Henry Louis Gates Jr. accepts medal named for Thomas Jefferson

Henry Louis Gates Jr. was awarded the 2026 Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal, a recognition presented by the University of Virginia and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello for public figures who excel at pursuits held in high regard by the founding father.

Gates, Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, was honored in the category of “citizen leadership,” with organizers noting his numerous books and documentary films on Black history.

Gates’ recent book titles include “The Black Box: Writing the Race” (2024) and “The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song” (2021). In 2001, he discovered the first novel written by a Black female author: Hannah Crafts’ “The Bondwoman’s Narrative (1850s).

Recent works for the screen include “Black and Jewish America: An Interwoven History” (2026) and the twelfth season of “Finding Your Roots,” both available on PBS. In his best-selling memoir “Colored People” (1994), Gates recalled his own roots in Piedmont, West Virginia, where he grew up amid the desegregation of the 1950s and ’60s.

“I have spent my life studying the documents that made America, and the lives that were excluded from them,” Gates said in his acceptance speech. “So, you might wonder what it means to me to receive a medal bearing the name of Thomas Jefferson.”

He paused. “It means everything.”

Also receiving medals this year were (in the category of law) U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. ’76, J.D. ’79, and (in architecture) Jeanne Gang, Kajima Professor in Practice of Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Medals were presented April 14 in a ceremony at the University of Virginia, an institution founded by Jefferson in 1819. Honorees also attended a dinner on April 13, the 283rd anniversary of Jefferson’s birth, at the third U.S. president’s Monticello estate.

“This year’s medalists demonstrate how creativity, scholarship, and principled leadership strengthen American institutions and deepen our constitutional democracy,” said Jane Kamensky, an emerita professor in Harvard’s Department of History who now serves as president and CEO of Monticello.

The sprawling property, located just a few miles southeast of the university in Charlottesville, Virginia, operates as an independent nonprofit dedicated to advancing the ideals Jefferson formalized as primary drafter of the Declaration of Independence.

In his speech, Gates spoke of Jefferson as “a deeply, painfully contradictory man who reached into the political philosophy of his age and pulled out something that had never before been made the foundation of a nation-state: the radical proposition that rights are not granted by kings or churches or bloodlines, but are inherent in the human person.”

Gates went on to praise Monticello’s archivists for conducting “the hard, unglamorous, morally serious work of recovering the full record” of Jefferson’s legacy. As detailed by historians such as Annette Gordon-Reed, Carl M. Loeb University Professor and professor of History at Harvard, and supplemented by DNA analysis, the man who wrote “all men are equated equal” and enslaved hundreds at his Virginia estate, fathered seven children with Sally Hemings, a woman he enslaved for many decades.

“What we need is to grasp and hold the whole man, and through him, the whole inheritance,” Gates told his audience. “To say, This was a flawed and visionary human being who lived inside the brutal contradictions of his time, and who nonetheless helped set in motion forces nobody could contain. Forces that, two and a half centuries later, brought a kid from Piedmont, West Virginia, whose ancestors were enslaved not far from here, to stand on this ground and receive this honor.”