A native of Piedmont, West Virginia, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 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 Museeum of Harlem. In 2011, his portrait, by Yugi Wang, was hung in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. He is member of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society. 

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 Gate's most recent books are The Black Box: Writing the Race, Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow and The Black Church: This is Our Story, This is Our Song. He has also 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. His latest history series for PBS are Gospel and Making Black America: Through the Grapevine. Finding Your Roots, Gates groundbreaking genealogy and genetics, series, is in its tenth season on PBS.

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