GATES: I'm Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Welcome to "Finding Your Roots."
In this episode, we'll meet actors
LeVar Burton and Wes Studi,
two men whose lives were shaped by
their absent fathers.
STUDI: I was teased about that.
You know, I'd say things like, uh, you know,
"I don't have a dad."
GATES: Mm-hmm.
STUDI: And, uh, the kids would say, "Ew."
BURTON: You know, you, you grow up just
with the blanks, right?
GATES: Yeah.
BURTON: With just no information, no clue.
And, and, and no real way to overcome that blind spot.
GATES: To uncover their roots,
we've used every tool available.
Genealogists combed through paper trails stretching
back hundreds of years,
while DNA experts utilized the latest advances
in genetic analysis to reveal secrets that
have lain hidden for generations.
STUDI: Wow!
GATES: And we've compiled it all into a book of life.
A record of everything we found.
BURTON: This is so intense.
(laughs)
STUDI: I feel on the verge of discovery.
GATES: And a window into the hidden past.
BURTON: I did not see this coming.
STUDI: In a way I'm dumbfounded by the,
I mean, I asked the question,
got the answer int, and now I'm dumbfounded.
BURTON: I am forever changed.
I am forever changed.
GATES: My two guests came to me with questions
about entire branches of their family trees.
In this episode, we're going to give them
the answers they've been searching for,
through a pioneering combination of genealogy and genetics,
allowing LeVar and Wes to see themselves more clearly
than ever before.
(theme music plays)
♪ ♪
(book closes)
♪ ♪
LeVar Burton has changed the way America sees itself.
The iconic actor, famed for his roles on "Roots"
and the "Star Trek" franchise,
has embodied the journey of Black people in our country
from slavery to outer space, giving us a glimpse of our
nation's tragic past, while pointing us towards
a more hopeful future.
But LeVar's own journey began far from the limelight,
in a household marred by great despair,
in a U.S. Army base in West Germany where his parents'
troubled marriage dissolved, and his mother made a
decision that would remake her family.
BURTON: My mother and my sisters and I left Germany
by ourselves um, and came back to the States,
back home to Sacramento, to begin our lives without him.
GATES: Did you go into a depression over it
or was it a relief?
Sometimes kids are relieved when their
parents get divorced.
BURTON: I just remember, Skip, you know, I just
remember a lot of confusion and,
and not understanding what was going on,
however, the absence of, of violence in the air and fear
about the dynamics of their relationship being
so dominant in our lives was now gone.
GATES: LeVar was 11 when his parents divorced.
He wouldn't see his father again for decades.
But his mother, a school teacher,
made sure that her children flourished just the same.
She worked tirelessly to pay for their educations
and encourage their ambitions,
and fortunately, when it came to LeVar's ambitions,
luck was on his side, too.
LeVar was a sophomore, studying theater at USC
when the producers of "Roots" began looking for
an actor to play Kunta Kinte,
the young African character at the heart of their story.
BURTON: I was in the right place at the right time.
They came in to one class one day and said that they
were casting, "they" being these people in Hollywood.
GATES: Mm-hm.
BURTON: They were looking for young Black kids.
There were three of us in the drama department.
And we all went to what turned out to be Lynn Stalmaster,
the legendary casting director's office um for the
for what they called back in the day a "go-see."
Go to this address and see the people there.
GATES: That was it.
BURTON: That was the beginning.
LeVar's "beginning" was bigger than anyone could
possibly have imagined,
"Roots" was an instant phenomenon,
and remains one of highest rated series
in the history of television.
It made LeVar a household name and ultimately allowed
him to pursue a very personal project.
♪ Take a look, it's in a book ♪
♪ a Reading Rainbow ♪
BURTON: Hi, there.
GATES: In 1983, LeVar became the producer and host of
"Reading Rainbow" a PBS series that ran for 23 seasons.
O'DONNELL: "Reading Rainbow"
GATES: Winning him 12 Emmys and a Peabody.
Crafted to encourage a love of books in children,
the series was close to LeVar's mother's heart,
and to his own.
GATES: Looking back, what are you proudest of?
BURTON: When I get asked this,
it's always I get a catch in my, in my throat
because you would think that "Roots" because of
the magnitude the, of the impact that it's
had on the planet,
um, some 50-plus countries around the world,
"Roots" is universally embraced as a, as, as,
an important story for humanity.
But it's really "Reading Rainbow."
GATES: Yeah.
BURTON: That is, that's the first line of my obituary,
I think.
GATES: Yeah.
BURTON: Host and producer of "Reading Rainbow."
GATES: A tribute to your mom.
BURTON: A tribute to my mom and, and, I, you know
having I, I, I, believing so much in the
power of education as we do in my family,
um, having an impact on the reading habits of a couple
of generations of human beings.
It doesn't get any better than that.
GATES: My second guest is Wes Studi,
the first Native American to win an Academy Award for acting.
Much like LeVar Burton,
Wes has changed our nation's perceptions,
redefining the way indigenous people are portrayed on screen,
an accomplishment that no one could have
envisioned when he was growing up.
Wes was born in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma,
the child of a single mother.
His youth was defined by a series of upheavals,
beginning when he was just five years old and
he was sent to live at a school for Native children
more than 40 miles from home.
When he returned he found himself an outsider.
STUDI: I learned English but when I went home for the summer,
uh, I tried speaking English in a Cherokee household and
was shut down,
(makes sound)
very effectively by my grandmother.
GATES: So you had to learn to speak Cherokee
all over again?
STUDI: I learned to speak Cherokee again so I could eat.
(laughs)
GATES: This experience would set a tone for much
of Wes's early life as he struggled to find his path,
changing jobs and homes often,
being forced constantly to adapt to new circumstances.
Indeed, Wes was in his mid-30s and working
as a rancher outside of Tulsa, Oklahoma when a
failed marriage drove him to discover his true calling.
STUDI: I went back to Tulsa,
and a good friend of mine,
Jay Wincrow,
he, uh, said, uh, I asked him, uh,
"I just got divorced and, uh, I wonder what, what
to do when I'm meeting new people and stuff."
And he said, "Hey! I got just the thing for you.
American Indian Theatre Company.
Check it out."
So, that developed, we began to be cast in things,
and we, uh, we, we, we worked on plays,
and after a while, we mounted the plays,
and did them any place that we could.
A lot of, uh, like, old folks' homes, and.
GATES: Sure.
STUDI: Any place we could get into, uh,
that had a little stage.
It didn't even need to be a stage.
GATES: What was it about it that appealed to you?
STUDI: It scared me. GATES: Uh-huh.
STUDI: One of the scariest things,
at that point in my life,
was being able to step out from the wings to a,
a mark out on stage and say my line.
GATES: It's terrifying. STUDI: It's terrifying.
GATES: Yeah.
STUDI: It's like traveling through a, like, a, a
Jello-ized air, that you just walk through and
then he hit that mark and then,
"Hello Mr. Johnson! How's your family?"
GATES: Wes got over his "fears" very quickly,
in less than a decade after stepping onto
the Tulsa stage, he was a star.
His breakout roles were fierce Native American warriors,
familiar stereotypes in American popular culture.
But Wes brought them to life in a new way,
and he went on to portray characters in
almost every genre,
continually expanding his range,
and breaking down barriers for Native performers.
In 2021, this journey came full circle when Wes
took a role on "Reservation Dogs,"
the first television series to feature all indigenous
writers and a largely indigenous cast.
The series not only proved to be a hit,
it also gave Wes the chance to see his impact
on a new generation.
STUDI: It's kinda heartwarming.
And it's also very exciting.
I'd like to think that uh, my involvement over the,
my career has had an influence for people to want
to do this and to say, and to uh, give it a shot.
GATES: Definitely. STUDI: You know? Yeah so.
GATES: They must tell you that all the time.
STUDI: Oh, I don't know.
(laughs).
STUDI: Okay, but, uh, yeah.
It, and to watch the excitement of these young people,
it's the kind of excitement that I felt 30 years ago.
GATES: Right. STUDI: You know?
GATES: That's a rush.
STUDI: Yeah. GATES: Yeah.
STUDI: And, and you can see it on their faces
and their actions, everything.
And they're, yeah.
GATES: And you deserve a lot of the credit, man.
Uh, you've made a difference in the
representation of Native Americans in film,
without a doubt.
STUDI: Okay, I can retire now.
(laughs).
GATES: My two guests have followed very different
paths to fame, but they share something profound,
both grew up knowing little to nothing about
entire branches of their family trees.
It was time to for that to change.
I started with LeVar Burton,
and with his mother, Erma Gene Ward.
Erma raised her children on her own after her divorce,
a Herculean task.
How did she compensate for the absence of a father?
'Cause she had to be mother and father.
BURTON: She had to be both, right.
um, not an uncommon story in the Black community.
Um, she did the best she could.
You know, put us all through Catholic schools.
GATES: Mm-hm.
BURTON: Um, made sure we had the education that
we could hardly afford, right?
GATES: She's an amazing person.
BURTON: She was, she was.
GATES: Did she tell you much,
you and your sisters, about her roots?
BURTON: No!
It was very difficult to get stories of her
upbringing out of her.
Impossible.
She never wanted to share any of her history.
GATES: Well, let's see what we found out.
BURTON: Okay.
GATES: We don't know why Erma was so reserved,
but as we dug into her family tree,
we uncovered a story that she may
have wanted to keep hidden.
It begins with her paternal grandmother,
LeVar's great-grandmother, a woman named Mary Sills.
LeVar knew Mary when he was a child.
He says that he called her "Granny" and he recalls
being told that she had Native American ancestry.
But after analyzing LeVar's DNA,
we realized that Mary's roots were much more complicated
than she could have imagined.
And Mary's social security application,
filed in the year 1940,
shows that she may not have even known her own father.
BURTON: "Name Mary Sills Bradshaw.
Age 48.
Place of birth unknown, North Carolina.
Father's name, Louis Sills.
Mother's name, Mary Jane Lee."
GATES: That record gave us the names of Mary's parents.
Your great-great-grandparents.
BURTON: Okay.
GATES: But here's where things get interesting.
According to our analysis of your DNA, Louis Sills,
the man listed here as Mary Jane's husband was
not the father of your great-grandmother,
Mary Sills.
BURTON: Wow.
GATES: So you never heard anything about this?
BURTON: No.
GATES: LeVar's DNA shows that he has no close
genetic connection to anyone in the publicly
available DNA databases who descends from Louis Sills.
Instead, these same databases contain multiple
matches that link LeVar to the descendants of a man named
"James Henry Dixon."
And as we built out the family trees of these matches,
we realized that James was Mary's biological father.
What's more, we soon saw why this had been kept secret.
BURTON: "Dixon, James H., head of household, white.
Age 57.
Occupation: Farmer.
Lucy, wife, white, age 43.
William, son, white.
Age 22.
William, son, white, age 10.
Will, granddaughter, white, age two months."
Wow.
GATES: Mary's father was...
BURTON: A white man.
GATES: Married, living with children,
and he was a white man.
BURTON: And she was the other family on the side.
GATES: There you go, were you expecting that?
Did you have any idea you had a white direct ancestor?
(laughing)
BURTON: No, no, I had no idea.
So Granny was half white.
GATES: Yeah, there you go.
BURTON: Wow.
GATES: We don't know anything about the nature
of the relationship between Mary's parents.
There are simply no records to guide us.
But now that we'd identified her father,
we could research his life.
We discovered that James was born in
Edgecombe County, North Carolina,
in 1847.
Meaning that as a teenager,
he faced a dilemma.
In 1861, when he was 14 years old,
the American Civil War broke out.
Weeks later, his native North Carolina
joined the Confederacy.
So let's see what he did during the war.
Would you turn the page?
BURTON: I'm shaking.
GATES: LeVar, this is a muster roll dated June 1864.
Would you please read the transcribed portion?
BURTON: "Confederate J. H. Dickerson, Private.
Captain J. W. Granger's Company,
Reserve Force, Junior Reserves,
North Carolina, enrolled April 5, 1864.
Occupation, farmer."
GATES: There's your great-grandfather.
His surname is misspelled as Dickerson.
BURTON: Right.
GATES: But it wasn't, it was Dixon.
He joined the Junior Reserves of the
Confederate Army shortly after he turned 17.
So you have an ancestor who served with the Confederacy.
(laughs)
BURTON: Are you kidding me?
GATES: No, that's true.
BURTON: Oh my God, oh my God.
I did not see this coming.
GATES: The Junior Reserves were not a combat unit.
They were primarily used for guard duty to free up
experienced soldiers for the front lines.
So we don't believe that LeVar's ancestor saw battle.
Regardless, the fact remains that as a young man,
James served to protect slavery,
but as an adult,
he fathered a child with an African American woman,
who had been born into slavery
leaving LeVar to ponder that paradox.
BURTON: I often wonder about white men of the period
and how they justify to themselves their relations
with, with Black women, especially those in
an unbalanced power dynamic.
GATES: Mm-hmm.
BURTON: There has to be a powerful disconnect
created emotionally and mentally.
GATES: Yeah.
BURTON: So it's possible in my mind that he could have
contemplated it and, and was conflicted at, at worst,
maybe repentant at, at, at best.
And then there's the possibility that he didn't
think about it at all.
GATES: Right, and we'll never know.
BURTON: Yeah.
GATES: They could have been in love.
BURTON: Right.
GATES: It could've been, could've been, uh,
something terrible.
We don't know.
BURTON: Right.
GATES: But there's one more thing I want to share with you.
(heavy sigh)
Would you please turn the page?
BURTON: Okay.
Wow, that's him.
GATES: You are looking at your
great-great-grandfather, James Henry Dixon.
It's difficult to make out, but that's
that is your biological great-great-grandfather.
BURTON: Now, I'd have fought you five minutes ago
if you told me that I had
a white great-great-grandfather.
GATES: You do.
You can fight me, but it's the truth,
and ain't nothing you can do about it.
BURTON: What, Kunta? GATES: Kunta.
BURTON: Got white ancestry!
GATES: That's right. BURTON: What?
GATES: Yeah.
BURTON: Come on now, Skip.
GATES: You know, you took two DNA tests.
The two major commercial DNA tests almost never have tested
an African American who was 100% sub-Saharan African.
BURTON: Wow.
GATES: We all have white ancestors.
BURTON: But this is close!
GATES: That's right, but this is close and by name.
(sighs).
GATES: LeVar's great-great-grandfather
died in 1906.
Our research shows that he had at least nine children
and more than 40 grandchildren.
Meaning that LeVar has an extensive network of white
cousins whose roots stretch back centuries
in the American South.
BURTON: This is insanely surprising.
I mean.
GATES: How does it make you feel?
(sighs)
Confederates in the family.
BURTON: Well, I, there's, there's, there's some
conflict roiling inside of me right now,
but it, it, it also, oddly enough,
I feel, I, I feel a pathway opening up.
I have wanted for a long time,
knowing what I know about the history of this nation,
I've wanted,
especially in this current timeframe and this now moment,
GATES: Mm-hmm.
BURTON: I believe that as Americans,
we need to have this conversation about who we
are and how we got here.
GATES: Mm-hmm.
BURTON: But yet I see that we're so polarized
politically and racially.
GATES: Right, we're not talking to each other.
BURTON: We're not talking to each other.
GATES: Mm-hm.
BURTON: And so I've been looking for an entry point
to talk to white America.
GATES: Mm-hmm.
Well, that door just opened.
BURTON: Here it is, here it is.
GATES: Yeah.
Much like LeVar, Wes Studi was about to
discover an entirely new branch of his family tree.
But his story begins closer to home.
Wes grew up not knowing the identity of his
biological father,
a mystery that shaped his childhood.
STUDI: In the '50s and '60s, being illegitimate
was a big deal.
GATES: Mm-hmm.
STUDI: Uh, not on the, uh, positive side.
GATES: Nope.
STUDI: Um, and, uh, I was teased about that.
Uh, you know, I'd say things like, uh, you know,
"I don't have a dad."
GATES: Mm-hmm.
STUDI: And, uh, the kids would say, "Ew," you know?
Just, um, not cool.
GATES: Yeah, what did your mother tell you about
who was your father?
STUDI: She gave me a name and she said,
"It's on your birth certificate."
STUDI: And, uh, that's about it.
GATES: The name on Wes's birth certificate
was "Eugene Philpott,"
a man who was roughly the same age as Wes's mother,
and who had been raised near her in the Cherokee Nation.
Wes grew up believing that Eugene was
his biological father,
but when he sought him out as a young adult,
the response he received was not what he'd expected.
STUDI: He was at a, a, a little café there having coffee.
I walked in and, uh, I don't know if we had
arranged this or not, but in any case, uh,
sat down with him and he just immediately said,
"I know what you're going to ask me, but no, I'm not."
GATES: Huh.
STUDI: And we left it at that.
GATES: And you just get up and walk away?
STUDI: Yeah.
GATES: Well, how did he know that you thought
he was your, your father?
STUDI: Uh, maybe I said something to him before.
GATES: Okay.
STUDI: Maybe I said, uh,
"I think you're on my birth certificate,"
or something like that.
Or, "My mom said."
GATES: Mm-hmm. STUDI: Uh-huh.
"That you're on my, uh, uh, birth certificate."
He said, "Yep, I know that.
But I, but it's not true."
To, something to that effect.
GATES: Huh, did you...
STUDI: He denied, he denied me, yes.
GATES: Did you put, follow it up at all or just?
STUDI: No. GATES: You let it go?
STUDI: Yeah.
GATES: Well, that must've been painful.
STUDI: No, actually, it was, uh, uh, I saw him and
I said to myself,
"I don't want to look like this son-of-a-bitch."
(laughs).
GATES: As it turns out,
Wes' feelings were based on more than his instincts,
Eugene Philpott is not his father.
The two men have no significant matches in
the publicly available DNA databases.
But this is where our research got complicated.
Wes' DNA links him to the descendants of a couple
named Jesse and Katie Blair,
they're Wes' paternal grandparents,
meaning that one of their sons is Wes' biological father.
But although they had two sons,
who were the right age to have conceived
a child with Wes' mother, there just wasn't enough
DNA evidence to distinguish between them.
So rather than identify his father,
we presented Wes with two candidates.
GATES: You're looking at Jess and Bobby Blair.
Jess is on your left and Bobby is on your right.
The photo of Jess was likely taken when he was
about 19 years old.
The photo of Bobby, on your right, was likely
taken when he was in his 70s or his 80s.
You are looking at your biological father.
We just don't know which one it is.
But one of these men, beyond the shadow of a doubt,
is your father.
Do you see a resemblance?
STUDI: Uh,
maybe the eyebrows?
Um, how old is this guy?
GATES: Um, Jess was, he was 19 in 1943.
STUDI: '43.
GATES: Yeah, during the mid, so, the middle of
World War II.
STUDI: Oh, he has huge ears.
GATES: Is that a family trait?
STUDI: I dunno.
(laughs).
GATES: What's it like to put names and faces to the
secret that's been hidden from you for your whole life?
STUDI: Uh, in a way I'm dumbfounded by the,
I mean, I asked the question.
GATES: Yeah.
STUDI: Got the answer int, and now I'm dumbfounded.
I mean, uh.
Without, without words really.
GATES: But that's normal.
STUDI: Hmm.
GATES: Although Wes did not recognize them,
he may well have seen the Blair brothers
during his childhood,
Bobby and Jess were both born in the
Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma
and spent much of their lives there.
Sadly, both men are deceased,
so a reunion is impossible.
What's it like to learn this?
STUDI: Uh,
well, in one way it's kind of, uh, uh,
disappointing and, um, uh, another way it's, uh, uh,
kind of, uh, a relief.
GATES: Mm-hmm.
STUDI: Um, least I know they were human, right?
GATES: Well, you know they were human
and you know their names.
And you know the names of your grandparents.
STUDI: Yeah, a whole side of a family,
a, a whole, yeah, a whole.
GATES: Just opened up.
STUDI: Hmm.
GATES: We now turned our focus to the Blair family,
and encountered some tortured history.
Wes' direct paternal line traces back to George Blair,
a half-Cherokee farmer who owned enslaved me and women
in North Carolina,
and then to George's father,
Wes's third great-grandfather,
a man named James Blair.
James was born in Virginia in 1761,
the child of white settlers.
As a young man, during the Revolutionary War
James led troops against the Cherokee Nation
then later had a child with a Cherokee woman.
So what's it like to learn that you descend
from a white man who was actively involved
in killing the Cherokee people?
STUDI: Uh, well it's not pleasant but, uh,
you know, you have to accept what is.
Um, uh, uh, uh, on the other hand,
I'm married to a settler woman, right?
GATES: Mm-hmm, yeah.
STUDI: So, wow, uh, I think I'll take about a week off
or something, right?
GATES: Yeah. STUDI: Yeah.
GATES: And you got a lot to think about.
STUDI: Hmm, yeah.
GATES: We had one more story to share regarding
Wes's newfound ancestors, a far happier one.
Following a different branch of the Blair family tree,
we came to Wes's sixth great-grandmother,
a woman named Nanye'hi.
Nanye'hi is a beloved figure in Cherokee history,
celebrated as both a warrior and a stateswoman,
and Wes was delighted
to discover their connection.
GATES: Isn't that amazing?
STUDI: I had no idea. GATES: She was grandma.
STUDI: Sixth grandmother.
GATES: Yes.
Great, great, great, great, great,
great grandmother, direct.
STUDI: Yeah.
GATES: You have DNA from her.
STUDI: Yeah, huh, well that's a pleasant surprise.
GATES: How about, how, how about that?
STUDI: Yeah.
GATES: Nanye'hi was born in the late 1730s.
As a teenager, she was given the title of
"War Woman" for picking up her dead husband's rifle
and leading the Cherokee to a victory over the Creek Nation.
This title gave her a powerful political role within
her tribe and Nanye'hi made the most it of it,
eventually leading negotiations with the
United States government in the hopes
of retaining her people's land.
Her efforts were futile,
but she left behind a remarkable testament to her vision.
STUDI: "We know the white people are more
and stronger than us.
But will you take everything from us
and let us starve?
We did never concern in the former treaty,
which has been broken, but we do in this.
You know women are always looked upon as nothing.
But we are your mothers, you are our sons.
Our cry is all for peace.
Let it continue because we are your mothers."
GATES: Those are your sixth great-grandma's
actual words.
STUDI: She could speak. GATES: She could speak.
Throughout her life, Nanye'hi worked towards peace
between her people and the Americans.
Urging both sides to see themselves as one people in
the land that they now inevitably shared,
would share forever.
But she consistently insisted that the Cherokee people
had a right to their own homelands.
And their challenge to white land hunger grew
within increased pressure on Cherokee territories.
She died sometime between 1822 and 1824
in present-day Benton, Tennessee.
STUDI: Hmm.
GATES: Wes you have a lot of information to process.
STUDI: And, uh, some influential people
in my background.
GATES: What does it mean to you to be descended
from her in particular?
I mean this woman was a major hero.
STUDI: Well, it's illuminating, and, and,
and I think, uh, what it really makes me think of
is how tough our women were,
and everybody's afraid of women more than they
were afraid of the men.
STUDI: You know? GATES: Uh-huh.
STUDI: And that's the kind of world that
I was born into, you know?
Uh.
GATES: A world of tough women.
STUDI: Yeah. GATES: Yeah.
STUDI: Yeah, ones that could outwork men.
GATES: Right.
STUDI: So, um, uh, it's all thought provoking
to say the least.
GATES: It is. STUDI: Right, uh.
GATES: Turning back to LeVar Burton,
we shifted from his mother's roots to his father's,
where we confronted a blank slate.
LeVar's father essentially disappeared when LeVar was
11 years old and the two men have had
very limited contact ever since.
As a result,
LeVar knows almost nothing about the Burton side
of his family tree.
So we set out to change that and we discovered that father
and son actually have a great deal in common.
The story begins in Cherry Valley, Arkansas
where LeVar's father was born in 1934, his parents,
LeVar's grandparents, were Versie Bowdry and Aaron Burton,
and they seem to have had a tumultuous relationship.
In fact, census records show that by 1940,
Aaron was married to another woman.
BURTON: Wow.
GATES: So you'd never heard anything at all about this?
BURTON: No, no, no.
GATES: You didn't even know these people existed?
BURTON: No, no I, I, I think the name Aaron Burton
I've, I've heard before,
but I had no real concept of where he was in the lineage.
GATES: Well, we assume that your grandparents divorced,
but we didn't find a record of that,
so we don't know.
BURTON: Sure, yeah.
GATES: But your father was five years old when
that census was taken.
BURTON: Yeah.
GATES: There you go. BURTON: Wow.
GATES: Your parents divorced when you were 11.
BURTON: Yes.
GATES: What's it like to see that happen with
your father's parents?
BURTON: The cycles do repeat themselves,
don't they?
GATES: Cycles do repeat, yeah.
BURTON: Wow.
GATES: This was not the only "cycle" that repeated
down through the branches of the Burton family tree,
indeed the 1940 census for Arkansas shows that
LeVar and his father's ancestors share something truly profound.
BURTON: "Aaron C. Burton,
head of household, Negro, age 27,
born in Arkansas.
Occupation school superintendent,
grammar school.
Salary $350."
GATES: Yep.
BURTON: "Evelyn Burton, wife, Negro, age 28.
Pearl B. Burton,
father, Negro aged 60,
birthplace Arkansas.
Occupation school superintendent,
junior high."
GATES: So you just met your great-grandfather.
BURTON: Pearl.
GATES: Yeah, Pearl B. Burton.
And he and your grandfather worked in education.
BURTON: Both school superintendents.
GATES: Both, father and son, school superintendents.
BURTON: One for grammar school and
another for, and the other for junior high school.
GATES: How's that make you feel?
BURTON: It fills me with great pride that I have
inherited this mantle of educator.
GATES: Yeah.
BURTON: Really honestly.
GATES: You come from educators on both sides.
(crying)
BURTON: That's very cool, I'm very proud of that.
GATES: You just opened a door and the whole room
was on the other side of the wall.
BURTON: Yeah, no kidding, no kidding.
My reality has shifted.
GATES: Yeah,
'cause you thought all of these attributes you
got from your mom.
BURTON: From my mom.
GATES: Yeah. BURTON: That's deep.
GATES: Records show that LeVar's great-grandfather
Pearl spent almost his entire adult life working
in schools, he was even the principal
and co-founder of a public school for
African American children in Osceola, Arkansas,
an institution that he helped open at a time when
roughly 20% of his state's Black population
was illiterate.
BURTON: I had no idea.
GATES: No. BURTON: I'm just.
GATES: You inherited from this invisible
presence in your life.
A guy who disappears when you're 11,
but all of that educational heritage came with him.
BURTON: Came with him.
GATES: Yeah, he left, but it didn't.
BURTON: It didn't.
GATES: Isn't that extraordinary?
BURTON: I'm ecstatic.
I can't even explain how it feels
to get this information.
It's like there have been pieces of me
that have been missing.
They've always been out there somewhere.
But you know, Black people, we don't share family stories.
GATES: No.
BURTON: We're really hesitant.
I, I, I couldn't pry information out of my mother.
GATES: Mm-hmm.
BURTON: She was always so insistent that we not know
about the trials and tribulations that
she went through.
GATES: Of course, she was trying to protect you.
BURTON: She was trying to protect us.
Yes, of course.
But it leaves us in the dark about who we are.
GATES: Yeah, it does.
BURTON: This information is stuff that we need
in order to feel whole.
GATES: It does, you do need it.
BURTON: Whew.
This is gonna, reverberate for awhile.
GATES: Hey, of course, forever.
BURTON: It's so powerful. GATES: Yeah.
This story was about to take a twist.
Seeking to learn more about Pearl Burton,
we turned back to the paper trail,
where we discovered that his father,
a man named Hal Burton, had a very complicated life.
BURTON: "Hal Burton, colored, is a gay lothario,
has caused the hearts of many jealous
husbands to beat with anguish on account of
attentions shown their wives by Hal.
Last night, Hal and the wife of one of John Williams
were taking a promenade in the West End when they
were discovered by the irate husband,
and he seized a club and proceeded to give
Burton a beating.
Both parties were arrested and will be fined for
the disturbance raised."
God, dog!
So the dog is inherited, too.
GATES: Papa was a rolling stone.
BURTON: "A gay lothario," in the vernacular of the day.
GATES: Isn't that amazing?
I mean, my daddy would say,
"Well, he came by it naturally."
BURTON: He came by it naturally.
GATES: Your great-great-grandfather
had a reputation as a ladies' man.
What's it like to learn that?
Could you ever have imagined?
I mean, you can't make this stuff up, right?
BURTON: No, you cannot, no, you cannot.
GATES: There was one more detail to share with LeVar,
another facet of Hal Burton that was almost
impossible to believe.
In 1867, just two years after the end of the Civil War,
the Reconstruction Acts gave African American men
in the occupied former Confederate states
the right to vote.
Just one year later, Black men were elected
to state office in Arkansas for the very first time.
It was the beginning of a wave of Black political
representation and LeVar's ancestor was a part of it.
In 1886 he became a representative in
the Arkansas General Assembly.
BURTON: He was one of those Negro politicians.
GATES: That's right.
BURTON: During Reconstruction.
GATES: Yeah, great.
BURTON: That was elected into office.
He was, he was, in spite of his phila,
his philandering,
he was popular enough to get elected to public office.
GATES: Yeah and the women couldn't vote, remember?
How does it make you feel?
Not only do you have two generations of superintendents.
BURTON: Yes.
GATES: You've got literacy going back at least to 1880,
and you have someone who was elected to represent
the Black community.
Your father's family was extraordinary.
BURTON: Wow, wow,
never in a million years would I ever
have imagined that you would find information
like this for my family.
It's overwhelming.
GATES: Hal's career as a legislator began
with great promise,
he proposed the bill to fight racial discrimination,
but he faced steep resistance from white politicians
intent on rolling back the gains of Reconstruction,
by implementing laws specifically designed
to suppress the Black vote.
These laws would prove devastatingly effective,
and Hal would serve only one term.
There's no evidence that he ever ran
for re-election 'cause you know it wasn't going to happen.
BURTON: No, no.
GATES: But even so, Hal didn't slow down.
Please turn the page.
LeVar, this is a page from the 1910 census for
Pine Bluff, Arkansas.
This is 23 years after Hal's time as a legislator.
Would you please read that transcribed portion?
BURTON: "Hal Burton, Head of Household, Black,
age 56, married for nine years.
Born, Arkansas.
Lucy Burton, wife, Black, age 44.
Occupation, sewing.
Mattie, daughter, Black, age nine.
Helen, daughter, Black, age seven."
GATES: There is your great-great-grandfather,
Hal, living with his third wife, whose name is Lucy,
and their two daughters.
BURTON: Right.
GATES: After his time as a legislator,
your ancestor worked as a merchant.
Then he managed the saloon,
and then he turned to farming.
BURTON: Wow.
GATES: And that census is the last record we have of your
great-great-grandfather.
He likely died sometime between 1910 and 1920
in Pine Bluff, Arkansas.
He sounds like a very energetic,
imaginative man.
BURTON: He does indeed.
GATES: Yeah. BURTON: Wow.
GATES: Now, LeVar, does learning about all this
about your father's roots change anything about the
way you see your father and the way you imagine
a new relationship?
BURTON: It does, I feel like for the first time
in my life, we have something in common.
GATES: Mmm, mm-hmm. BURTON: Right?
And I feel like I want to share that with him.
GATES: We'd already traced Wes Studi's paternal roots
back to a heroine of the Cherokee Nation, now,
turning to his mother's ancestry,
we focused on an event that transformed every family in
that nation, the "Trail of Tears"
the forced removal beginning in 1830 that drove
roughly 60,000 Native people
from their homes in the Eastern United States
to unknown territory in the West.
It's a tragedy that Wes has long struggled to comprehend.
GATES: So when did you learn about the Trail of Tears?
How old were you?
STUDI: Um, high school, probably.
GATES: Mm-hm.
STUDI: I would have been 13, 14 years old.
Uh, yeah.
GATES: Do you remember what your reaction was?
STUDI: Uh, shameful.
I was ashamed that it had happened to us that way,
you know?
GATES: Mm-hmm.
STUDI: Yeah, I felt, uh, that it was,
I was ashamed of it.
Uh, how did we let that happen,
is, uh, my reaction.
GATES: Wes told me that these feelings ultimately
evolved into a kind of curiosity,
he studied the Trail of Tears in detail,
even reading first-hand accounts written by survivors.
But the names of his own ancestors who had endured
the ordeal had been lost.
And at first, we couldn't find them either.
Then one of our researchers uncovered
an application for Cherokee Membership
filed by Wes' great-grandmother in Oklahoma in 1906.
It lists the names of Wes's family all the way back to
the early 1800s and places them in a very significant location.
STUDI: "Nancy Catcher, grandmother.
Where were they born?
In the Cherokee Nation state of Georgia."
GATES: In the Cherokee Nation-state of Georgia.
Wes, you just met your maternal
third great-grandmother,
brother, your great, great, great grandmother.
STUDI: Oh.
GATES: Her name was Nancy Catcher,
also known as "Big Nancy".
You ever hear of her?
STUDI: No.
GATES: And you notice where she was born?
STUDI: Yeah.
GATES: Learning Nancy's birthplace unlocked the story
of how she experienced the Trail of Tears,
leading us to a claim that she submitted
to the United States government in 1842.
Thousands of claims like this one were filed
by indigenous people seeking compensation for
what had been taken from them by white settlers.
STUDI: "One steer, three years old, two yearlings.
One horse.
Whole amount: $187."
GATES: What's it like to see this in black and white?
You know about it in the abstract,
but what's it like to see an actual case involving
your actual ancestor and what she actually lost?
STUDI: Well it, well it pisses me off.
It always has, but, uh, this, it's more, uh,
it's more succinct.
Now I know where it was.
GATES: Yeah.
STUDI: And I wonder if the people are still there,
who took over her place.
GATES: I'm sure they are.
STUDI: Mm, might be worth a trip.
(laughs).
GATES: Nancy's claim not only describes the
property she owned,
it also names the group,
or detachment, with whom she traveled west.
There were more than a dozen such detachments,
but Nancy's was led by the
Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation,
and with that information in hand,
we were able to map the precise route that she took,
a journey that stretched over 700 miles allowing Wes
to engage with what his ancestors were forced to endure.
STUDI: I've been to some of the places, uh,
that she passed through.
GATES: Hm.
STUDI: I've been to many of these places,
seen them, and I don't know, uh, let's see,
um, yeah, yeah, it's, um, that's the most northern route,
and it was in the wintertime.
GATES: Yeah.
STUDI: They waited until the, uh,
uh, ground was a little more frozen and, uh, hard,
easier to walk on, rather than mud, uh, a lot of places.
GATES: Yep.
And she was in her late 20s or early 30s when she
made that journey,
what's it like to see that,
to know the actual route?
STUDI: It's, it's good to know.
I, it's, it's good to know particulars and have a
real story about how, um, we got to where we are
because a, a lot of our family has been doing this
genealogy thing, and trying to figure out this net.
GATES: Right.
STUDI: And so, uh, I'm bringing a, uh, uh,
wealth of information, thanks to you and your program here.
GATES: Good. STUDI: Uh.
GATES: And I know it's gotta be painful.
STUDI: Well, we've lived with that pain
for a long time, you know?
GATES: Yeah.
STUDI: Uh, so it, it's, uh, not something that
stabs at the heart right now, you know?
GATES: Yeah.
We had a final detail to share with Wes.
Nancy arrived in Oklahoma in February of 1839.
12 years later, she appears in what's known
as the "Drennen Roll" the first record enumerating
the Cherokee Nation in the West.
And the family is living just ten miles from where
Wes' mother would be born almost a century later.
What do you think your mom would have
made of all this?
STUDI: I think she would just have been,
she would have said something like,
"I'm sorry they didn't tell me this."
GATES: Yeah.
STUDI: And I can kind of echo that, you know?
GATES: Well.
STUDI: But I'm glad we found out something.
GATES: Let me ask you the obvious question,
why do you think these stories weren't passed on?
STUDI: Uh, well, these days it's called
colonization, socialization,
assimilation, a, uh, survival.
Essentially survival and all the other things
go along with it, because, uh, uh, they made this trip,
this family of people right here made that trip
in order for me to be sitting here talking to you.
I mean, there's the idea of, uh,
coming generations that, uh, that you have to keep in mind.
GATES: Yeah.
STUDI: For your own people to continue to be.
GATES: Right, ultimate urge is to survive.
STUDI: Ultimate urge.
GATES: Yeah. STUDI: Yeah.
GATES: The paper trail had run out for Wes and LeVar,
it was time to show them their full family trees.
Now filled with people who's names they'd never heard before.
STUDI: Wow, that's quite a tree.
BURTON: This is the gift of a lifetime.
It's the gift of, of generations of sweat and
blood and toil and dream.
GATES: For each, it was a moment of awe,
offering the chance to see how their own lives were part
of a larger family story.
STUDI: I'm forever grateful for two of those who made,
made it possible for me to be here today.
And, um, I work towards making
it a good place for those,
my progeny that,
uh, will be here in years, in the future.
BURTON: I didn't know anything about myself
critically before today,
and, and this information has changed me,
Doctor, I got to tell you, it has changed me.
It changes the way I see myself.
It changes my relationship to my family.
GATES: Mm-hm.
BURTON: I am forever changed.
I am forever changed.
GATES: That's the end of our search for the
ancestors of LeVar Burton
and Wes Studi,
join me next time when we unlock the secrets of the
past for new guests on another episode of
"Finding Your Roots."