On December 5, 2024, the James Madison Program welcomed Professor Henry
Louis Gates, Jr. of Harvard University. Professor Gates, who hails from
Keyser, West Virginia, discussed his upbringing in the heart of
Appalachia with his friend and fellow West Virginian, McCormick
Professor of Jurisprudence Robert P. George.
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 and Peabody Award-winning
filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, and
institution builder, Professor Gates has published numerous books and
produced and hosted an array of documentary films. The Black Church
(PBS) and Frederick Douglass: In Five Speeches (HBO), which he executive
produced, each received Emmy nominations. Finding Your Roots, Gates’s
groundbreaking genealogy and genetics series, which just completed its
tenth season on PBS, has been nominated for a Primetime Emmy (2024).
His most recent history series, Gospel, premiered on PBS in February
2024. His latest book is The Black Box: Writing the Race (Penguin Random
House, 2024).
Gates is a recipient of a number of honorary degrees, including from his
alma mater, the University of Cambridge, and most recently, 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. In 2001 he discovered the first novel written by a
Black female author, The Bondwoman’s Narrative, by Hannah Craft.
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 Literature from Clare College at Cambridge in 1979, where he is
also 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.