Gates Unveils New Curriculum Vision
Harvard University scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., one of America’s most prominent intellectuals and an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, unveiled his vision on November 5, 2015 for a new educational curriculum on genealogy and African American history.
The curricular program is designed to reinforce esteem for education traditionally held by African Americans, through new methods of discovering their own personal heritage.
Dr. Gates spoke on Genealogy, Genetics and African American History” in UNC Asheville’s Kimmel Arena. The author or co-author of nineteen books and creator of fourteen documentary films, Gates was the keynote speaker for the 20th anniversary of UNC Asheville’s Center for Diversity Education, which is paying tribute to the work of ASCORE (the Asheville Student Committee on Racial Equality) from 1960-65.
As founding director of Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Gates established The Root.com, the first comprehensive scholarly online resource in the field of African American genealogy. He produced, wrote, and hosted the PBS series Finding Your Roots, and his documentary series The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, won an Emmy, the Peabody Award, and an NAACP Image Award.
While Dr. Gates spoke at length about the history of the slave trade and how the importation and involuntary movement of enslaved peoples around the United States brought about a vast diaspora, he also focused on the DNA heritage of African Americans, noting that using mitochondrial DNA traces anyone’s maternal lineage while the Y-chromosome DNA in men helps trace male ancestry. The science of DNA-tracking, while it does not replace the census reports and paper trail of family names and ancestry, does provide nearly infallible clues to an individual’s point(s) of origin on the African continent. A vast percentage were from western Africa, from such as the Hausa people; few were Nubian (Egypt’s “black pharaohs,” who intermingled with Europeans), and some were Sudanese from Eastern Africa.
Asking rhetorically, “What is the larger import of this?” he described the thrill of learning more about yourself, particularly about your identity.
“At the Utah Academy of Arts and Sciences I have seen the family history library packed with people of every ethnicity at 9:10 a.m., all using microfilm” to trace their ancestors. When a woman jumped up and said “I found my great-grandmother,” and burst into tears, he realized the potency of discovering one’s ancestors, particularly for people whose history has been deliberately suppressed and destroyed.
To that end, he is working to develop a program for school-age children to engage them in the excitement, and importance, of learning. He is creating a curriculum that he hopes will revolutionize how we teach science and history to inner city middle-school kids. As he describes the process:
“Watching Crick and the double Helix? Dull. But ‘spit in the text tube’ and in six weeks we’ll tell you who your ancestors were: that’s fun for middle-school kids! Then, while we wait for the results, we’ll teach you how the science works. The students will have to go home and interview their mother, father, grandparents, about their heritage and ancestors; not only will they gain specific knowledge from them, but they’ll learn interviewing skills while doing so – without even being aware of it.
Students will be instructed to go online and research federal census records from 1940 all the way back to 1870 – the first census that included black Americans (before the post-Civil War 13th Amendment, slaves were not citizens); after that they’ll research county records for white families with the same surname, since many emancipated slaves took the names of their former masters.
It’s human nature, says Dr. Gates, “to think about yourself. Humans have egos.” And in light of that, the six-week unit that Dr. Gates hopes to introduce will pose the question in the most fundamental terms: What is genealogy, what is ancestry-tracing about? Yourself. Your identity!”
Also on the program with Dr. Gates were attorney James Ferguson, the first president of ASCORE and founder of the first integrated law firm in North Carolina; Dr. Deborah James, professor of English at UNC Asheville, and Deborah Miles, founder and executive director of the Center for Diversity Education at UNCA.
