Join the Newberry in honoring Henry Louis Gates, Jr. for his outstanding contributions to the humanities.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. Emmy, DuPont, and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, cultural critic, and institution builder, Professor Gates has published numerous books and produced and hosted an array of documentary films, including The Black Church (PBS), Frederick Douglass: In Five Speeches (HBO), Gospel (PBS), and Great Migrations (PBS). Finding Your Roots, Gates’s groundbreaking genealogy and genetics series, now in its eleventh season on PBS, was nominated for a Primetime Emmy (2024). His latest book is The Black Box: Writing the Race (Penguin Random House, 2024), named by The New York Sunday Times Book Review as one the “100 Best Books of the Year.” He is at work on a new series exploring “The History of Blacks and Jews.”
Gates is a recipient of numerous honorary degrees, including most recently, one from his graduate alma mater, the University of Cambridge, and The London School of Economics. Gates was a member of the first class awarded “genius grants” by the MacArthur Foundation in 1981, and in 1998 he became the first African American scholar to be awarded the National Humanities Medal, conferred by President William Jefferson Clinton. In 2001 he discovered the first novel written by a Black female author, The Bondwoman’s Narrative, by Hannah Craft, the holograph manuscript of which he donated to Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book Library.
The Newberry Library Award is presented annually to recognize achievement in the humanities in the tradition of the Newberry, which has cultivated the life of the mind since its founding in 1887. Past recipients include filmmaker Ken Burns; Ira Glass and This American Life; Lonnie G. Bunch III, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution; and Carla Hayden, 14th Librarian of Congress, among others.
5 pm: Cocktails
6:30 pm: Presentation of the Newberry Library Award and Conversation with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Dinner to Follow
For more information about the event, please contact Jennifer Shulman at shulmanj@newberry.org or (312) 255-3594.
Purchase Tickets
All purchases include tickets to the program and dinner. Table purchasers will be recognized on Newberry donor plaques; Sponsor table purchasers receive priority seating during the program and dinner.
The estimated fair market value of benefits provided is $125 per person.