JULIA WEBER
Assistant Editor
At 10:45 a.m. today in the Amphitheater, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University, will deliver a lecture in conjunction with the Week Nine theme of “The Importance of Gathering.”
The filmmaker, journalist, cultural critic and literary scholar is the recipient of numerous awards, including Emmy and Peabody Awards. In his morning lecture, he will focus on the importance of preserving and sharing collective histories and memories, drawing on his scholarship focusing on connections and community.
Gates has written extensively on Black literature and history, having most recently published The Black Box: Writing the Race in 2024. He is widely known for his PBS documentary series “Finding Your Roots,” which is in its 12th season. In the series, Gates explores the ancestry of many influential people across backgrounds, professions and experiences to better understand America’s understanding of itself and foster a conversation about identity at a broader level. In addition to “Finding Your Roots,” Gates has also worked on multiple documentary projects and published numerous books.
He previously served as the chair of the Pulitzer Prize board and he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters; currently, he serves on 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 a 2010 “The Historymakers” PBS oral history archival project, Gates spoke about his upbringing in West Virginia and his studies at Yale University.
He said he attended Yale at a time of change not only for the school, but for the entire nation. At the same time Gates enrolled at Yale in 1969, the university began admitting women, and the number of Black students enrolled grew each year.
Gates said the climate at Yale fostered an innate sense of leadership. He said much of the rhetoric centered on the students being individuals who would go on to lead the nation in different ways.
“… We had a tremendous sense of our own privilege and a great sense of our own responsibility,” he said in “The Historymakers.” “We thought we were Du Bois’ Talented Tenth, but we weren’t going to be arrogant like they were. We were going to bring other Black people along.”
In a 2024 interview with TIME’s Charlotte Alter, Gates said he viewed the U.S. as being in an era of racial backlash driven by fear. He said he saw the destruction of his hometown’s paper mill negatively impact those who live there, which he said “symbolized concretely what had happened economically, materially, spiritually, to my wonderful little hometown.”
He said the uncertainty this economic instability fosters can lead to fear, which people can attribute to a culture they perceive as unfamiliar or different than they remember.
“So when you feel that the rug has been pulled out from under you, that all of the certainties that you were raised with are gone, and you look around and you see there are all these Latino migrants and all these Black people … You can’t watch a commercial on TV without seeing an interracial couple. And then regular people say, ‘What the hell is that about? What happened to good old white America, you know?’ ” he said in the 2024 TIME interview. “So people lash out because they’re afraid, and you can’t assuage someone’s fears by bullying them. You have to speak to their fears.”
In today’s lecture, Gates will speak on his extensive scholarship focused
on shared histories and connection.
In the same interview, Gates said he has noticed that middle aged people tend to be most commonly interested in genealogy, which he credited to some of the coinciding life experiences that can happen around one’s 50s. He said in the interview, “Why is that important? It’s important because at that age, you’re experiencing senses of alienation, loss, grief. You know, your parents probably are gone. Sometimes your friends are gone. Family members are gone.”
The role of genealogy, he said, can be to expand one’s understanding of their family and forge connections to an entire lineage.
“Genealogy allows you to find two sets of ancestors, new ancestors in the past, new family members in the past, and through the wonders of DNA analysis, new relatives in the present. So that precisely when your family is shrinking, you can expand your sense of family back in time, vertically and horizontally,” he said.
