Henry Louis Gates at Messiah College

It was a great night at Messiah College.

As I blogged about earlier today, Henry Louis Gates was on campus to deliver the keynote address for the 2010 Messiah College Humanities Symposium.

Anyone who has seen Gates's PBS documentaries on genealogy, memory, and ancestry would have been familiar with the material that he presented tonight, but Gates has such a warm and personable style it is hard not to be entertained. His talk tonight was entitled "Genetics and Genealogy."

Gates started out with a very moving clip from his most recent PBS series "Faces of America." He then talked about how he got interested in genealogy and the search for his roots. In 1977 he got what he described as a "serious case of Roots envy" after watching Alex Haley's television mini-series.

Here were few themes from the talk:

• 10.8 million Africans left Africa prior to the Civil War, but only 450,000 went to the land that would eventually become the United States. Most went to the Caribbean and South America

• Gates called our attention to a valuable resource for teaching and learning: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database.

• He noted that in the 1860s over half of the 488,000 free blacks in the United States lived in the Confederacy.

• He debunked the myth that most African-Americans had Native-American blood. He described this as "Have I told you about my Cherokee grandmother?" myth. In fact, only 5% of African-Americans have Native American blood. The roots of this myth come from the African-American reaction to 18th century philosophers like David Hume and Thomas Jefferson who said that native-Americans were "noble" savages but Blacks were "ignoble savages." Because of this, African-Americans have had a long history of "native-American envy"
  

• He noted that about 33% of Blacks today descend from white men.

• Gates described how he felt when he learned that he was half white and descended, on his mother's side, from an Irish King.
  

• One of the more hilarious moments was Gates describing his induction into the Sons of the American Revolution. One of his ancestors, John Redmond, fought in the Continental Army as a free black.

• He concluded with his vision for using this kind of genetic research to get inner-city African American kids excited about history and science.
  

OK--some of you are probably wondering if Gates talked about his arrest this past summer or his famed "Beer Summit" with Obama. He did joke about it during the Q& A session.

I was impressed and inspired by Gates as a public intellectual. Here is a Harvard professor committed to bringing the humanities to a larger audience.