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Early Wednesday morning, Vester Lee Flanagan II, reportedly upset over being fired from Virginia news station WDBJ7 in 2013 as well as the June church massacre in Charleston, S.C., targeted two of his former colleagues and fatally shot them during a live broadcast.

In his PBS documentary Black in Latin America, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. reported that Cuba’s is a culture in which blackness is still in a battle for expression, inclusion and true equality, for an equal place at the social and cultural table.ditor’s note: With the U.S. Embassy reopening in Havana on July 20, The Root is giving some insight and perspective into the lives of Afro-Cubans who suffer discrimination and economic distress, even in the midst of the Cuban revolution that Fidel Castro declared put an end to racism. Harvard professor and The Root Chairman Henry Louis Gates...

William Ellison's fascinating story is told by Michael Johnson and James L. Roark in their book, Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South. At his death on the eve of the Civil War, Ellison was wealthier than nine out of 10 white people in South Carolina. He was born in 1790 as a slave on a plantation in the Fairfield District of the state, far up country from Charleston. In 1816, at the age of 26, he bought his own freedom, and soon bought his wife and their child. In 1822, he opened his own cotton...

Movie star Ben Affleck has another nine slaveholder ancestors from Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia, according to publicly available Census records and genealogy research conducted by Breitbart News. Last week, Affleck admitted that he successfully pressured Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates to edit his Georgia slaveholding ancestor, Benjamin Cole, out of an episode of the PBS series “Finding Your Roots” that featured his family history. This brings the number of Affleck’s known slaveholder ancestors to 12, who owned a total of 214 slaves. The relative ease with which Breitbart News was able to find these nine additional slaveholding...

The North Korean email hack of Sony continues to haunt Hollywood. The leftist group WikiLeaks recently posted a searchable set of the documents and the London Daily Mail found a new scandal subject: Ben Affleck ... and PBS. Harvard black-studies professor Henry Louis Gates produces a show for New York PBS superstation WNET called "Finding Your Roots." Gates tells celebrities about their ancestors. A few years back, NBC had a show just like this called "Who Do You Think You Are?" It's now on cable, on TLC. Why PBS believes it's right to use taxpayer money to copycat commercial television...

Ben Affleck has at least three ancestors who owned slaves including a wealthy landowner who bought a young boy who he appears to have set to work in his tanning business. The Batman star's distant family can be traced to Connecticut and in 1728 they paid 80 pounds for a slave called Tobe who they kept until he was grown up. The bill of sale refers to Tobe as a 'negro boy' which the previous owner 'sold as my proper estate'. Tobe's owner was called Nathaniel Stanley and was known as a smart man of 'respected piety and evangelical sentiments'...

Ben Affleck insisted on censoring the fact that one of his ancestors owned slaves from PBS show “Finding Your Roots,” the Sony email hack has revealed. In a hacked Sony email from July 22, 2014, now available on WikiLeaks, the show’s host, Henry Louis Gates Jr., writes to Sony USA chief Michael Lynton asking for advice: “One of our guests has asked us to edit out something about one of his ancestors–the fact that he owned slaves. Now, four or five of our guests this season descend from slave owners, including Ken Burns. We’ve never had anyone ever try to...

The film star Ben Affleck asked television chiefs to hide the fact that one of his ancestors was a slave owner, according to a newly published batch of hacked emails involving the media giant Sony.

Ben Affleck asked the producers of PBS’ Finding Your Roots television show to edit out details of an ancestor who owned slaves, according to a Sony internal email exchange leaked this week. In an email sent to Sony CEO Michael Lynton shortly before the show’s second season premiere, Harvard professor and Finding Your Roots host Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote that an unnamed “megastar” had asked producers to “edit out something about one of his ancestors – the fact that he owned slaves.”

Ben Affleck persuaded the producers of Finding Your Roots to edit out details of how his ancestors were slave owners even though it was a breach of PBS editorial rules. The new Batman star, who supports a number of liberal causes, objected to the ancestry TV show airing how his distant relations were racist, leaked Sony emails reveal. Instead viewers were shown heartwarming stories of how his third grandfather was a mystic in the Civil War and how his sixth grandfather was a patriot who fought in the American Revolution. Daily Mail Online has reviewed a transcript of the show...

Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik ascribed blame in a murder case to radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh - thereby labeling him an accomplice - while conceding he has no proof. At a press conference in the summer of 2009, President Barack Obama admitted to not having all the facts about an incident involving his friend Henry Louis Gates and the Cambridge Police. He then proceeded to declare that the Police "acted stupidly" anyway. Gates was belligerent with his arresting officer Sgt. James Crowley, called him a "racist" and then demanded an apology. Crowley refused to issue one. Sheriff Dupnik...

When Henry Louis Gates Jr., a prominent Harvard professor of African-American studies, was arrested for disorderly conduct by a white Cambridge police officer last summer, President Obama led a chorus of critics denouncing the local Police Department. Gates, who is African-American, described his arrest as a “teaching moment’’ about race relations in America. His case drew national attention to the relationship between policing and race. Obama wound up hosting Gates and the officer who arrested him for a so-called beer summit at the White House. And the arrest, for some, raised the question of whether officers disproportionately arrest blacks for...

Ben Affleck went searching for his roots and ended up finding more than he bargained for. And he admits it. "After an exhaustive search of my ancestry for Finding Your Roots, it was discovered that one of my distant relatives was an owner of slaves," Affleck wrote on Facebook Tuesday, breaking his silence on the controversy kicked up by a leaked Sony email that revealed the actor specifically requested that that limb of his family tree be left out of his episode of the PBS series Finding Your Roots. "I didn't want any television show about my family to include...

From 1948 to 1961, there was a show called "This Is Your Life," hosted by Ralph Edwards. In it, an unsuspecting celebrity was lured to a place by a friend or family member where Edwards would surprise them. People from the celebrity's past would then come out one by one and tell stories of the celebrity's early life. A modern-day version of that program is "Finding Your Roots," the latest in a brilliant series about race, identity and heritage hosted by Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Scheduled to air September 23 through November 25 on PBS. Check your local...

For all his accomplishments, Henry Louis Gates might be doomed to being best remembered as the man whose arrest led to the "Beer Summit." But the Harvard prof had something surprising to say on today's Morning Joe: Gates questioned the need for affirmative action for affluent African-Americans, saying instead such programs should seek to help poor people, regardless of race. Gates made the personal political, citing the case of his own two daughters, whom Gates described as having a "privileged" life." Do they really need to benefit from affirmative action?", asked Gates rhetorically. View the video here.

Can something as tragic and immoral as slavery become, if not less tragic, then noble, even righteous, in the telling? It can and it does in the capable hands of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., whose brilliant and compelling new six-part series for PBS called "The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross" premieres Oct. 22 (check local listings). Gates, whose previous series, "African American Lives," chronicled the heritage of some famous and notable African Americans, takes us on a new journey that begins 500 years ago. While some of the history is familiar, Gates re-tells it in a...

Isn't it ironic that President Obama, having acquired the highest office in the land by agitating — all his political life — against privilege and discrimination, is now systematically wielding his executive power lawlessly to favor his friends and punish his enemies? We are witnessing an unmistakable pattern from Obama and those under his command of establishing different rules for different groups of Americans. I'm not just referring to his opportunistic championing of the "poor" and his vendetta against the "wealthy" or his relentless vilification of "fat cat banks," big corporations, private jet owners and the insurance, oil, coal, natural...

Obama: Police who arrested professor 'acted stupidly' 2009 (CNN) -- President Obama said that police in Cambridge, Massachusetts, "acted stupidly" in arresting a prominent black Harvard professor last week after a confrontation at the man's home. Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. talks Wednesday about his ordeal with Cambridge police.

We've all heard the story of the "40 acres and a mule" promise to former slaves. It's a staple of black history lessons, and it's the name of Spike Lee's film company. The promise was the first systematic attempt to provide a form of reparations to newly freed slaves, and it was astonishingly radical for its time, proto-socialist in its implications. In fact, such a policy would be radical in any country today: the federal government's massive confiscation of private property -- some 400,000 acres -- formerly owned by Confederate land owners, and its methodical redistribution to former black slaves....

...In 1964, in West Virginia a fourteen-year-old Henry Louis Gates Jr. broke his hip and went to a doctor who x‑rayed his knee, which was also in pain. The doctor saw nothing wrong with his knee and deemed his pain psychosomatic. "He said that I had a nervous breakdown because I was an overachiever," Gates said. "He said colored people weren't supposed to do as well as I had done. I had been stressed out and there was nothing wrong with my knee. White guy thought I was imagining things. And that's why I walk with a cane and I've...