Henry Louis Gates Jr.

His father worked a paper mill in Piedmont, West Virginia, and cleaned buildings at night. His mother cleaned houses. At 14 he fractured the ball and socket joint of his right hip playing touch football, and the doctor decided the pain was imaginary. By the time the slipped epiphysis had healed, his right leg was two inches shorter than his left, and he has walked with a cane ever since. He left Piedmont High in 1968, spent a year at Potomac State College, and at 19 was working in a hospital at Kilimatinde in Tanzania as a Yale pre-medical student. He came out of Yale in 1973 with a history degree, summa cum laude, and sailed to Cambridge on the Queen Elizabeth 2 as the first Black Mellon fellow.

Yale hired him in October 1975 as a departmental secretary, and he was an assistant professor there four years later. A MacArthur fellowship in 1981 paid for the archival work that produced Harriet Wilson's Our Nig, printed in 1859 and now taken as the earliest known novel by an African American. The Signifying Monkey, in 1988, argued that Black writing had to be judged by the aesthetic standards of its own tradition rather than imported ones, and won an American Book Award. Then came the institution building: the Norton Anthology of African American Literature with Nellie McKay, the Africana encyclopedia with Kwame Anthony Appiah, the recovered Bondwoman's Narrative, and the PBS series that turned genealogy into a television genre. He has held the Alphonse Fletcher chair at Harvard and run the Hutchins Center since 2006.

On July 16, 2009, someone reported a man forcing the front door of a house near Harvard Square. The man was Gates and the house was his. Cambridge police arrested him and charged him with disorderly conduct. Prosecutors dropped it, President Obama said the police had acted stupidly, and the affair ended two weeks later with Gates, Sergeant James Crowley, Obama and Joe Biden drinking beer in the White House Rose Garden on July 30. Six years afterward came a different kind of trouble. Ben Affleck persuaded him to leave a slave-owning ancestor out of a Finding Your Roots episode. When that surfaced, PBS suspended the series. It returned in January 2016, with Gates having demonstrated on his own programme about ancestry exactly how easily an ancestor can be edited out.

He has been attacked from both directions for 40 years, which is roughly the position he chose. Separatist critics, among them John Henrik Clarke, Molefi Kete Asante and Maulana Karenga, hold that folding Black writing into a pluralist American canon concedes too much. His 2010 New York Times essay on African participation in the Atlantic slave trade enraged colleagues who work on reparations, and Eric Foner answered in print that historians had never ignored the subject. People wanted to kill me, man, Gates said of the reaction. The honours arrived anyway, through the National Humanities Medal in 1998 to an Oxford honorary degree in 2026. At 75 he is still running the centre and still hosting the show.

Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• The Signifying Monkey book
  Won the American Book Award in 1989 1988
• Colored People: A Memoir book
  Piedmont, West Virginia, and the end of segregation there 1994
• The Norton Anthology of African American Literature book
  Co-edited with Nellie Y. McKay 1996
• Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience book
  Co-edited with Kwame Anthony Appiah, and issued as Microsoft Encarta Africana 1999
• Finding Your Roots television
  He has hosted it on PBS since 2012 2012
• The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross television
  Six parts, 500 years, a Peabody Award and an NAACP Image Award 2013

• September 16, 1950 aged 0 Born at Keyser, West Virginia His father worked a paper mill and janitored at night. His mother cleaned houses.
• 1964 aged ~14 A fractured hip at 14 is misdiagnosed as psychosomatic His right leg healed two inches shorter than his left.
• 1973 aged ~23 Graduates from Yale summa cum laude in history
• October 1975 aged 25 Hired at Yale as a secretary in the Afro-American Studies department He was an assistant professor in the same department by 1979.
• 1979 aged ~29 Takes his doctorate at Clare College, Cambridge
• 1981 aged ~31 Named a MacArthur Fellow
• 1991 aged ~41 Recruited from Duke to Harvard
• July 16, 2009 aged 58 Arrested at his own front door in Cambridge The charges were dropped. Two weeks later he drank a beer at the White House with the arresting sergeant.
• 2015 aged ~65 PBS suspends Finding Your Roots over the Ben Affleck episode Affleck had persuaded Gates to omit a slave-owning ancestor. The show returned in January 2016.

• W.E.B. Du Bois 1868–1963
  Sociologist, historian, and civil rights activist who was the first African American to earn a Harvard doctorate. directs the institute named for him
• Cornel West b. 1953
  Philosopher and public intellectual whose work bridges race, democracy, and American pragmatism. co-author, The Future of the Race
• Oprah Winfrey b. 1954
  Media executive and talk show host who built a multimedia empire and became one of the most influential women in the world. traced her ancestry
• Barack Obama b. 1961
  44th President and first African American to hold the office, known for the Affordable Care Act. brokered the beer at the White House