TELEVISION
Houstonian Michael Strahan digs up his family tree in the next episode of “Finding Your Roots.”
Louis Gates’ PBS series “Finding Your Roots,” in which wellknown figures trace their ancestry, always is a fascinating look into the past through a distinctly personal lens. The subjects may be celebrities living the high life now but their ancestors nearly always reflect a more hard-scrabble familial history.
In “Freedom Tales,” in which two African-American performers — former pro football player and current “Good Morning America” co-host Michael Strahan and “Law & Order” actress S. Epatha Merkerson — unearth the twisted roots of their families’ previously unknown slave-era history and, in Houston-born Strahan’s case, that heritage runs deep into the loamy East Texas soil.
As Gates and Strahan note at the top of the show, many African-Americans of Strahan’s age (he’s 47), don’t know much about their lineage beyond their grandparents. The tumult of the slavery and post-slavery eras often makes it hard to excavate this history.
In Strahan’s case, this is especially unfortunate since he has so much to be proud of. His ancestors, born into bondage in the Kentucky-Tennessee region before being brought to East Texas in what’s called the Second Middle
Passage, went on to establish a thriving small city, Shankleville in Newton County, one of Texas’ famed “freedmen’s towns” where former slaves lived. Meanwhile, the discovery of a white ancestor ties Strahan to a European past that he didn’t know about either. He was dimly aware that he had non-African ancestry but was ignorant of the details.
Similarly, Merkerson’s story leads her to face her Louisiana heritage and to wrestle with the reality of how difficult the slave and post-slave eras were.
Yet seeing Strahan’s eyes light up as Gates leads him through his very personal history — leaving both men marveling that Strahan had never known of any of this before, that these weren’t stories told around the family dinner table — encompasses everything that makes “Finding Your Roots” such a pleasure. That this particular case also is so intimately tied to East Texas makes it even more of a compelling watch for Houstonians.