"It is the American story": Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on "In Search of Our Roots"

More than a work of history, "In Search of Our Roots" is an important book that, for the first time, brings to light the lives of ordinary men and women who, by courageous example, blazed a path for their famous descendants. This is true whether a guest’s ancestor arrived on these shores before the American Revolution, when the continent was still a site of colonial settlement and encounter; or fought for independence in the nation’s first defining war, or took up arms for the union during its greatest trial; true whether an ancestor landed on American soil during a massive wave of immigration, or embarked on their family’s journey within the span of living memory as a refugee. So for a surprising number of African Americans, as in my own case, our family trees include many white ancestors, too, who came to this country as willing immigrants. For the African American community, then, our DNA tells a story about the history of slavery that our ancestors might have preferred not to discuss: the fact that rape was a frequent, quite violent, and dehumanizing aspect of human bondage, and we all carry the genetic evidence of it in our skin tones, in the shape of our features, in our hair textures, but not often in what we in the United States call our heritage. It is with this story—our story—that I began my first televised explorations of ancestry, in the PBS series "African American Lives" and "African American Lives 2," which aired in 2006 and 2008, respectively.