our next guest is the host of Emmy award-winning show finding your roots on PBS historian and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr has explored the ancestry of dozens of people from diverse backgrounds including mine last year disclosure the show is now in its sixth season and includes guests such as Jeff Goldblum RuPaul and Queen Latifah and gates told our Walter Isaacson how family tapestries can offer a sense of stability in these unsettled times skip welcome back to the show it's nice to see you again hey and congratulations six seasons of finding a rich it just began again thank you it's a blessing I love doing this show and I love the way that people respond people see me on the street people write me people care about retrieving their ancestors you know I have a metaphor which is that I think your ancestors are in purgatory and waiting to be discovered and when we find them you know we unlock the doors and they tell their story and their story is really part of your story you just don't know it and we have a wonderful video that shows some of the excitement let's just go to the video and then we can talk about it that's great you care like your friends talk about their German ancestors and their Irish ancestors and Italian ancestors I can join in that conversation yes it's cool to know that I have there's there's a warrior's blood is it from your ancestral homeland that is from Inter's thinking I think the best part of that is that they're leaving behind a place called future stinking her this is so wonderfully scandal I'm proud of my ancestors this is a great document my family got balls like this this is when I'm like proud of being from where I'm from I've always thought the best of us is this combination look it's taking from everything to make something stronger you need to know your history need to know you won't this is the best time I've ever had in my whole life Wow that's amazing and you did my hometown friend Jean Baptiste who comes from a wonderful lineage yeah we found a couple amazing stories on his family tree we found the voter registration document for his great-great third great-grandfather who registered to vote in what I call the Freedom Summer of 1867 when black men in ten of the eleven Confederate states were given the right to vote by the first reconstruction act and he was illiterate because it was illegal to teach the slaves to read and write and he signed his name with an X that's that's powerful you think about that just the idea of signing something signing something mm-hmm and we take we take it for granted and this would have been the first thing he the proper thing he said he's fine right it's astonishing me that's a lot to process yeah you know what Walter 80% of the black men who were eligible to vote in the former Confederacy registered to vote in the summer of 1867 and in 1868 500,000 cast their votes for ulysses s grant which gave them the margin of the election grant was popular majority was three hundred thousand votes so he won overwhelmingly in the electoral college black men had elected a white man President of the United States three years after the end of the Civil War and Jean Baptiste ancestor was one of them we also found out that he was 85% sub-saharan African and 14% European so these are the kind of things that we try to find for each of our guests you did with RuPaul - and RuPaul another Louisiana story it's an incredible motif has emerged this season which is a pattern of black people who descended from ancestors who were freed early on RuPaul's fourth great grandmother's name was in that net her brother's name was Andre they were freed in st. Martin's Parish in 1804 and then but their mother wasn't freed and they worked for about 15 years to save enough money to free their mother who was RuPaul's fifth great-grandmother Queen Latifah Queen Latifah's fifth great-grandmother's name was juggy Owens - Queen Latifah's birth name is Dana Owens juggy Owens you ready for this was freed in 1792 and we found the manumission certificate she was freed by white woman named Mary old being conscientious of the injustice and impropriety of holding my fellow creature and state of slavery I do hereby emancipate and set free no way no way one Negro woman named jug who is about 28 years old to be immediate free after this day October 1st 1792 Mary old and through another document we found the name of Queen Latifah sixth great-grandmother whose name was grace Owens who wasn't freed but she was born in 1740 so to be able to take a black family back by name to 1740 is quite extraordinary you know but your own family your own words your own heritage you're from West Virginia yeah and a real multicultural multi ray sort of communities there how did you start figuring out your own words well as a surprise when we started the series up I only did black people we started was called Africa African American lives Oprah Quincy Jones Chris Tucker Bishop TD jakes my Yale classmate ben Carson my Harvard colleague Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot so we were doing it just on a lark the genealogist decided to search from my family tree and what they found was incredible they found out that I'm descending from three sets of fourth great-grandparents who were free including one fourth great-grandfather John Redman on my mom's side who actually fought in the Continental Army I read an essay about him for the times and because of him he was in the Continental Army from 1778 to 1784 and because of him my brother and I my brother dr. Paul Gates is an oral surgeon we were inducted into the Sons of the American Revolution you could have knocked me over with a feather here's the punchline those three sets of fourth great-grandparents lived 30 miles Walter from where I was born tell me why this is important for America for all of us yeah mass that question a lot and I think that people feel so unsettled they feel personally erased used to be we were growing up you know my dad worked at the paper mill in the daytime he worked at the Chesapeake and Potomac telephone company a part time job as a janitor he worked two jobs to put my brother through three degrees of Western University including the dental school and me through Yale and then the University of Cambridge he knew that there was a an upward curve of economic progress that if he worked hard his kids could be doctors I mean I was raised to be a medical doctor almost killed my mother when I got a PhD instead but I never doubted that I was going to go to college they never doubted that things were going to be better for the next generation and then for my kids now there are many Americans I would say the majority who can't assume that curve of progress and so people are unsettled traditional foundations that provided stability have been rocked used to be the church it used to be economic progress used to be the people believed in the Constitution and respected it and then decorate some independence now all these things are if not under erasure at least questioned so people are looking for other forms of stability and one form than they found it's right under your own feet which is the roots that you stand on the ancestors on whose shoulders that you stand one way to address your own Eraser is to under a steer ancestors to establish their identity to know where you come from know and I think that the political the subliminal political messages of finding your roots each week or one that we're 99.9 percent the same no matter where we came from and two there is no such thing as racial purity our use of genetics deconstructs the racist notions of white supremacists that there is that we're all pure that we're you know purely black that race is essential Iser that year there's such a thing as a white race sometimes do you find out things that are controversial unsettling that people don't want to hear one of the most difficult things that face involved the ancestry Christopher Walken and I'm really worried about this he comes from a long line of Baker's people who owned bakeries in Germany and there were two brothers one came to the States and one stayed in Germany and one fought for the Nazis and the other became an American and I had to tell him that and we found out details about his service and in the German military and but I don't think that guilt irritable and I'm very very careful about revealing unpleasant detail on the other hand through the use of genetics we can basically perform miracles which is to find biological parents biological mothers and fathers for adoptees so it's complicated and I also had to tell Joe Madison get ready for this talk about owning a slave or what your ancestor did in a war I had to tell him that the man he had called his father was not his biological father Joe one of the most difficult phone calls I have ever had to make was the Saturday morning when I called you to tell you that that man Felix Edwin Madison according to your DNA is not your biological father and I didn't know how you take this if somebody told me that I don't know how I would take it big I appreciated the your sincerity and concern and you know I thought about it and it just there was this curiosity and then the real question is then who was it's a big responsibility it's very very difficult and we do have a protocol PBS if there is something like a non-paternity event as the geneticist gene Ian I'll just call it we have to tell you that privately this is not like a gotcha kinda show and then you could opt out we could tell you that's all we tell you you went through an incident that was supposed to be a national learning experience when you were trying to enter your own house in Cambridge Massachusetts it's a Harvard professor trying to get the door unlike somebody calls the police thinking you're breaking in you get arrested by the police officer in the battle what have you thinking back on that learn from that I think that what happened to me was of a fundamentally different nature than the terrible things that have happened to people who have been killed by the police people like Eric garner it's a completely different level of experience so I don't know if him talk my arrest because I think it was a bizarre one-off I think the officer just happened to be walking down the street and he got a call from a woman who happened to see the man who had driven me from the airport after two weeks in China and someone had what's left out of the story is someone had tried to break into my house while I was in China so Mikey wouldn't work so I asked the driver who was a big man it happened to be from Morocco now is a very close friend of mine I asked him if he would just try to break the door down and he would be to a boot in the door popped open at the same second a white older white persons walking by and she looks up she calls the police - black guy he's a brown North African right she calls the police it says two black men are breaking into this house so this officers and the officer Crowley nearby I had three suitcases which I had taken with me to China so as soon as I got home I opened the suitcases of the foyer of the house the policeman later told me that one of the motifs that thieves use is to bring suitcases into a house empty and fill them up and then you know steal the stuff so he look like they're just leaving so there was my black face and there were these empties there were these suitcases so he couldn't even see me anymore Barbara Johnson whom as you know it's brilliant professor of comparative literature at Harvard and one of my best friends who passed much too soon once the find a stereotype as an already read text this is what racism is about this is what anti-semitism is about they look at you and you've already provided a narrative a narrative that's been superimposed by history of stereotyping I tell my students at Harvard then under the floorboards of Western culture the two streams that are constantly running when is anti black racism and one is anti-semitism and we saw that at Charlotte's ville and we see it every day in American society but both are rooted in economic insecurity so if we can address the cause of economic insecurity we can begin to address the causes of anti-semitism and anti-lock racism you teach it Harvard to what extent do you feel you know multiculturalism a push for separatism things like that are happening among the different groups at Harvard and to what extent do you feel at your role to push back on that and to make things more complex for the students the students at Harvard are very integrated now this was surprising there are 16 I believe that's the latest count 16 black organizations in the undergraduate college at heart 16 I mean I was the secretary the Black Student Alliance at Yale and I had a list of all the black kids my job was to call them the day before the meetings they please come out you know we're not gonna beat you up ideologically please come out we we need as a show of force 16 groups the Nigerian students have a group the black men's forum of which I'm the faculty advisor and has a marvelous group every Monday they dress up in suits and ties I kind of like that I'm old school black women have different groups but then they they have a Leadership Council so they cross pollinate I don't think that you could embrace a universal cultural identity without having a particular culture on which to stand and that's the same principle that's at work in finding your roots we're all admixed we all have been sleeping with each other for a long long time we all are Africans the only questions if you are dissing African or recent African yet despite how different we look at the level of the genome we are 99.9 percent the same we all come from the proverbial common ancestor the proverbial Adam and Eve and that's a marvelous thing to contemplate and that's what I hope finding your roots teaches Americans week to week skip gates thank you so much thank you my brother thank you [Music] you