Moving On Up

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. meets actor Sheryl Lee Ralph and historian Lonnie Bunch—two African Americans whose ancestors broke boundaries as they moved from slavery to freedom. Traveling from plantations in the south to cities in the north, Gates uses his detective skills to piece together the lives of women and men who survived unimaginable ordeals—and emerged to forge thriving families.

Sheryl's discovers her third great grandparents, a mixed race couple, got married in 1837.

Lonnie learns about his grandfather Jesse who served on a school committee for the local school of Black students. However, his role was eventually terminated during the rise of Jim Crow, and he ended up purchasing his own farmland, the same land that Lonnie visited in his teenage years.