FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) hosts an online conversation with historian, filmmaker, and public intellectual Henry Louis Gates, Jr., best known for his PBS series Finding Your Roots

Friday, April 9, 2021; 12-1pm PST
Register in advance at moadsf.org; fee is pay what you can

San Francisco, CA, March 15, 2021 —The Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco invites you to a special online conversation with Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, and institution builder, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Gates, Jr., best known for his PBS series Finding Your Roots, will be in conversation with novelist and essayist Sarah Ladipo Manyika, host of MoAD’s monthly online series Conversations Across the Diaspora, launched in April 2020 to bring audiences sheltering at home exciting, interactive conversations from across the worldwide African diaspora. Past guests have included global entrepreneur and philanthropist Strive Masiyiwa; award-winning playwright and actor Anna Deavere Smith; poet and scholar Claudia Rankine; Senator Cory Booker; and beloved actor and singer Tatyana Ali.

“I am so excited to be in conversation with Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. whose work across the African diaspora is unrivaled,” says Manyika. “As the founding director of the Hutchins Center—the world’s preeminent research center dedicated to African and African American research at Harvard University—Professor Gates is not only a distinguished scholar and historian but a prominent public intellectual who brings his broad knowledge of the African Diaspora into the American living room. From his Emmy-winning documentary series The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross to his ground-breaking genealogy series, Finding Your Roots, Professor Gates is a pioneer whose life’s work deepens and enriches our understanding of history. I can think of no one who better embodies the spirit of Conversations Across the Diaspora than Professor Gates.”

About Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. Professor Gates has authored or co-authored twenty-four books and created twenty-one documentary films, including Wonders of the African World, African American Lives, Faces of America, Black in Latin America, Black America since MLK: And Still I Rise, and Africa’s Great Civilizations. Finding Your Roots, his groundbreaking genealogy series now in its seventh season on PBS, has been called “one of the deepest and wisest series ever on television,” leveraging “the inherent entertainment capacity of the medium to educate millions of Americans about the histories and cultures of our nation and the world.”

The public is asked to register in advance at moadsf.org to receive instructions on joining the talk via Zoom and pay what they can to attend.