Henry Louis Gates Jr. is an award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, and cultural critic. He was born on September 16, 1950, in Keyser, West Virginia, to Henry Louis Gates Sr. and Pauline Augusta Coleman Gates. He has one brother, Paul Edward Gates.
In 1968, Gates graduated as the valedictorian of his class from Piedmont High School, becoming one of the first African American students in West Virginia to attend a newly desegregated public school. Gates then enrolled at Potomac State College in Keyser, West Virginia but after his first year, transferred to Yale College in New Haven, Connecticut. In 1969, Gates graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in History after being inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. That same year, he received an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award to do graduate study at the University of Cambridge, in England where one of his tutors was the legendary Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka. Gates earned a Master of Arts in English Literature in 1974 and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1979, becoming the first African American to achieve that honor in Cambridge’s 800-year history.
In 1976, Gates began serving as a lecturer in English and African American Studies at Yale and remained there until 1985 as an Assistant Professor. After leaving Yale, Gates held a professorship in English, Literature, and Africana Studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, until 1990. While at Cornell, Gates’s book, The Signifying Monkey: Toward a Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism, was the winner of the 1989 American Book Award. This work, published by Oxford University Press, revealed the literary tradition that accompanied enslaved Africans to the Americas.
In 1991, Gates was appointed Professor and the Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The institute has since been renamed, and Gates now holds the position of Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard.
Gates, the author or co-author of 22 books, has produced more than 20 documentary films that explore African American history and the African American experience. His most notable documentary is the 2013 six-part PBS series, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, which earned an Emmy Award for Outstanding Historical Program Long Form. In 2025, his Great Migrations: A People on the Move, a four-part docuseries about the African American movement over the 20th and 21st centuries, appeared on PBS.
Gates has received extensive recognition for his work, including Emmy nominations for his genealogical series Finding Your Roots, The Black Church (PBS) and Frederick Douglass: In Five Speeches (HBO). He has been awarded 51 honorary degrees, among them a Doctor of Humane Letters from Howard University, Colgate University, and his Alma Mater the University of Cambridge. In 1997, Time magazine recognized him as one of the “25 Most Influential Americans.” The following year Gates became the first African American scholar to receive the National Humanities Medal, presented by President Bill Clinton. In 2006, he was inducted into the Sons of the American Revolution, received the prestigious Spingarn Medal from the NAACP and was elected an Honorary Fellow by the Royal Academy of Arts in England. He also holds membership in Sigma Pi Phi Fraternity.
Since his first marriage, Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. has been married twice and has two daughters, Maggie Gates and Liza Gates.
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“Colgate to award six honorary degrees at 180th commencement exercises May 20,” https://www.colgate.edu/news/stories/colgate-award-six-honorary-degrees-180th-commencement-exercises-may-20; “Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,” https://www.gilderlehrman.org/about/henry-louis-gates-jr; “Meet Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,” https://www.pbs.org/articles/dr-henry-louis-gates-jr.
