Opening the Gates: From Piedmont to Potomac State to the Beer Summit
Credit: Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., photo courtesy of PBS
He is known today as one of the most prolific Black voices in this country. Weekly, he can be found helping famous people trace their genealogy. He counts former President Barack Obama and entertainer Oprah Winfrey among his closest friends. And he is an alum of Potomac State College.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. grew up in Piedmont, West Virginia. He was given an honorary degree by WVU Potomac State in 1999, symbolically receiving the Associate of Arts degree he had started on campus in 1968.
His closest friends and family in the area simply call him Skip.
At the age of nine, a doctor set young Skip’s broken leg incorrectly and told his mother not to worry because “Black boys did not need perfect bones.”
“I remember the doctor asked me about my career aspirations,” Dr. Gates said. “I told him I wanted to grow up and be a doctor. The doctor looked at my mother and said the pain I was experiencing was all in my head – brought on by the fact that I was Black. He told my mother I was a dreamer with an overactive imagination and the pain in my leg was simply a psychosomatic response because I realized my race would keep me from being a physician.”
Credit: Dr. Gates and his mother, courtesy of the Gates family
He and his mother left the doctor’s office that day in extremely different moods than when they went in. His mother was outraged. But for nine-year-old Skip, a fire was ignited. And it would become a spark that would burn continuously for more than 65 years. Skip was determined to prove that white physician – indeed all those who dared to doubt his dreams - wrong.
Credit: Gates Family photo, courtesy of the Gates family
Henry Louis Gates was born on September 16, 1950. The closest city to him as a child growing up was across the bridge in Westernport, Maryland. At that time, most folks who lived in Piedmont and Westernport worked for the Luke Mill. Members of the Gates family were no exception to that rule. That is where Henry Louis Gates Sr. was employed as a janitor. Gates’ mother was a housekeeper and the first Black member of the PTA in Piedmont.
“My family has lived between Patterson Creek and Cumberland, Maryland since the early 19th Century,” Dr. Gates said. “Two sides of my family can be traced back to the Revolutionary War. It’s phenomenal to trace your roots back that far as a Black man. Slavery was a huge delete key on the computer of Black history.”
That could be why it took researchers four years to resolve the mystery of who Gates’ great-great-grandfather was, the man who impregnated Jane Gates. Jane is well known in nearby Cumberland as the first woman of color to buy property in her own name – something that was nearly unheard of in her day. Her home is now a museum located on Greene Street in that city. The story she had always told about her children’s father turned out to be not correct.
Credit: Jane Gates Portrait, courtesy of the Jane Gates Foundation and the Jane Gates House and Museum
“Jane Gates was a former slave who was able to purchase property within six years after the end of the Civil War,” Jane Gates Heritage Foundation President Sukh Gates said. “On August 31, 1871, Jane Gates recorded a deed for the purchase price of $1,400 for a parcel of land on Greene Street in Cumberland, Maryland. She is listed in the 1870 United States Federal Census working as a laundress and nurse. Jane independently maintained her home and family.”
“The Gates family continuously owned the property for 70 years from 1871 until it was sold in 1941,” said Sukh Gates. “In 2007, the original home at 515 Greene Street was returned to the family when it was purchased by John E. Gates and (myself.) When the project started, 515 Greene Street was not in the best shape; in fact, we’ve spent the last few years restoring just the foundation, which has been a very lengthy process.”
The 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, was not fully ratified until December 6, 1865; the 14th Amendment, which finally gave Gates and other formerly enslaved persons the rights of full citizens of the US, was not fully ratified until July 9, 1868. A mere three years later, Gates owned her own house, giving her a land-owning status not even white women in America in 1871 could claim. And the parcel of land she bought was large enough to eventually accommodate three houses.
“I believe that knowing about our ancestors is fundamental to knowing about ourselves,” Dr. Gates said. “The only way to deal with the past is to know about the past. William Faulkner wrote, ‘The past is never dead.” It’s not even past.’ And that is very true. The past is still with us, shaping both who we are and the society and our norms under which we function.”
The Harvard scholar learned a long-buried puzzle about his great-great-grandmother, Jane Gates, information which scrambled even his ancestry and opened up a whole new branch of his family tree going back to Ireland.
“I was moved to tears,” Dr. Gates says. “I used to pass her grave at the Gates’ plot in Rose Hill Cemetery in Cumberland, and I would say, ‘Grandma, I’m going to out you. I’m going to tell the world your secret.’”
After studying at Potomac State College, Gates headed to Yale. There, he studied literature with an intensity that startled professors. He challenged syllabi that erased Black writers. He asked why entire intellectual traditions were missing from the canon. He refused to accept the idea that Black culture was an academic footnote. When he won a Ford Foundation fellowship to study in Africa, he walked through archives in Sierra Leone and Ghana, collecting fragments of history others overlooked.
At Harvard, he built the Department of African and African American Studies into a national powerhouse. He recruited scholars who had been marginalized by mainstream academia. He revived forgotten texts. He authored his own books and offered his own lectures about race and African American culture.
Then he turned to television.
He created the series Finding Your Roots for PBS. The program is well known today for tracking family lines of celebrities, athletes, journalists, activists, and political figures. It is the single most-watched traditional broadcast show on PBS.
“The two subliminal messages of ’Finding Your Roots,' which are needed more urgently today than ever, are that what has made America great is that we’re a nation of immigrants,” Dr. Gates said. “And secondly, at the level of the genome, despite our apparent physical differences, we’re 99.99% the same.”
The series started in 2006 under the title “African American Lives,” conceived by Dr. Gates in the middle of the night in his bathroom.
“I originally had this idea for a TV show, and then it became pretty exciting,” Dr. Gates said. “We started with Black families. We picked nine prominent African American people and traced their family tree. We had Oprah, Whoopi, Quincy Jones, and Chris Tucker. We wanted to be able to trace their family trees and see where their ancestor came from in Africa.”
After the television show debuted, Dr. Gates, who hosted a family reunion in Cumberland a year ago at the Allegany Museum, invited prominent Black celebrities and traced their family trees back to slavery. When the paper trail ran out, they would use DNA to see which ethnic group they were from in Africa. That reunion allowed Gates to turn the lens back on himself.
Challenged by a viewer to open the show to non-Black celebrities, Gates agreed, and the series was renamed “Faces of America,” which had to be changed again after it was discovered the name was taken. Along the way, Gates had a crash course in DNA.
“For a guy with a PhD in English literature, I think I can do pretty well on the AP genetics exam,” he laughed, before proving it with a thorough explanation of autosomal DNA.
Over the years, the show has delivered fascinating results, like when Natalie Morales discovered she’s related to one of the legendary pirates of the Caribbean and when former “Saturday Night Live” star Andy Samberg found his biological grandmother and grandfather. It revealed that RuPaul Charles and U.S. Senator Cory Booker are cousins, as are Meryl Streep and Eva Longoria. He also found that Carol Burnett and actor Bill Hader are cousins. This season will feature musicians Lizzo, Wiz Khalifa, Flea, and Rhiannon Giddens.
“I always tell my guests that you’re not responsible for the crazy things your ancestors did. I don’t care what they did. Guilt is not inheritable,” Gates said. “You have to understand how people functioned in the past without judging them.”
Gates and his team — particularly genetic genealogist CeCe Moore — have found that traditional family stories passed down through the generations are often filled with a few embellishments and tall tales, often to cover up injurious behavior.
“I call it where there’s smoke, there’s fire. The stories are never accurate, but they’re often close,” said Gates. “There is a kernel of truth there.”
In 2009, he faced national attention for an incident outside his Cambridge home when a police officer arrested him after mistaking him for a burglar. President Obama invited him and the officer who arrested him to the White House for what was later termed the “Beer Summit.” Gates later said the moment showed how easily identity could be misunderstood, distorted, or weaponized.
Credit: book jacket of Henry Louis Gates 1994 book, Colored People, a book that recounts his experiences with racism and integration growing up in 1960s Piedmont.
Gates’ own published works include Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (1997). Stony the Road (2019), The Signifying Monkey (1988), The Black Church (2021), and Colored People: A Memoir (1994). He continues to host the PBS series and occasionally goes on the lecture circuit across the country. He remains a political activist and educator as well. In 2022, he was recognized by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for "his groundbreaking work as a scholar and public intellectual."
Credit: Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., photo courtesy of Harvard University
Behind his public persona is a man who loves footnotes, first editions, and the thrill of uncovering a document no one has touched in a century. He mentors students with patience. He works through pain from the childhood injury that never fully healed.
“You can’t get complacent and just sit still,” Dr. Gates said. “You owe it to yourself to keep moving and keep learning and keep contributing.”
WVU Potomac State College is celebrating its 125th birthday this year and recognizing its notable alumni. Dr. Gates is honored on campus with the Scholars Achievement Wall. For more information about the College's milestone, read more here, and purchase a limited-edition commemorative poster here.