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, DuPont, and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, cultural critic, and institution builder, Professor Gates has published numerous books and produced and hosted an array of documentary films, including The Black Church (PBS), Frederick Douglass: In Five Speeches (HBO), Gospel (PBS), and Great Migrations (PBS). Finding Your Roots, Gates’s groundbreaking genealogy and genetics series, now in its eleventh season on PBS, was nominated for a Primetime Emmy (2024). His latest book is The Black Box: Writing the Race (Penguin Random House, 2024), named by The New York Sunday Times Book Review as one the “100 Best Books of the Year.” He is at work on a new series exploring “The History of Blacks and Jews.”

Gates is a recipient of numerous honorary degrees, including most recently, one from his graduate alma mater, the University of Cambridge, and The London School of Economics. 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, conferred by President William Jefferson Clinton. In 2001 he discovered the first novel written by a Black female author, The Bondwoman’s Narrative, by Hannah Craft, the holograph manuscript of which he donated to Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book Library.

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 Language and Literature from Clare College, Cambridge, in 1979, where he is 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. In 2023, his portrait, by Kerry James Marshall, was hung at the Fitzwilliam Museum at The University of Cambridge. He was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa honor society in his junior year. In July 2024, he was awarded the prestigious Spingarn Medal from the NAACP. In December 2024, he was awarded The Barry Prize and was elected an Honorary Fellow by the Royal Academy of Arts in England. In February 2025, he was awarded the Vilcek Prize for Excellence in Literary Scholarship.

Books

2024

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 2024. The Black Box: Writing the Race. Penguin Random House.

2021

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 2021. The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song. Penguin Books.

2019

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 2019. Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow. Penguin Books.

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.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Tonya Bolden. 2019. Dark Sky Rising: Reconstruction and the Dawn of Jim Crow. Scholastic.

2017

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 2017. 100 Amazing Facts about the Negro. Pantheon.

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.

2016

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 2016. Finding Your Roots, Season 2: The Official Companion to the PBS Series. University of North Carolina Press.

Films

2025

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 2025. Finding Your Roots, Season 11. Writer, host, and executive producer. Television series, PBS (ten, one-hour episodes).

2024

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 2024. GOSPEL. Writer, host, and executive producer. Television series, PBS (four, one-hour episodes).

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.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 2024. Finding Your Roots, Season 10. Writer, host, and executive producer. Television series, PBS (ten, one-hour episodes).

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.

2023

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 2023. Finding Your Roots, Season 9. Writer, host, and executive producer. Television series, PBS (ten, one-hour episodes).

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.

2022

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 2022. Black History in Two Minutes (or So). Writer, host, and executive producer. Web series. Series Two and Three, 2022-2023.

It's Black History delivered in short, lively, fact-packed stories accessible to people of all ages and education levels. It's fast, accurate U.S. history describing major historical events and introducing less well-known experiences involving Black Americans. The topics range from recent events to the founding of the United States of America. Heroes of the Civil Rights movement are covered, as are some of the more obscure figures in the fight for equality.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 2022. Making Black America: Through the Grapevine. writer, host, and executive producer. Television series, PBS (four, one-hour episodes).

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.

Edited Books

2023

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., David Bindman, and Alejandro Fuente, eds. 2023. The Image of the Black in Latin American and Caribbean Art, Book 1: From Colony to Nation. Harvard University Press.

2022

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Andrew Curran, eds. 2022. Who’s Black and Why?: A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race. Harvard University Press.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Genevieve West, eds. 2022. You Don’t Know Us Negroes and Other Essays by Zora Neale Hurston. Amistad.

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.

2021

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Eric Foner, eds. 2021. W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Reconstruction. Library of America.

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.”

2018

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Paul Devlin, eds. 2018. Albert Murray: Collected Novels & Poems. Library of America.

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.

2017

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Maria Tatar, eds. 2017. The Annotated African American Folktales. Liveright.

These nearly 150 African American folktales animate our past and reclaim a lost cultural legacy to redefine American literature.

Drawing from the great folklorists of the past while expanding African American lore with dozens of tales rarely seen before, The Annotated African American Folktales revolutionizes the canon like no other volume. Following in the tradition of such classics as Arthur Huff Fauset's "Negro Folk Tales from the South" (1927), Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men (1935), and Virginia Hamilton's The People Could Fly (1985), acclaimed scholars Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Maria Tatar assemble a groundbreaking collection of folktales, myths, and legends that revitalizes a vibrant African American past to produce the most comprehensive and ambitious collection of African American folktales ever published in American literary history. Arguing for the value of these deceptively simple stories as part of a sophisticated, complex, and heterogeneous cultural heritage, Gates and Tatar show how these remarkable stories deserve a place alongside the classic works of African American literature, and American literature more broadly.

Opening with two introductory essays and twenty seminal African tales as historical background, Gates and Tatar present nearly 150 African American stories, among them familiar Brer Rabbit classics, but also stories like "The Talking Skull" and "Witches Who Ride," as well as out-of-print tales from the 1890s' Southern Workman. Beginning with the figure of Anansi, the African trickster, master of improvisation―a spider who plots and weaves in scandalous ways―The Annotated African American Folktales then goes on to draw Caribbean and Creole tales into the orbit of the folkloric canon. It retrieves stories not seen since the Harlem Renaissance and brings back archival tales of "Negro folklore" that Booker T. Washington proclaimed had emanated from a "grapevine" that existed even before the American Revolution, stories brought over by slaves who had survived the Middle Passage. Furthermore, Gates and Tatar's volume not only defines a new canon but reveals how these folktales were hijacked and misappropriated in previous incarnations, egregiously by Joel Chandler Harris, a Southern newspaperman, as well as by Walt Disney, who cannibalized and capitalized on Harris's volumes by creating cartoon characters drawn from this African American lore.