The program documents a 3,000-mile journey Gates took through Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Tanzania, with his then-wife, Sharon Adams, and daughters, Liza and Meggie Gates. Gates married Sharon Lynn Adams in 1979. I wrote in 2006 about Gatess PBS series, African-American Lives. In this program, everything about America and whites is negative, everything about African-Americans is positive. In the first series, Gates learned that he has 50% European ancestry and 50% African ancestry, He had known of some European ancestry but was surprised to learn the high proportion; he also learned that he was descended from John Redman, a mulatto veteran in New England of the American Revolutionary War. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE (JULY 28, 2020): Today at the Virtual PBS Press Tour, PBS and WETA announced THE BLACK CHURCH: THIS IS OUR STORY, THIS IS OUR SONG will premiere February 16 and 23, 2021 at 9:00 p.m. In October 1975, he was hired by Charles Davis as a secretary in the Afro-American Studies department at Yale. This trip came 25 years after Gates worked at a hospital in Kilimatinde, near Dodoma, Tanzania, when In October 1975 Henry Louis Gates Jr. was hired by Charles Davis as a secretary in the Afro-American Studies department at Yale. The Bondwoman's Narrative was first published in 2002 and became a bestseller. Sharon quickly tried to find ways to get her daughter's speech back. Subscribe to our email newsletter. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. presents a journey through America's past and our nation's attempts at renewal in this look at the Civil War's conclusion, Reconstruction, and the rise of Jim Crow segregation. In 2020, Gates earned a NAACP Image Award Nomination for Outstanding Literary Work Nonfiction for his book. But those friends, some of whom are black, say that he was a perfectly center of the road, cosmopolitan person. Rather, he works for greater recognition of Black works and their integration into a larger, pluralistic canon. Gates hosted Faces of America, a four-part series presented by PBS in 2010. Gates was an Anisfield-Wolf prize winner in 1989 for The Schomburg Library of Women Writers. This is how our country works.