Tracing history

His parents raised him to be a doctor, Henry Louis Gates Jr. told the audience that filled McKnight Hall in the Cone University Center to hear him speak on Tuesday afternoon. But Gates had other plans for his future.

At the age of 9, he traced his family tree. Today, he helps other people trace theirs through his groundbreaking genealogy series, “Finding Your Roots.”

Gates, the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University, delivered the 2019 Chancellor’s Speaker Series presentation, which is part of the annual UNC Charlotte Civic Series presented by Bank of America.

An Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, historian and literary scholar, Gates is director of Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research and author or co-author of 24 books. His 20 documentary films include “Faces of America,” “Black in Latin America,” “Black America since MLK: And Still I Rise” and “Africa’s Great Civilizations.”

Gates, who earned master’s and doctoral degrees in English literature from Clare College at the University of Cambridge, said documentaries are ingrained in English culture, and that is where he developed a love for them.

“I fell in love with documentary and with the fantasy of being in front of the camera,” Gates told the crowd.

And as an African American growing up in a segregated America, Gates had another fantasy, which he shared with interviewers for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship. Gates was the first African American to receive this fellowship.

“I said, ‘I had no idea what I would study, but I wanted the opportunity to live in another society as a black American, so I could see myself through the reflection of people not conditioned by American slavery and Jim Crow segregation,’” Gates recalled.

Years later, Gates’ fantasy of being in front of the camera was fulfilled when he got a call from television producer Jane Root, who cast him on the BBC travel documentary series “Great Railway Journeys.” Gates’ two daughters accompanied him on the trip to Zimbabwe and the village of Kilimatinde in Tanzania, where Gates had worked during a gap year while a student at Yale.

In his PBS documentary “African American Lives,” Gates helped black celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey, Mae Jemison, Whoopi Goldberg and Morgan Freeman trace their ancestry. That show concept was expanded to “Finding Your Roots,” where Gates does the same for both black and white celebrities. Season six of the show, in progress, includes actors Melissa McCarthy and Eric Stonestreet. He plans to include non-celebrities on the show in the future.

But irrespective of race, Gates said the goal of his series is the same: to reinforce the idea that we are all immigrants.

“We’re a nation of immigrants, and that’s what makes us great,” he said.