Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Net Worth

What is Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s Net Worth?

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is an American literary critic, historian, professor, and television documentary host and filmmaker who has a net worth of $1 million. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is most widely known to audiences as the host of the PBS documentary series "Finding Your Roots," on which he helps a variety of prominent guests discover their ancestries. Gates has published extensively on African-American literature and theory, and serves as the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.

Early Life and Education

Henry Louis Gates Jr. was born on September 16, 1950 in Keyser, West Virginia to Henry Sr. and Pauline. He was raised in nearby Piedmont, where he attended Piedmont High School. At the age of 14, Gates suffered a hip injury while playing touch football that left him with a shorter right leg. After graduating from high school, he attended Potomac State College for a year before transferring to Yale University, from which he graduated summa cum laude in 1973 with his BA in history. Gates subsequently became the first African-American to receive a Mellon Foundation fellowship, which he used to attend graduate school at Clare College, Cambridge. He earned his MA from the school in 1974 and his PhD in 1979, both in English literature.

Career in Academia

In 1975, Gates joined the African-American Studies department at his alma mater Yale University, originally as a secretary. The following year, he was promoted to a lecturer, and after completing his doctoral degree in 1979 he became an assistant professor in both the African-American Studies and English departments. In 1984, Gates was promoted to an associate professor. He went on to teach at Cornell University from 1985 to 1989, followed by two years at Duke University. In 1991, Gates was recruited to teach at Harvard University, where he has remained ever since. As the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, he teaches both undergraduate and graduate classes at Harvard. Gates also serves as the director of the university's Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.

As a literary critic and theorist, Gates applies strategies of deconstruction to native African literary traditions and attempts to analyze African texts outside of the interpretive frameworks of Western culture. His major scholarly work is the 1988 book "The Signifying Monkey," which won an American Book Award. Gates has also been a critical figure in the preservation of historical African texts through the Black Periodical Literature Project, a digital archive of Black papers and magazines. Through his research, he rediscovered some of the earliest known African-American novels, including Harriet E. Wilson's "Our Nig" and Hannah Crafts's "The Bondwoman's Narrative." In 2022, Gates became the editor-in-chief of the Oxford Dictionary of African American English, a glossary of Black vernacular phrases.

Television Documentaries

In 1996, Gates presented his first television documentary as part of the BBC series "Great Railway Journeys." He appeared in the program alongside his wife and daughters taking a 3,000-mile trip through Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Tanzania. Over the subsequent years, Gates hosted, wrote, and/or narrated programs for PBS, WGBH, and the BBC. Two of his most popular programs were the PBS miniseries "African American Lives" (2006) and "African American Lives 2" (2008), in which he explored the genealogies of various prominent people of African-American descent. Guests included Quincy Jones, Chris Tucker, Whoopi Goldberg, Morgan Freeman, and Maya Angelou. Gates also featured his own ancestral heritage on the show, and learned that he has 50% European ancestry. 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 wrote and presented the series "Black in Latin America," based on his book of the same name.

Gates began his best-known documentary series, "Finding Your Roots," in 2012 on PBS. In each episode of the program, he helps a different prominent figure discover their family history by drawing on a combination of genealogical research and DNA testing. Gates went on to write and host the acclaimed six-part PBS series "The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross" in 2013. Chronicling 500 years of African-American history, culminating in the second inauguration of President Barack Obama, the series won a Peabody Award. In 2016, Gates wrote, hosted, and narrated the four-part PBS series "Black America Since MLK: And Still I Rise." The year after that, he wrote and hosted the six-part series "Africa's Great Civilizations." Gates next hosted "Reconstruction: America After the Civil War," a four-part series that premiered on PBS in 2019. His first documentary series of the 2020s was the four-part "Making Black America: Through the Grapevine," which premiered in 2022. He went on to host the four-part series "Great Migrations: A People on the Move" in early 2025.

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Other Activities

Among his sundry other activities, Gates has written articles for such publications as the New Yorker and the New York Times. In 2008, he co-founded the Root, a website dedicated to African-American perspectives on the media. Gates also sits on the boards of various major 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 has earned a plethora of honors for his contributions to the study of African-American history and culture, including several honorary doctorates. In 1989, he won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for editing the 30 volumes of "The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers." Later, in 1995, Gates was given the Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement. In 1998, he received the National Humanities Medal, and in 1999 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Gates was selected by the National Endowment for the Humanities for the prestigious Jefferson Lecture in 2002. Among his numerous other accolades are two Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards, the Chicago Tribute Literary Award, the Louis Stokes Community Visionary Award, the Muhammad Ali Voice of Humanity Award, the Barry Prize, and the Vilcek Prize for Excellence in Literary Scholarship.

Cambridge Arrest Controversy

After coming home from a trip to China in the summer of 2009, Gates found the front door of his house in Cambridge, Massachusetts to be jammed. As his taxi driver helped him to get in, a passerby called the police reporting the incident as a break-in. Gates was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct, although the charges were ultimately dropped.

Personal Life

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

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