Place of Birth: Baltimore, Maryland
Date of Birth: September 18, 1950
Ethnicity: African-American (including Ivory Coast, Ghana, Angola, Cameroon, Congo, and Senegal), English
Anna Deavere Smith is an American actress, playwright, and professor.
Anna’s paternal grandparents were Deaver Young Smith (the son of Stanley Smith and Mary) and Virginia S. Biggs (the daughter of Calvin H. Biggs and Julia A.).
A DNA test taken by the show Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (2014) stated that Anna’s genetic ancestry is:
*50.7% European
*48.9% African
In his 2016 book about the show, Finding Your Roots, Season 2: The Official Companion to the PBS Series, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. wrote that Anna’s African ancestry was mainly from the Ivory Coast and Ghana, as well as Angola, Cameroon, Congo, and Sengal, and that 41% of her European ancestry is from Great Britain, with remote Scandinavian, Finnish, Russian, Italian, and Greek.
Source: Genealogy of Anna Deavere Smith (focusing on her father’s side) – https://www.geni.com
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