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Finding Your Roots

20121h 0m / epDocumentary

First aired

March 24, 2012

6.2

TMDB Score

62% match · 21 votes

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S01 · E02

John Lewis and Cory Booker

Season 1 · Mar 24, 2012 · 1h 0m

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E01▶

Branford Marsalis and Harry Connick, Jr.

Mar 24, 2012 · 1h 0m

E02Playing

John Lewis and Cory Booker

Mar 24, 2012 · 1h 0m

E03▶

Barbara Walters and Geoffrey Canada

Apr 1, 2012 · 1h 0m

E04▶

Kyra Sedgwick and Kevin Bacon

Apr 7, 2012 · 1h 0m

E05▶

Rick Warren, Angela Buchdahl and Yasir Qadhi

Apr 14, 2012 · 1h 0m

E06▶

Robert Downey, Jr. and Maggie Gyllenhaal

Apr 28, 2012 · 1h 0m

E07▶

Samuel L. Jackson, Condoleezza Rice and Ruth Simmons

Apr 29, 2012 · 1h 0m

E08▶

Martha Stewart, Margaret Cho and Sanjay Gupta

May 6, 2012 · 1h 0m

E09▶

John Legend and Wanda Sykes

May 13, 2012 · 1h 0m

E10▶

Adrian Grenier, Michelle Rodriguez and Linda Chavez

May 20, 2012 · 1h 0m

In this episode, we feature two African American politicians from different generations and opposite backgrounds. John Lewis grew up in a sharecropping family in rural Georgia, while Cory Booker was raised in an affluent, all-white New Jersey suburb. Although both men have devoted their lives to the betterment of African-American people, neither of them knows much about their own ancestors. In this episode, we introduce Booker to his white great-grandfather, a man he never knew, and move Lewis to tears over the extraordinary ambitions and accomplishments of his slave ancestors..

About the Series

Documentary

Synopsis

Noted Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has been helping people discover long-lost relatives hidden for generations within the branches of their family trees. Professor Gates utilizes a team of genealogists to reconstruct the paper trail left behind by our ancestors and the world’s leading geneticists to decode our DNA and help us travel thousands of years into the past to discover the origins of our earliest forebears.

First aired: March 24, 2012
Last aired: April 14, 2026
Seasons: 13 seasons · 127 episodes
Status: Returning Series
Original language: English
Network: PBS