When Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. arrived at Yale University to attend classes, there were two undergraduate students who owned cars. Gates was one of them. Find out which member of the Ford family was the other, as Gates sits down for a chat with Ford CEO Jim Farley for the latest episode of his DRIVE podcast.
Gates, one of America’s most prominent scholars in African American studies and host of the hit PBS docuseries “Finding Your Roots,” talks to Farley about his love of cars, the importance of understanding one's ancestry, and what the automotive industry (and Ford specifically) represented for the African American community in the early 20th century.
“The automobile changed the face of Black America because they were people who were hemmed in,” Gates explains. “Black people under slavery and Jim Crow lived a claustrophobic life, a claustrophobic social life. And the automobile gave them that freedom.”