Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. (1950-…), is a leading African American historian, educator, literary critic, and filmmaker. Gates has written or edited many books that explore African American history, literature, and culture. As an editor and scholar he has given exposure to many African American writers, especially women, who had previously been little known or unknown. His publications also include major reference works on Africa. 
Gates established himself as an important literary critic with two books examining African American literature, Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self (1987) and The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (1988). With African American scholar Nellie Y. McKay, he coedited The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1996, later editions 2004, 2014). Gates published two books tracing the family histories of Americans of various heritages—In Search of Our Roots: How 19 Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed Their Past (2009) and Faces of America: How 12 Extraordinary People Discovered Their Pasts (2010). He continued his study of African American history in Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African American History, 1513-2008 (2011). In 2017, Gates published 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro. Gates also wrote Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (2019) and The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song (2021). Together with the African American writer Tonya Bolden, he wrote a history for young adult readers, Dark Sky Rising: Reconstruction and the Dawn of Jim Crow (2019).
Gates has written, produced, and hosted a number of television series, including several that examine the African American experience in the United States. These series were telecast either jointly by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in the United States or by PBS alone. The series include “Wonders of the African World” (1999), “America Beyond the Color Line” (2004), “African American Lives” (2006), “African American Lives 2” (2008), “Faces of America” (2010), “Finding Your Roots” (2012- ), “The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross” (2013), and “Africa’s Great Civilizations” (2017).
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., was born on Sept. 16, 1950, in Keyser, West Virginia. He received a B.A. degree from Yale University in 1973. He then completed an M.A. degree in 1974 and a Ph.D. degree in 1979, both at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. In 1991, Gates joined the English department at Harvard University. He is also the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard. He wrote an autobiography, Colored People: A Memoir (1994). A collection of his writings was published as The Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Reader (2012).
