Emotional moments await actors Tony Danza and Terry Crews in “Fighters,” a new episode of Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates Jr. The show airs Tues., Feb. 8, at 8 p.m. (ET) on PBS.
Tony Danza, Gates’s first guest, was born in New York as Anthony Salvatore Iadanza. His paternal grandparents both came from Campania, Italy. The actor learns an immigrant granduncle, a Brooklyn saloonkeeper, was arrested for running a “disorderly house.” He is surprised to hear that his grandparents went back to Italy for a few years before making a permanent return to the U.S.
Gates traces Danza’s Italian roots to 1774. “I would like to think that they would be proud of me, but I’m nothing compared to what these people went through and accomplished,” says Danza.
Terry Crews discovers that his maternal grandmother left rural Georgia as a teenager and traveled to Flint, Michigan, to live with her grandfather, an entrepreneur. The actor is amazed to learn how family members were ripped apart by enslavers only to be reunited again shortly before Emancipation. “It’s beautiful,” says Crews. “They found a way to stick together!” Gates also sheds light on Crews’s absent grandfather. “My father never talked about him,” he explains. “I am actually connected to my past, and I was never connected to it before today.”