How do you find the right direction in your life and understand who you truly are? On PBS’s Finding Your Roots, Henry Louis Gates Jr. allows celebrities like Scarlett Johannsson and Questlove to better understand themselves by helping them to discover their family histories and ancestral origins.
Gates is a pioneer for many reasons; he broke boundaries as the first African-American honored with an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award. In addition, he’s a prolific professor and Director of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University.
To understand Gates’ inspiration for the work he does and to get his advice for millennials, we spoke about his upbringing, college years, and I got the scoop on the story behind Finding Your Roots.
Aviva Legatt: In your experience, what were the factors in deciding where to go to college?
Henry Louis Gates Jr.: I never considered a historically black college because we were the crossover generation. Our generation was meant to integrate historically white institutions. The only question was: Which historically white university I would attend? That's it.
My route to Yale was not a direct one. In 1965, I went to an Episcopal church camp, and there were only three black kids out of 102, and they'd attended prep schools in the Northeast and were on their way to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and I wanted to join that wave as well. So I did!
I loved Exeter, but I was homesick after six weeks. When I told [Exeter] that I was going to drop out, they told me it was a real mistake because I had some of the highest test scores in the school, and they told me that black people weren't supposed to test well in standardized tests.
I tried to go back to Exeter after dropping out, but they turned me down. I was pretty mad.
So I applied to the local junior college, a two-year college that feeds into West Virginia University. I later applied to Yale, and I got in as a transfer student sophomore year.
Legatt: What happened when you got to Yale?
Gates: I thought that everybody at Yale would be Albert or Alberta Einstein, and I just didn't know. So I went there. My parents bought me a new car and a new Royal electric typewriter, and I drove myself up.
My parents wouldn't see Yale until my graduation, and I was terrified. I was excited and terrified. I was humbled to be there, but there was no question that I was going to give it a try. The last thing my father said was, "If they don't treat you right, come on home," and that was very liberating to me. If I went there and it didn't work out, I could move back home and then go to college there. But I liked it right away.
Legatt: What led you to launch Finding Your Roots?
Gates: I developed my interest in ancestry and genealogy when I was nine, the day after my grandfather's funeral. Right after the funeral, my father showed me his father's scrapbooks, and, in one of those scrapbooks, there was an obituary of my great-great-great-grandmother Jane Gates who died January 6, 1888, and it was "Jane Gates: An Estimable Colored Woman." She had been a slave, and my grandfather never wanted us to forget her. That night I looked up the meaning of the word estimable and said, "Wow, she's estimable! I must be estimable too!"
And the next day was July 3, 1960, I asked my father to buy me a composition book and I interviewed my parents about my family tree because I wanted to know how I was related to this “estimable” woman, and my grandfather too since he looked like a white man. Genealogy was sort of my mythos, if you see what I mean.
Then in the year 2007, a black geneticist wrote to me and said they could test my DNA and was I interested in being a guinea pig, basically. Dr. Rick Kittles [an American biologist] took my blood sample. Around that time, I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, and that’s when I got the idea [at 57 years old], that became Finding Your Roots. That's a true story.
Legatt: How did you wind up bringing your ideas to public attention?
Gates: It occurred to me that I could breed together these twin interests that I had in genealogy and genetics, this whole new science of ancestry-tracing through DNA, through which Dr. Kittles had introduced me. And the rest, as they say, is history.
We sort of rode the wave of revolution, and I came up with just a good idea at the right time. Then the science of DNA became cheaper, more popular; records were being digitized rapidly. It was a wave, and I was just part of that wave.
Legatt: What is the number one thing someone can do if they want to succeed?
Gates: They have to ask for advice. You need a "guidance counselor" or the local minister or someone who's been where you want to go. You need to ask many people. Many people are too anxious or too afraid to ask a question. They think it makes them appear weak. And I always tell my students that the most important thing is being able to ask the right questions and finding somebody who can answer them. The only way to overcome that fear is to ask over and over again and not feel bad about it at all.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity and brevity.** Adapted from my forthcoming book, Mindset Matters: True Stories of How to Find Success Beyond College
