“At the genome level,” Gates said, “all human beings are 99.99% the same. And there are demagogues that want to make us forget the fact that we are all created in the image of God.”

Gates was in Tulsa on Friday morning as the final speaker for Tulsa Town Hall’s 2021-22 season. He spoke to a full house in the Tulsa PAC’s Chapman Music Hall and took part in an informal question-and-answer session with students from Tulsa Community College prior to his lecture.

Gates, a literary critic and professor at Harvard University, has written more than 20 books and earned 59 honorary degrees for his work in exploring and expounding upon the history and contributions of Black culture.

However, he is perhaps best known as the host of “Finding Your Roots,” the popular PBS series in which he guides celebrities through the often densely packed branches of their family trees.

Gates said his interest in his own family history began in 1960, at the funeral of his grandfather, a man so light-skinned that the children in the family secretly referred to him as “Casper.”

After the funeral, Gates’ father took him and his brother to the top floor of their grandfather’s house to show them a collection of old ledger books that Gates’ grandfather had used as scrapbooks.

“He started turning through the pages until he found what he was looking for,” Gates said. “He pointed to a clipping, then showed us a photograph of a woman. He said he wanted us to remember this person.”

She was Jane Gates, Gates’ great-grandmother. She was a midwife, and the headline for her obituary described her as “estimable colored woman.”

“The last thing I did before I went to bed that night,” Gates recalled, “was to get out the big red dictionary on my desk and look up the word ‘estimable.’ When I saw what it meant (worthy of great respect), I thought maybe some day I could be estimable, too.”

Like many African Americans, Gates was galvanized by the story told in Alex Haley’s book “Roots” and by the landmark TV mini-series adapted from it.

It wasn’t until 2000, when DNA testing had developed to the point where it could determine the various strands of a person’s ancestry, that the idea for what would become “Finding Your Roots” was born.

Originally, Gates focused on famous African Americans, such as astronaut Mae Jemison, composer Quincy Jones, actress Whoopi Goldberg and media mogul Oprah Winfrey.

“Why did I want Oprah (to be in the first series)?” Gates asked of the Town Hall crowd. “Simple — I needed $6 million in order to do the series.”

Gates later expanded the scope of the program after receiving a letter from a woman of Russian and Jewish heritage, accusing him of racism because the show did not include people of other nationalities and cultures.

“Finding Your Roots” is one of the highest-rated series on PBS, something that Gates attributes to the fact that the United States is, in the words of Martin Luther King Jr., “a nation of exiles.”

“Everyone here is from somewhere else,” Gates said. “And what truly makes America great is the fact that we welcome those people who are willing to risk everything to a find a home in this ‘city on a hill,’ as Ronald Reagan called it.”

Gates believes that one of the most effective ways to heal up the divisions in our society is to use the history and science involved in genealogy. Students would be tasked with searching through databases of census records to create their own family trees, then follow that with DNA tests to reveal one’s true ancestry.

“After all,” Gates said, “your favorite subject is always yourself. And when you open that vault of history and stories of your ancestors, you will discover information about who you are in ways you could never imagine before.

“Your genome is a walking family tree,” he said. “And being able to help let these stories live is why I’m so honored to host ‘Finding Your Roots.’”

Featured video: Tulsa Race Massacre graves researchers need DNA, genealogies to tie burials to victims