Finding Your Roots to learn about his genealogy — and a surprising parallel emerged.The host of the PBS documentary series, Henry Louis Gates Jr., revealed to RuPaul that his great-great-grandparents Isaac and Annie had been marriage pioneers.
According to discovered documentation, they were wed in 1870 — just five years after the end of the Civil War, which marked the end of slavery and the beginning of when African-Americans could legally be married in the United States."If you were a slave, legal marriage did not exist because you were property," Gates explained. "So after the Civil War, lots of Black people who had been in loving relationships got married as soon as they could.