Talking to Henry Louis Gates, Jr. about his popular PBS show, Finding Your Roots, it’s impossible not to feel the enthusiasm he has for the program, which was almost derailed last year by that whole Ben Affleck kerfuffle. On the day we spoke with him, what was supposed to be a 10- to 15-minute interview turned into an almost hour-long interview. Had he not had other obligations, it felt totally conceivable that he’d have spent the rest of the day speaking to us about the show. For the noted author/historian/academic, hosting and producing Finding Your Roots is much more than a job, it’s the passion of a lifetime. According to Gates, his love for genealogy and ancestry research started when he was a 9-year-old boy attending the open-casket funeral of his grandfather in Cumberland, Maryland.
“My grandfather’s name was Edward St. Lawrence Gates, and he looked like a white man,” Gates told Uproxx. “I’m standing there holding my father’s hand, looking at the corpse of his father in this casket and I’m terrified, and my grandfather was so white, we called him Casper behind his back, so you could imagine how white he looked dead. He looked like he was coated with alabaster and sprinkled with baby powder.”
Gates told us that finding out how he, an African-American child, descended from such a pale-looking man sparked something of an obsession that began that day. Fueling things even more, Gates said that after the funeral, back at his grandparents’ home, his father showed him an obituary dated Jan. 6, 1888, for his great-great grandmother, Jane Gates, a former slave described in the obit as “an estimable colored woman.” Furthermore, Gates said that his father also showed him a photograph of Jane Gates, and she looked nothing like the grandfather the family had just memorialized.
“I wanted to figure out how someone with my phenotype could be descended through my father of this ghost-looking white man, and then how he was related to this woman, who was a slave, who clearly was much darker and more African-looking, so I was hooked,” Gates said.
As the years passed, Gates became equally obsessed with helping others discover their roots. He told us that the idea for turning this obsession into a television program came to him in the middle of the night when he got up to urinate. It was a profound “ah-ha” moment that Gates now refers to as “a gift from God,” one he was so moved by that “tears just ran down my face” as he stood over his toilet.
Ahead, we discuss how Finding Your Roots is made, why it’s so appealing, and Gates’ favorite moments from the show, among other topics.
I’m finding that your show comes up more and more as a topic of conversation I’ve had with friends recently.
The ratings for our season premiere were up 40 percent over our all-time season premiere high. The series is hot! I am so happy that it’s going well, and the episode with Jimmy Kimmel and Norman Lear and Bill Hader is one of our best. I mean, it’s just very moving. I don’t know if you saw it, but we had Maya Rudolph…
The episode with Maya Rudolph and Shonda Rhimes. Yes, I saw it. It was indeed incredibly moving.
Prince tweeted about it!
Maya Rudolph breaking down over the discovery of her slave lineage was the moment that got a lot of attention, but I was equally touched by Shonda Rhimes when she discovered she had an ancestor named Matilda, and that was a name that she had dreamed about naming a child for so long. It’s incredible.
You’re just astonished, because this is the greatest African-American showrunner in history — and one of the greatest showrunners of all-time, the woman who actually owns a day on television — and she breaks down and cries over something on our show.
I think that’s a thing that I know personally really grabbed me about your show, and may be grabbing other people, as well: You have these guests on who are obviously very accomplished people, and they’re sitting in front of you, and you look into their eyes via the camera, and they look so humble and vulnerable. There’s such an incredible human aspect to that, to see them flip the pages and have their histories revealed to them, it’s just, it’s really powerful beyond words.
Yeah, the genealogy is the powerful part of this. The genetics is powerful, too, but we had to learn how to really make the genetics pop, because at first we just would say, “50,000 years ago, your family lived here, and people’s eyes would glaze over and go ‘yeah yeah, fine, thank you.’ ” But then when they saw the names of their ancestors, and finding the name of that white man who owned them, etc., people were actually weeping.
Interesting.
A false assumption that I’d made was that everybody but African-Americans knew their ancestry. I thought it was only African-Americans who were rootless. I’ve done just about every kind of person you could do, and nobody knows anything about their ancestry.
How did you find Johni Cerny, the amazing genealogist who helps you do the research for the show?
Quincy Jones recommended her, because after he did Roots, he wanted to find out his ancestry, and he found Johni some kind of way. As it turns out, Quincy, 20 years before I showed up doing this sort of thing, used to give people, for their Christmas present, a book of Johni’s research.
Wow. What a great gift to give someone.
Johni finds the raw documents, and what we do is take the raw documents and turn them into narrative, turn them into stories. That’s the art. Everything that we find is a public document, except maybe the private papers of one of our guests’ ancestors. There’s always a family historian, and we always interviewed the family historian, and they’ll say, “Well, my great-great-grandfather left a diary, and that’s like a gold mine,” or something like that, but 99 percent of what we find is available in the public records. You just have to know where to look, really need a team to find a lot of that stuff, and then you have to know how to interpret it.
I’m from south Louisiana originally, and I know a big issue for people who come from there when tracing their family histories has been records being washed away by hurricanes over the years.
If there’s no paper trail, there’s no story, and you have to find those documents, but people like the Mormon church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints have done such a great service to the human community. Regardless of their motivation — and I won’t judge that, because it’s someone’s religion — but part of their belief system is that you can baptize your dead ancestors. So, be that as it may, what they’ve done is to assemble the greatest collection of ancestry records in human history, and they do it for everybody. It’s indiscriminate, it’s color-blind, and now because of the digital revolution, you can just sit and go onto a website to do research. Things that used to take months and years and lots and lots of money, and only historians and wealthy amateurs were able to do it, now anybody can do it just by clicking on a website.
It’s a reminder that we live in an amazing time in world history. There’s so much we can learn about our past that others could not, or at least not near as easily, what with sites like Ancestry.com out there.
Take Norman Lear, who was born in 1922, and being able to move him to reveal that he’s had conflicting feelings about his father, because his father Herman was sent to prison for two years for receiving stolen goods, when Norman was just 8, and he had no idea that his father had served with distinction in World War I in the 307th Field Signal Battalion. He was in this famous battle called Meuse Argonne, the bloodiest battle on foreign soil in the history of the United States.
His father never talked about it when he was growing up?
No, his father never talked about it. Norman had to blink back tears upon learning that his father had served his country with distinction, and I mean that’s just one example. Bill Hader descends from six Patriot ancestors on his mother’s side of the tree. Six! One of his ancestors was 44 years old when the American Revolution broke out, and he fought at the Siege of Charleston and the monumental battle called the Battle of Monmouth in New Jersey, and the Battle of Trenton in New Jersey, which most likely means he crossed the Delaware under George Washington. I mean, who the hell would have known that?
That’s really incredible.
His eighth great-grandfather arrived in Maryland in 1667 as an indentured servant from England, and he paid off his passage, and we found documentation that he had paid off his passage by 1674, and in return, he got 50 acres of land. He has some of the deepest ancestry we’ve ever found. We were able to trace the paper trail, Brett, back to his 40th great-grandfather.
I guess Hader is an example of his family living in the right places, where the records were able to be accessed that went back that far?
No, you’re right. It’s living in the right place, and then it’s just the luck of the draw. The only people who did genealogy for years were The Royals, because they were trying to keep bloodlines pure, so if you’re lucky enough to tap into one of those streams, Jesus, you can go back more than 500 years.
Speaking of royalty, I’m reminded one of the favorite moments of your show this season was when you revealed to Bill Maher and Bill O’Reilly that they’re actually related, and I believe there was a royalty aspect that connected those two, right?
Oh yeah, that’s right. They’re descended, like me, from Niall, Niall of the Nine Hostages, and it’s a big deal. We’re all descended from this guy because we have an identical Y DNA signature. But Bill and Bill have a closer connection, which is they both … if you look at their chromosomes, they share identical DNA on chromosome six. That means that they have a close common ancestor. If we had their ideal family trees, they have a common ancestor in, I don’t know, the last two, three hundred years, so then if we had an ideal family tree for both, one would light up as overlapping between the two. That means they share common descent, and this is not random.
What’s been your favorite moment on the show, of all the amazing moments that you guys have shown, of people discovering things about their history? What’s the one that sticks out in your mind the most?
Well, it’s kind of like having children and having to pick your favorite, right?
I’m sure it’s hard to pick one.
Each one has been special. But one of the most satisfying reveals we ever did was the one we did with Bill O’Reilly. It was at an awful time when people were being beheaded by ISIS. I remember my producer was white as a sheet and I came out of the bathroom and he said,” Bill O’Reilly is here, and he can only stay for an hour.” Now, it takes two and a half hours, at least, to do these reveals, even though we only use about 20 minutes of the footage after editing. So, we sit down and O’Reilly says, “Professor, heads are being cut off in the Middle East. Fox News needs me.” I said, “I understand.” He said, “Should I start by asking you questions?” I said, “No, Bill. This is my show,” and two and a half hours later, he was still sitting in that chair.
He was riveted, obviously. He probably couldn’t move.
He was riveted, and he’s something of a scholar, so he was just delighted with the research, because the research is amazing.
You could see it in his eyes on the show.
Yeah, you could see it. Who knows why people agree to be in the series, but then when they get there, I have all the answers in this amazing book, and I tell them stories, and they become like little kids when they’re here. They want to hear the story.
The little-kids analogy is one I’ve used to describe the show to others. The participants are sitting there like children being told a story by their mother or father. It’s very reminiscent of that.
They all have wonder on their faces.
How do you get the celebrities whose ancestry you profile? Are they reaching out to you, or do you guys pick certain people to target and go after?
Well, right here in my dining room, which I use as my study, I have a corkboard pairing people. I have a team, and my producers and I are always thinking of people, so it’s usually people I admire. I mean, at the end, it’s my call. Sometimes people reach out and we consider them, but generally we just approach people. The hardest thing is finding them. It’s easier to get to the White House than it is to get in touch with some hip-hop stars.
So, you have a wish-list, essentially.
Yes. We also get feelers from agents, and sometimes people will request that we do the research for them privately, and we go, “No, no, we can’t do that.” You have to turn them into these stories, and that’s the art of it. I want to share the experience. I don’t want it just to be a private thing. The point of the story, the point of the series is that fundamentally when you strip away all physical appearances, we are primally and fundamentally related at the level of the genome. And, in addition, we are related through a commonality of human experience. The dreams, the trials, the tribulations, the moments of defeat, the moments of transcendence. That’s why people watch, because they can identify these are stories of real people, and nobody is royal back there. We’re talking about a king maybe a thousand years ago, but we’re talking about immigrants, like Bill Hader says, who had to borrow money to come here on a boat, and work for seven years or whatever it was to pay off the indenture.
We’re all human in the end. That’s what it all boils down to.
That’s what we want people to see. Particularly at a time when so many demagogues seem to be demonizing people who are different, and people are so frightened that I want them to realize that we’re all members of the human community no matter what our physical differences. That’s the key thing.
Finding Your Roots airs Tuesday nights at 8 p.m. EST on PBS.
