Finding Your Roots — Season 1, Episode 7: Samuel L. Jackson, Condoleezza Rice and Ruth Simmons

Episode synopsis

Samuel L. Jackson, Condoleezza Rice and Brown University President Ruth Simmons have each climbed to the pinnacle of their profession, yet each started life as a second class citizen in the Jim Crow south. In this episode we will use DNA to investigate family mysteries: where do they come from in Africa, and who are the white men in their family trees?

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.
• E2John Lewis and Cory Booker
• E3Barbara Walters and Geoffrey Canada
• E4Kyra Sedgwick and Kevin Bacon
• E5Rick Warren, Angela Buchdahl and Yasir Qadhi
• E6Robert Downey, Jr. and Maggie Gyllenhaal
• E8Martha Stewart, Margaret Cho and Sanjay Gupta
• E9John Legend and Wanda Sykes
• E10Adrian Grenier, Michelle Rodriguez and Linda Chavez