Finding Your Roots — Season 1, Episode 2: John Lewis and Cory Booker

Episode synopsis

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 Finding Your Roots

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.

More episodes from Season 1

• E1Branford Marsalis and Harry Connick, Jr.
• E3Barbara Walters and Geoffrey Canada
• E4Kyra Sedgwick and Kevin Bacon
• E5Rick Warren, Angela Buchdahl and Yasir Qadhi
• E6Robert Downey, Jr. and Maggie Gyllenhaal
• E7Samuel L. Jackson, Condoleezza Rice and Ruth Simmons
• E8Martha Stewart, Margaret Cho and Sanjay Gupta
• E9John Legend and Wanda Sykes
• E10Adrian Grenier, Michelle Rodriguez and Linda Chavez