Henry Louis Gates Jr. Searched His Own Past and Made a Surprising Discovery

Henry Louis Gates Jr., 73, is a writer, cultural historian and director of Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. He hosts the PBS TV series “Finding Your Roots,” and his latest book is “The Black Box” (Penguin Press). He spoke with Marc Myers.

I drew my first family tree on July 3, 1960, when I was 9. I know the date because a day earlier, at a funeral home in Cumberland, Md., my father took my older brother, Paul, and me to the altar to view the open casket of his father, Edward St. Lawrence Gates. I was petrified.

My grandfather was so white-looking we had called him “Casper” behind his back. After we buried Pop Gates, we went to my grandparents’ home. Upstairs, my father showed us Pop’s scrapbooks of newspaper clippings, including an 1888 obituary of Jane Gates, our great-great-grandmother.

Jane had been a slave and had five children with a white man whose identity she took to her grave. The next evening, back home in Piedmont, W.Va., I took out a composition book and interviewed my parents to trace our family lineage back to Jane. The box for my great-great-grandfather’s name remained blank.

In Piedmont, an Irish-Italian paper mill town, we first lived in a small house at the base of a hill. When I was 4, we rented a larger house from our white physician. Blacks weren’t allowed to own property in town then.

My father, Henry, held two jobs—one at the mill during the day and the other as a janitor at the phone company in the early evening. My mother, Pauline, was a homemaker and an expert seamstress. She had our futures mapped out: “You boys are going to be doctors.” Preparing for that career, we got straight A’s all through school. My sensitivity and empathy grew out of another experience.

One day, while playing touch football when I was 14, I noticed a pain just above my right knee. The pain worsened, and a doctor treated the knee. Days later, I was in agony and couldn’t move. At the hospital, doctors still treated my knee. They wrapped my leg in a walking cast, and I fell over.

Outraged, my mother had a friend drive us 1½ hours to the West Virginia University Medical Center in Morgantown. The orthopedic surgeon diagnosed that the ball-and-socket joint in my hip had separated. They put four pins in my hip, and I needed crutches. Three surgeries later, I was walking again, my right leg just a bit shorter than my left.

In 1965, while at Episcopal summer camp, I discovered the larger Black world after hearing about the Watts riots in Los Angeles. I began reading articles and books about Black people. My dad read them, too, and we began to watch the news together.

During my junior year in high school, I applied to Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. I was accepted but stayed only six weeks. I was homesick. Back in Piedmont, I picked up where I left off and graduated as the first Black valedictorian in our integrated school. I applied again to Exeter as a transition to the Ivy League, but was rejected.

Instead, in the fall of 1968, I attended Potomac State College, a branch of West Virginia University where my brother had gone. I was pre-med. In college, my English professor, Duke Anthony Whitmore, urged me to attend an Ivy League school. I applied to Yale and was accepted.

By the time I graduated after majoring in American political history, I had serious doubts about med school. To give me time to think, I applied for and received a Paul Mellon Fellowship and studied English literature at Clare College at the University of Cambridge in England.

During my first month at Clare in 1973, I was befriended by Kwame Anthony Appiah, a fellow student, and Wole Soyinka, a visiting professor who, in 1986, would become the first Black writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

One night, they took me out to dinner. After, they said, “We’re here from the future. You’re never going to be a doctor. You’re going to be a professor of African studies.” Deep down, I knew they were right.

After receiving my Ph.D. in English literature in 1979 from Cambridge, I went on to teach literature and African-American studies at Yale, Cornell, Duke and Harvard.

Today, I live with my wife in a lovely Victorian in Cambridge, Mass. We opened the interior space, painted the walls white and re-created a neo-Cuban interior designed by my wife.

The past remains a passion. In 1977, I already loved genealogy when I watched “Roots,” but Alex Haley’s TV miniseries inspired me to go further. Late one night at home in 2003, I came up with the idea for the PBS series “Finding Your Roots.” We went into production the following year.

Thanks to DNA analysis, I was able to fill several empty branches of my family tree—including the name of my white great-great-grandfather, who was Irish-American. It turns out I’m 49% African and 49% European. Everyone has a surprising past.

Henry’s Homes

Favorite home spot? Our kitchen table, where I read and write under a skylight and bank of windows. I love natural light.

Downtime? Visiting our Miami condo and sitting on the beach. We also bike ride 8 miles each evening on the bike path.

Mom’s distress? When she was little, she cleaned the home of a wealthy white family in Piedmont. One day, they wrongfully accused her of taking a $5 bill hidden among the sofa pillows. She never forgave the insult.

Later? In 1975, my brother and I helped my father buy the house she had once cleaned. Uneasy at first, she lived there happily until 1987, when my brilliant mother died.