Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University.

Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, and institution builder, Professor Gates has published numerous books and produced and hosted an array of documentary films. The Black Church (PBS) and Frederick Douglass: In Five Speeches (HBO), which he executive produced, each received Emmy nominations. In January 2024, Finding Your Roots, Gates’s groundbreaking genealogy and genetics series, returned for its tenth season on PBS. His most recent history series for PBS, Gospel, premiered in February 2024.

8.3.4
hlg_bio_winter_2024.pdf132 KB

Read More

Gates is a recipient of a number of honorary degrees, including his alma mater, the University of Cambridge. Gates was a member of the first class awarded “genius grants” by the MacArthur Foundation in 1981, and in 1998 he became the first African American scholar to be awarded the National Humanities Medal. In 2001 he discovered the first novel written by a Black female author, The Bondwoman’s Narrative, by Hannah Craft.

A native of Piedmont, West Virginia, Gates earned his B.A. in History, summa cum laude, from Yale University in 1973, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in English Literature from Clare College at Cambridge in 1979, where he is also an Honorary Fellow. A former chair of the Pulitzer Prize board, he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and serves on a wide array of boards, including the New York Public Library, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Aspen Institute, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Library of America, and The Studio Museum of Harlem. In 2011, his portrait, by Yuqi Wang, was hung in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. He is a member of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society.

Books

The Black Box: Writing the Race
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 2024. The Black Box: Writing the Race. Penguin Random House. Abstract
A magnificent, foundational reckoning with how Black Americans have used the written word to define and redefine themselves, in resistance to the lies of racism and often in heated disagreement with each other, over the course of the country’s history.
The Black Church: This is Our Story, This is Our Song
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 2021. The Black Church: This is Our Story, This is Our Song. Penguin Books. Abstract
From the New York Times bestselling author of Stony the Road and The Black Box, and one of our most important voices on the African American experience, comes a powerful new history of the Black church as a foundation of Black life and a driving force in the larger freedom struggle in America.
Dark Sky Rising: Reconstruction and the Dawn of Jim Crow
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Tonya Bolden. 2019. Dark Sky Rising: Reconstruction and the Dawn of Jim Crow. Scholastic. Abstract
This is a story about America during and after Reconstruction, one of history's most pivotal and misunderstood chapters. In a stirring account of emancipation, the struggle for citizenship and national reunion, and the advent of racial segregation, the renowned Harvard scholar delivers a book that is illuminating and timely.
Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow
The abolition of slavery in the aftermath of the Civil War is a familiar story, as is the civil rights revolution that transformed the nation after World War II. But the century in between remains a mystery: if emancipation sparked “a new birth of freedom” in Lincoln’s America, why was it necessary to march in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s America? In this new book, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., one of our leading chroniclers of the African-American experience, seeks to answer that question in a history that moves from the Reconstruction Era to the “nadir” of the African-American experience under Jim Crow, through to World War I and the Harlem Renaissance.
100 Amazing Facts about the Negro
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 2017. 100 Amazing Facts about the Negro. Pantheon. Abstract
The first edition of Joel Augustus Rogers’s now legendary 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro with Complete Proof, published in 1934, was billed as “A Negro ‘Believe It or Not.’” Rogers’s little book was priceless because he was delivering enlightenment and pride, steeped in historical research, to a people too long starved on the lie that they were worth nothing. For African Americans of the Jim Crow era, Rogers’s was their first black history teacher. But Rogers was not always shy about embellishing the “facts” and minimizing ambiguity; neither was he above shock journalism now and then.
 
With élan and erudition—and with winning enthusiasm—Henry Louis Gates, Jr. gives us a corrective yet loving homage to Roger’s work.
  •  
  • 1 of 6
  • »

Films

Finding Your Roots, Season 10
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 2024. Finding Your Roots, Season 10. Writer, host, and executive producer. Television series, PBS (ten, one-hour episodes). Abstract
Renowned scholar Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. returns for a new season of FINDING YOUR ROOTS. Using genealogical detective work and cutting-edge DNA analysis, Gates guides twenty-one compelling guests-including three of his loyal viewers--deep into their family trees, revealing surprising stories that transcend borders, illuminating an American root system fortified by its diversity.
GOSPEL
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 2024. GOSPEL. Writer, host, and executive producer. Television series, PBS (four, one-hour episodes). Abstract
From acclaimed scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Gospel explores Black spirituality in sermon and song. From the blues to hip-hop, African Americans have been the driving force of sonic innovation for over a century. While musical styles come and go, there is one sound that has been a constant source of strength, courage, and wisdom from the pulpit to the choir lofts on any given Sunday: gospel.
Finding Your Roots, Season 9
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 2023. Finding Your Roots, Season 9. Writer, host, and executive producer. Television series, PBS (ten, one-hour episodes). Abstract
Renowned scholar Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. returns for a new season of FINDING YOUR ROOTS. Using genealogical detective work and cutting-edge DNA analysis, Gates guides twenty-one influential guests deep into the branches of their family trees, revealing surprising stories of forgotten ancestors that transcend borders, illuminating an American root system fortified by its diversity.
Frederick Douglass in Five Speeches
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 2022. Frederick Douglass in Five Speeches. Executive producer. Feature-length documentary, HBO: February 2022. Abstract
Famed anti-slavery activist Frederick Douglass' words about racial injustice are brought to life in this documentary.
Finding Your Roots, Season 8
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 2022. Finding Your Roots, Season 8. Writer, host, and executive producer. Television series, PBS (ten, one-hour episodes). Abstract
Renowned scholar Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. returns for a new season of FINDING YOUR ROOTS. Using genealogical detective work and cutting-edge DNA analysis, Gates guides twenty-one influential guests deep into the branches of their family trees, revealing surprising stories of love, hardship, and triumph that transcend borders and merge to form an American root system fortified by its diversity.
Making Black America: Through the Grapevine
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 2022. Making Black America: Through the Grapevine. writer, host, and executive producer. Television series, PBS (four, one-hour episodes). Abstract
Professor Gates, with directors Stacey L. Holman and Shayla Harris, chronicle the vast social networks and organizations created by and for Black people beyond the reach of the “White gaze.” The series recounts the establishment of the Prince Hall Masons in 1775 through the formation of all-Black towns and business districts, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, destinations for leisure and the social media phenomenon of Black Twitter.
  •  
  • 1 of 6
  • »

Edited Books

The Image of the Black in Latin American and Caribbean Art, Book 1: From Colony to Nation
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., David Bindman, and Alejandro de la Fuente, ed. 2023. The Image of the Black in Latin American and Caribbean Art, Book 1: From Colony to Nation. Harvard University Press. Abstract
The Image of the Black in Latin American and Caribbean Art is the first comprehensive survey of the visual representation of people of African descent in Latin America and the Caribbean, some twelve million of whom were forcibly imported into the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade.
You Don’t Know Us Negroes and Other Essays by Zora Neale Hurston
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Genevieve West, ed. 2022. You Don’t Know Us Negroes and Other Essays by Zora Neale Hurston. Amistad. Abstract
You Don’t Know Us Negroes is the quintessential gathering of provocative essays from one of the world’s most celebrated writers, Zora Neale Hurston. Spanning more than three decades and penned during the backdrop of the birth of the Harlem Renaissance, Montgomery bus boycott, desegregation of the military, and school integration, Hurston’s writing articulates the beauty and authenticity of Black life as only she could. 
W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Reconstruction
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Eric Foner, ed. 2021. W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Reconstruction. Library of America. Abstract
Upon its publication in 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction offered a radical new assessment of the post–Civil War era, a time when African American progress was met with a white supremacist backlash and, ultimately, the unjust social order of Jim Crow. Previously cast as a misguided, even villainous effort to impose an inverted and “unnatural” racial hierarchy on the defeated South, Reconstruction was for Du Bois nothing less than a milestone in the course of human history, “the finest effort to achieve democracy for the working millions which this world had ever seen.”
Albert Murray: Collected Novels & Poems
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Paul Devlin, ed. 2018. Albert Murray: Collected Novels & Poems. Library of America. Abstract
One of the leading cultural critics of his generation, Albert Murray was also the author of an extraordinary quartet of semi-autobiographical novels, vivid impressionistic portraits of black life in the Deep South in the 1920s and '30s and in prewar New York City. Train Whistle Guitar (1974) introduces Murray's recurring narrator and protagonist, Scooter, a "Southern jackrabbit raised in a briarpatch" too nimble ever to receive a scratch. Scooter's education in books, music, and the blue-steel bent-note blues-ballad realities of American life continues in The Spyglass Tree (1991), Murray's "Portrait of the Artist as a Tuskegee Undergraduate." The Seven League Boots (1996) follows Scooter as he becomes a bass player in a touring band not unlike Duke Ellington's, and The Magic Keys (2005), in which Scooter at last finds his true vocation as a writer in Greenwich Village, is an elegaic reverie on an artist's life. Editors Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Paul Devlin round out the volume with a selection of Murray's remarkable poems, including 11 unpublished pieces from his notebooks, and two rare examples of his work as a short story writer.
Twelve Years a Slave: Norton Critical Edition
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Kevin M. Burke, ed. 2017. Twelve Years a Slave: Norton Critical Edition. W.W. Norton. Abstract
This Norton Critical Edition of Solomon Northup’s harrowing autobiography is based on the 1853 first edition. It is accompanied by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Kevin Burke’s introduction and detailed explanatory footnotes.
  •  
  • 1 of 4
  • »