Henry Louis "Skip" Gates

Valerie Jarrett (pictured left), one of President Barack Obama‘s longest-serving advisers and confidantes, will be delving in to her ancestral DNA on tonight’s “Finding Your Roots,” hosted by literary scholar, Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (pictured) on PBS. SEE ALSO: Marc Morial On Getting Equal Funding For Common Core [VIDEO] Jarrett, whose father was a […]

The history of the African American people seems far too wide, deep and complex to boil down into 6 television episodes, but that’s what Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and founding director of the Hutchins Center for African and African-American Research at Harvard University, has done with the series he has […]

In a rare genealogical discovery, comic actress Wanda Sykes has been able to identify that her familial roots in America go as far back as the 17th century, according to a New York Times report. SEE ALSO: Will 2012 Be Esperanza Spalding’s Year? Her paternal ninth great-grandmother was Elizabeth Banks, a free white woman. According to […]

The W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research presents its annual lecture series at the Old Whaling Church in Edgartown this evening, beginning at 5 pm.