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On his compelling PBS genealogy show, renowned history scholar and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., 72, has brought celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and Chris Rock to tears with his

revelations about their ancestors. On the current season of _Finding Your Roots_, he unearths the family trees of actresses Viola Davis and Julia Roberts, pop star Cyndi Lauper, journalist

Jim Acosta and comedian Carol Burnett, among others. _FINDING YOUR ROOTS_ IS IN ITS NINTH SEASON, BUT ORIGINATED AS THE 2006 GENEALOGY SHOW _AFRICAN AMERICAN LIVES._ HOW DID IT EVOLVE? So we

had a great first season [of _African American Lives_]. We had Oprah and Quincy Jones and [bishop] T.D. Jakes … Chris Tucker. Whoopi [Goldberg] heard about it from Oprah and called my

office 19 times, and I let her in. PBS said, “Wow, this is great. The ratings are fabulous.” So I do a sequel. I got my good friend Maya Angelou, bless her soul; Morgan Freeman — [because]

anybody who played God and the president, you gotta do his DNA, right? Chris Rock, who burst into tears when I introduced him to his great-great-grandfather who served in the South Carolina

legislature during Reconstruction. Then I got a letter from a Jewish lady. It said: “Dear Dr. Gates, I’ve always admired your stances on cultural diversity and cultural pluralism, but after

watching _African American Lives, _I’ve decided you’re a big fat racist because you don’t do white people; you don’t do Jewish people like me.” We completely reinvented the series because of

that lady’s letter. So the third season was called _Faces of America,_ which featured Stephen Colbert, Meryl Streep, Yo-Yo Ma, Kristi Yamaguchi, Mike Nichols. Then someone threatened to sue

us over the name, so PBS said. “You’ve got five minutes. Pick a new name.” I went:  Finding Your Roots_. _That’s the history of the series. On Season 9 of "Finding Your Roots,"

Gates takes celebrities, including actor Jeff Daniels, on emotional ancestry journeys. Courtesy Finding Your Roots WHY DO YOU THINK THE SHOW HAS SUCH HIGH RATINGS? I’ve been able to trace

the growing popularity of the series over the last decade by the number of people and the kinds of people who stop me on the street or in an airport. In the beginning, it was mostly African

Americans who stopped me about my work as a scholar or my Black history series, but then that audience started to diversify. … One of the reasons we are the number 1 nonfiction series on PBS

is precisely because it brings people together. It shows people two things: one, that America is a nation of immigrants. And two, with our ever-more important DNA component, it shows that

under the skin — no matter how different we apparently are superficially — we are 99.9 percent the same at the level of the genome. That is a message people want to be reminded of over and

over again. WHAT ELSE HAVE YOU LEARNED SINCE STARTING THIS SERIES? I used to think African Americans had the most difficult ancestry to reestablish, but I’ve learned that for Ashkenazi Jews

from Russia, the Armenians, the Irish and for many other groups, it’s just as difficult to populate their family trees as it is for African Americans. When I started, I thought that all

white people had a coat of arms, but they don’t, and very few people whom I’ve interviewed — white, Black or brown or yellow or red — know more than … their grandparents, a few know their

great-grandparents, almost nobody knows their great-great-grandparents, and then we tend to forget.  IF YOU COULD GO BACK AND LIVE IN ANY TIME PERIOD, WHAT WOULD IT BE AND WHY? I would live

right now. Given the history of anti-Black racism in America, there’s never been a freer time to be Black than post-Civil Rights. When I read the slave narratives, then the autobiographies

of freed Black people, they’re all so frustrated. I bet they all died of heart-related conditions that stem from high blood pressure, because they are dealing with Jim Crow racism, and

before that slavery.