Henry Louis Gates Jr. is an American historian, professor, television documentary host and filmmaker, and literary critic with a net worth of $1 million. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is best

Henry Louis Gates Jr. Net Worth

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is an American historian, professor, television documentary host and filmmaker, and literary critic with a net worth of $1 million. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is best known to the public as the host of the PBS documentary show “Finding Your Roots,” where he assists a range of high-profile guests in learning about their ancestral pasts. Gates has written widely on African-American theory and literature, and is the director of Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.

Early Life and Education

Henry Louis Gates Jr. was born on September 16, 1950, in Keyser, West Virginia, to Henry Sr. and Pauline. He grew up in the nearby town of Piedmont, where he went to Piedmont High School. At age 14, Gates was injured in a touch football game and broke his right leg, which was shorter as a result. He attended Potomac State College after high school for one year before transferring to Yale University, where he graduated summa cum laude in 1973 with his BA in history. Gates then became the first African-American Mellon Foundation fellow, using the award to pursue a graduate degree at Clare College, Cambridge. Gates received his MA from the institution in 1974 and his PhD in 1979, both in English literature.

Career in Academia

In 1975, Gates became a member of Yale University’s African-American Studies department, initially as a secretary. The next year, he was elevated to a lecturer, and after the completion of his Ph.D. in 1979 became an assistant professor in both the English and African-American Studies departments. Gates was elevated to associate professor in 1984. He taught at Cornell University between 1985 and 1989, then spent two years at Duke University. In 1991, Gates was hired to teach at Harvard University, where he has stayed. As the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, he instructs both undergraduates and graduate students at Harvard. Gates is also the director of the university’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.

As a literary theorist and critic, Gates uses deconstructionist strategies on indigenous African literary traditions and tries to read African texts beyond Western interpretive paradigms. His most important scholarly book is the 1988 work “The Signifying Monkey,” an American Book Award winner. Gates has also been a vocal champion in the preservation of Black historical writing in texts through the Black Periodical Literature Project, an online database of Black periodicals and magazines. Through his work, he uncovered some of the oldest known African-American novels, such as Harriet E. Wilson’s “Our Nig” and Hannah Crafts’s “The Bondwoman’s Narrative.” In 2022, Gates became editor-in-chief of the Oxford Dictionary of African American English, a dictionary of Black vernacular sayings.

Television Documentaries

In 1996, Gates introduced his first television documentary as part of the BBC series “Great Railway Journeys.” He traveled in the show with his wife and daughters on a 3,000-mile journey around Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Tanzania. During the following years, Gates hosted, wrote, and/or narrated programs for the PBS, WGBH, and the BBC. Two of his most watched shows were the PBS miniseries “African American Lives” (2006) and “African American Lives 2” (2008), where he investigated the genealogy of several notable

individuals of African-American heritage. Some of his guests were Quincy Jones, Chris Tucker, Whoopi Goldberg, Morgan Freeman, and Maya Angelou. Gates also used his own ancestral background in the show and discovered that he has a 50% European heritage. For his next television program, he wrote and hosted the PBS documentary “Looking for Lincoln,” which premiered in 2009. The next year, Gates wrote and hosted the four-part PBS series “Faces of America,” which examined the genealogies of such celebrities as Stephen Colbert, Yo-Yo Ma, Meryl Streep, Malcolm Gladwell, and Noor Al Hussein. In 2011, he authored and hosted the series “Black in Latin America,” adapted from his book of the same title.

Gates started his most famous documentary series, “Finding Your Roots,” in 2012 on PBS. Each episode of the show features him assisting a different well-known individual in uncovering their ancestry through a blend of genealogy and DNA analysis. Gates continued writing and presenting the acclaimed six-part PBS series “The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross” in 2013. Documenting 500 years of African-American history, leading up to the second inauguration of President Barack Obama, the series was awarded a Peabody Award. In 2016, Gates authored, hosted, and narrated the four-part PBS series “Black America Since MLK: And Still I Rise.” In the following year, he authored and hosted the six-part series “Africa’s Great Civilizations.” Gates hosted “Reconstruction: America After the Civil War,” a four-part series that was shown on PBS in 2019. His first 2020s documentary series was the four-part “Making Black America: Through the Grapevine,” which was released in 2022. He later hosted the four-part series “Great Migrations: A People on the Move” during early 2025.

Other Activities

Among his various other pursuits, Gates has published essays in such journals as the New Yorker and the New York Times. In 2008, he co-founded The Root, an online magazine focused on African-American commentary on the media. Gates also serves on the boards of several prominent institutions, including the New York Public Library, the American Repertory Theater, the Aspen Institute, and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Honors and Awards

Gates received an abundance of awards for his work in the field of African-American history and culture, among which were a number of honorary doctorates. In 1989, Gates received an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for compiling the 30 volumes of “The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers.” Subsequently, in 1995, Gates was awarded the Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement. In 1998, Gates was awarded the National Humanities Medal, and in 1999 he became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Gates was chosen by the National Endowment for the Humanities to deliver the prestigious Jefferson Lecture in 2002. Among his many other awards are two Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards, the Chicago Tribune Literary Award, the Louis Stokes Community Visionary Award, the Muhammad Ali Voice of Humanity Award, the Barry Prize, and the Vilcek Prize for Literary Scholarship Excellence.

Cambridge Arrest Controversy

Upon returning home from a trip to China during the summer of 2009, Gates discovered the front door of his Cambridge, Massachusetts home stuck. When his taxi driver assisted him in entering, a bystander called the police stating the situation as a break-in. Gates was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct, though the charges were later dropped.

Personal Life

Gates was married to his first wife, Sharon Adams, in 1979. They had two daughters, Liza and Meggie, and divorced in 1999. Gates married his second wife, historian Marial Iglesias Utset, in 2021.