Rate My Professor Henry Gates Jr.

Gates is an Emmy, Peabody, and DuPont Award-winning filmmaker, having produced and hosted documentaries on Black history, including the genealogy series Finding Your Roots (now in its twelfth season on PBS in 2026), Gospel (PBS, 2024), The Black Church (PBS), and the forthcoming Black and Jewish America: An Interwoven History (PBS, 2026). His scholarly output is prolific, with recent books such as The Black Box: Writing the Race (2024), The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song (2021), Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (2019), and edited volumes like The Image of the Black in Latin American and Caribbean Art (2023-2024). In 2001, he discovered and edited The Bondwoman’s Narrative, the first novel known to be written by a Black woman in antebellum America, donating the manuscript to Yale University. Among his honors are a MacArthur “genius grant” in 1981 (first class recipient), the National Humanities Medal in 1998 as the first African American scholar so awarded, the NAACP Spingarn Medal in 2024, the Barry Prize and Honorary Fellowship from the Royal Academy of Arts in 2024, and the Vilcek Prize for Excellence in Literary Scholarship in 2025. Gates's work has profoundly influenced African American studies, literature, and public understanding of Black history through scholarship, media, and institution-building.