke a genius in the middle of the night. He decided to find eight prominent African Americans and trace their roots back to Africa. That was the beginning of Gates’ now very popular show, “Finding Your Roots.”

There are many reasons why Gates believes in the power of discovering one’s roots. One of the biggest is that when we start digging into our roots, as Americans, we find that we are all immigrants, down to the Native Americans who traveled here thousands of years ago. “Everybody came here from someplace else,” says Gates. He adds, “At that level of the genome, we are 99.99% the same. That is a message that we urgently need to hear.”

On Gates’ show, many guests are surprised by what is found in their family tree’s histories. It can often be an emotional experience. Understanding the past, according to Gates, is the best way to understand who we are now. Hear more from this fascinating man when Tulsa Town Hall brings him to Tulsa on April 8.