By RODNEY HO/ rho@ajc.com, originally filed March 23, 2015
Ever since his childhood, Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., has regarded U.S. Rep. John Lewis with awe.
“He’s a civil rights hero,” said Gates, who is also director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research in Cambridge, Mass. “I watched him speak on TV when I was 13. I saw him at the March on Washington. He spent his life talking about injustice and inequality.”
Thanks to Gates’ PBS new series, “Finding Your Roots,” he was able to give something back to Lewis: family history the Atlanta Democrat had known nothing about.
In an episode airing locally on GPB Sunday at 9 p.m., Gates explores the ancestry of both 72-year-old Lewis and a black politician from a younger generation, 42-year-old Cory Booker, mayor of Newark, N.J.
Gates' researchers dug up the a marriage certificate of Lewis' great-great-grandparents, Tobias and Elizabeth Carter, from Dec. 16, 1865, just 10 days after slavery was abolished. They also discovered Tobias' voter registration paperwork from Alabama in 1867, nearly a century before the ballot box became accessible to their now-prominent great-great-grandson.
During Reconstruction, freed slaves in the South were allowed to vote. But within a few years, Alabama and other states began blocking blacks from voting through a combination of “Jim Crow” laws and intimidation.
It wasn’t until passage of the 1965 federal Voting Rights Act, Lewis said, that he, his parents and grandparents could vote in Lewis’ native state of Alabama. Before then, he said, “In Alabama, there was a poll tax. You had to own land. You had to pass a so-called leadership test.”
During the show’s filming, Lewis cried when Gates showed him his great-great-grandfather’s voter registration papers. “It’s just incredible,” he said after composing himself. “This is just too much!”
When Lewis watched a portion of the episode in New York City at a special Lincoln Center screening this past Monday, he said he cried again.
“I’ll probably cry one more time when I watch it on TV,” he said in a phone interview earlier this week from his Washington, D.C., office. “It’s been an unbelievable journey to travel to discover so much about my family, especially on my mother’s side, to know that my family has such a rich history going back to the days of slavery.
