African American Lives

Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. begins to piece together the family histories of four of the participants. In doing so, the episode explores the post-World War I "Great Migration" of African American families from the South to northern cities like Detroit and Chicago, as well as the experiences of those families that stayed in the South during the period of Jim Crow segregation.

From the early 20th century to the end of the Civil War, a look at how African Americans defined their freedom after slavery. Dr. Gates learns that courthouse records of land acquisitions, documents from the Freedmen's Bureau and the 1870 census prove important resources for tracing the participants' lineage through Reconstruction.

Genealogical research is more difficult moving back from the Civil War through the Colonial era. One participant visits the plantation where her ancestors toiled. Another is shocked to learn that a relative, though a soldier, was neither African American nor fought for the Union. Genealogists explain the difficulties inherent when African Americans have spent more generations enslaved than free.

Professor Gates visits scientists around the country using DNA analysis to trace ancestral roots. He and one participant make the last leg of the journey, back to Africa, visiting the West African port from which the participant's patrilineal ancestor was likely shipped into slavery, and meeting tribal elders whose DNA suggests are the participant's cousins.