greater experience of his Africanness on the ship than he would have on the land, where, as Russell Warren Howe notes, he would have identified with clan, village, region, and religion before identifying as African.

Kunta's experience of his African identity is forged by the suffering he shares with the other men—all Africans—in the hold of the ship and by their common desire to resist the men who hold them there—all Europeans. The men comfort each other, pass on information, and plan their resistance. Through these communications, they become a community. Haley writes:

The relaying of any information from whatever source seemed about the only function that would justify their staying alive. When there was no news, the men would talk of their families, their villages, their professions, their farms, their hunts. And more and more frequently there arose disagreements on how to kill the toubob, and when it should be tried. Some of the men felt that, whatever the consequences, the toubob should be attacked the next time they were taken up on deck. Others felt that it would be wiser to watch and wait for the best moment. Bitter disagreements began to flare up. One debate was suddenly interrupted when the voice of an elder rang out, "Hear me! Though we are of different tribes and tongues, we must remember that we are the same people! We must be as one village, together in this place!"

Although the men forge a kind of pan-African community born of their suffering in the hold, Kunta retains his tribal identification. He stops speaking to his Wolof neighbor when he realizes that he is a pagan, and even in the American colonies, he instinctively identifies other blacks according to their tribes.

The American blacks have little time for what they call Kunta's "heathen Africanisms"; when Kunta tells his wife Bell that she is like a Mandinka woman, the highest compliment he can think of to pay her, Bell takes it as an insult. The American blacks have been taught to denigrate their own African heritage and to identify with the European culture of their masters; in fact, Kunta is astonished to see black slaves obediently following orders instead of rising in revolt.

Clearly, being forced to give up their African identities is one step toward identifying with the slave system; Kunta is named "Toby" as a symbolic attempt to rid him of his old identity and replace it with a slave identity. To the end of his life, Kunta will resist the master's attempts to separate him from his own identity, and insist that his name is Kunta, not Toby.

Although they denigrate their own African heritage, the American blacks have familiar practices. Kunta often notices how black American cultural practices are like African ones. Haley writes:

And Kunta had been reminded of Africa in the way that black women wore their hair tied up with strings into very tight plaits—although African women often decorated their plaits with colorful beads. And the women of this place knotted cloth pieces over their heads, although they didn't tie them correctly. Kunta saw that even some of these black men wore their hair in short plaits, too, as some men did in Africa.

Kunta also viewed Africa in the way that black children here were trained to treat their elders with politeness and respect. He saw it in the way that mothers carried their babies with their plump little legs straddling the mothers' bodies. He noticed even such small customs as how the older ones among these blacks would sit in the evenings rubbing their gums and teeth with the finely crushed end of a twig, which would have been lemongrass root in Juffure. Although he found it difficult to understand how they could do it here in toubob land, Kunta had to admit that these blacks' great love of singing and dancing was unmistakably African.

Clearly, even the American blacks who denigrate their African heritage are engaging in cultural practices that are unmistakably African. These cultural practices bind the community together in a shared African American culture, which is separate from that of the master. These enduring Africanisms give the lie to the theory of tabula rasa, and thus loosen the grip of paternalism: the slaves maintain separate identities from their masters, building a powerful communal culture.

By far the most important element in the culture of the slaves is their religion. When Kunta goes to his first black Christian religious service, he is "astonished at how much it reminded him of the way the people of Juffure sat at the Council of Elders' meetings once each moon." In spite of this realization, Kunta remains true to his Muslim faith.

Yet for his descendants Christianity represents a way to hold onto the idea of freedom. As Genovese notes, slaves identified with the sufferings of Jesus and expected that one day a new Moses would lead them to the Promised Land of freedom. Likewise, Kunta's descendants expect to see their lost relatives in the next world, which helps them bear terrible separations in this one.

Genovese notes that many masters tried to control their slaves' religious expressions, but didn't succeed. They were more successful in their attempts to destroy and denigrate African culture. In particular, they sought to destroy those aspects of African culture that could be used against them. It was routine for tribesmen to be sold to different farms, lest they be able to plot insurrection or escape in their own languages.

Likewise, Kunta noted that the drumtalk that was a constant feature of life in African villages had been stilled in black communities in the American colonies. Drumming was often made illegal in Southern communities because slaveholders thought it "agitated" their slaves, often not realizing that drumming was actually a way of communicating.

Kunta also noticed that American blacks had secret ways of communicating, much like the "sireng kato" language of his village. These secret methods of communication included special handshakes and ways of talking and, most famously, the secret messages in slave spirituals. For these reasons alone, the masters encouraged the destruction and denigration of African culture.

This denigration of African culture is a common feature of American life even today; most Americans, both black and white, are ignorant of the history, diversity, and magnificence of African life. Moreover, many blacks do not have direct access to their African heritage because of the dislocations of slavery. For many readers, Roots was their first chance to see an African past which they could admire.

As Chester Fontenot maintains, "this book stands as the first thorough attempt by an Afro-American to come to terms with his African heritage." Haley offers a powerful myth of a beautiful African culture and its enduring influence in black American life, and thus gives black American readers a profound source of pride. As Haley asserts, Roots is a myth his people can use.

Source: Jane Elizabeth Dougherty, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 2000. Dougherty is a Ph.D. candidate at Tufts University.

I acknowledge immense debt to the griots of Africa—where today it is rightly said that when a griot dies, it is as if a library has burned to the ground. The griots symbolize how all human ancestry goes back to some place, and some time, where there was no writing. Then, the memories and the mouths of ancient elders was [sic] the only way that early histories of mankind got passed along, for all of us today to know who we are.

With these words, Alex Haley concludes the Acknowledgments page of his ambitious work, Roots. The tribute to the African griots he paid here, and in the final chapters of the book—not to mention at countless lectures and interviews after publication—was paid back to him by African American critics. For instance, his biographer Mary Siebert McCauley entitled her study Alex Haley, A Southern Griot. In The Black Scholar, published only months after the first transmission of the television mini-series, black columnist Chuck Stone praised Haley for producing, as he had intended, "the symbol [sic] saga of all of us of African ancestry." Calling him "the griot from Tennessee," he praised Haley for "painstakingly unraveling the umbilical cord that had stretched the tortured distance from Africa to America." For many critics, and millions of readers and TV viewers, Haley unraveled that umbilical cord by using his own family's story, and his griot-like powers, to link the pre-literate African past to his own literary, professional present via the terrible saga of slavery. The griots passed stories on orally, "for all of us today to know who we are." Haley—as befitted a contemporary figure who was the culmination of centuries of oppression and resistance, slavery and freedom—gave his story massive pre-publicity circulation on campus lecture tours and in popular journals, then wrote it down for publication and subsequent TV serialization. Whatever his onginal intention, Haley (already a race hero for his authorship of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 1965) slipped comfortably into the role of mythic national figure, welcoming claims made for the vast symbolic importance of Roots for his race and nation.

The impact of Haley and Roots has been profound. For African Americans, deprived for centuries of their ancestral homes and families, enslaved and exploited, denied basic human and civil rights, including the crucial right to literacy, this book—published in Bicentennial Year, 1976—offered a fresh perspective on their history, community and genealogy. Although usually regarded as a novel, it was published originally as nonfiction, supporting Haley's apparently thoroughly researched claims that the book told the true story of his ancestors, traced back to the Mandinka tribe of Juffure, the Gambia. This was no tale found in books; it was a culmination of an epic quest. Haley had heard fragments of it first at his grandmother's knee in Henning, Tennessee, and had subsequently traveled the world, interviewing people, seeking sources, and eventually being led to an old African griot who revealed the name of his original ancestor Kunta Kinte.

The problem with this romantic account is that it has been disputed by several distinguished historians and journalists, who have challenged Haley's version of events, research methods, and source material. The most recent, and most damning, attack on the authenticity of Haley's claims comes from journalist Philip Nobile, arguing in the Village Voice that Roots is "a hoax, a literary painted mouse, a Piltdown of genealogy, a pyramid of bogus research." Far from being a griot and literary giant, in Nobile's account Haley is a liar, plagiarist and fantasist. Ever since Roots first appeared, many voices—most stridently, Haley's own—have been heard to defend and attack both book and TV series. It seems appropriate, in a journal issue devoted to "Voice," to examine the weight and validity of the various voices and silences which have surrounded this controversial text, one which claimed above all else that it derived from verbal accounts within a predominantly oral culture.

Roots begins in the year 1750 and records the story of the original ancestor of ex-Coast Guard journalist Alex Haley. Kunta Kinte, a Mandinka warrior, is captured into slavery, and taken to the South, where he becomes the first of a long line culminating in Alex, his brothers and sister. The book records the horrors of the Middle Passage, the cruelties and deprivations of slavery, the separation of families, economic and sexual exploitation, the rise of abolitionist fervor, Secession, the Civil War, Emancipation, and gradually a new prosperity for what became the Haley family. The main story ends with Alex's grandfather hanging up his sign, in 1893, "W.E. Palmer Lumber Company" and his wife giving birth two years later to Bertha; the final page records the professional careers of Haley and his siblings. Pervading the book is the theme of loss of an idealized African culture, the ordered, patriarchal and hierarchical Muslim society in which Kunta Kinte would have played a major social and familial role.

Roots was an instant success. Its advance printrun of 200,000 sold out at once; 1.5 million hardback copies were sold in the first eighteen months, and millions have sold since. The novel was translated into at least thirty-three languages and distributed in twenty-eight countries. Among many major awards, it won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize. By the mid-1980s, 276 colleges and universities had adopted the book for black history curricula; it was popularly recognized as a sort of black family Bible.

In January 1977 (ironically because the programming director feared low ratings) the twelve-hour television mini-series was broadcast over eight consecutive evenings on ABCTV to record American audiences. ABC research estimated that 130 million viewers saw some part of the series; virtually three quarters of the TV audience watched the eighth, final part. (The previous record was set by the first broadcast of Gone With the Wind in November 1976, which attracted 65 per cent of the audience.) The huge success of the TV series (in Britain as well as the USA) was both astonishing to all concerned and seen by some as a major cultural event. "Haley's Comet," Time Magazine called it; black readers claimed it as the most important civil rights event since the 1965 Selma, Alabama, march. In Britain, reporting on the impact of the first U.S. broadcasts, the Daily Express (3 February 1977) referred to the way "30 million Americans fought blizzards, ice and fellow commuters to be home in time for Roots," while the Daily Mail reported the cancellation of night school courses, a huge drop in restaurant business, and the emptying of bars and hospital wards. In the Sunday Telegraph (30 January 1977) the series was described as "the most traumatic event in the nation's broadcasting since Orson Welles's War of the Worlds produced panic in the 1930s." Audience figures were all the more amazing because 90 percent of the TV audience was white, and Roots—in an unprecedented eight sequential nights of broadcasting—became the film trade's dream "crossover": a feature which appealed to the urban black mass market as well as the majority white audiences. The TV series won 145 different awards, including nine Emmys.

Roots has enjoyed multiple intertextual circulations. Fifty cities declared "Roots Weeks"; the Governor of Tennessee (Haley's home state) proclaimed May 19-21, 1977 "Alex Haley Days"; while the Gambian Government pronounced Kunta Kinte's home in Juffure to be a national shrine and began to market "Roots trips." T-shirts, plaques, "Roots music" recordings appeared; "Roots-tracing kits" with imitation parchment genealogical charts became the rage (among whites as well as blacks). Schools were sent supplementary materials to use with the book and show, and colleges gave students credit for simply watching the miniseries. New black babies were named Kunta Kinte and Kizzy, after the show's main protagonists. As recently as 1988, in Eddie Murphy's successful comedy Coming to America, H[is] R[oyal] H[ighness] Akeem (Murphy) enters a barber's shop and is proclaimed by the barber "a Kunta Kinte"—an authentic African.

Haley himself became a folk hero. Letters arrived from all over the world addressed to "Alex Haley, 'Roots,' America." De Burg notes he was the third most admired black man among black American youth (after Muhammed Ali and Stevie Wonder). In the prestigious "Black One Hundred," a list of the most influential blacks, Haley is still listed above major writers James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. He was invited to meet presidents and crowned heads, to front TV commercials, speak on talk shows, at prestigious lecture venues, and at autograph parties. He was given the key to many U.S. cities; special citations from the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, profiles in magazines and newspapers galore. Two black colleges, Fisk and Lane, placed him on their boards, and dozens of publishers and hundreds of individuals sent him manuscripts for endorsement and patronage.

The (mainly Caucasian) critics who have waxed most fulsomely about Roots have made large, often extravagant claims for it. Despite a damning indictment of its literary style, writing in 1979 Leslie Fiedler recognized the cultural significance of the book and TV series. Noting that Kunta Kinte had become a household name, he said, "with Roots, a Black American succeeded for the first time in modifying the mythology of Black-White relations for the majority audience" (a majority which was of course white), and he goes on to argue how unlikely it might have seemed that this book, like Mrs. Stowe's, [would] be "read equally in the parlor, the kitchen and the nursery, but be condensed in the Reader's Digest and assigned in every classroom in the land." Almost a decade later, Harold Courlander (who had by then won a plagiarism suit against Haley) noted:

Roots continues to be read and quoted, is found everywhere on library shelves, is a cornerstone of various black studies programs.… In short, the book has an established place in contemporary American literature and will be spoken of, no doubt, for some time to come.

Willie Lee Rose describes Roots simply as "the most astounding cultural event of the American Bicentennial."

Celebration of Haley's focus on roots recurs in the critical acclaim. David A. Gerber, by no means uncritical of the work's historicity and style, argues that "the lives of both Kunta Kinte and Malcolm X have filled a powerful emotional need for inspiring models of strength, dignity, and self-creation in a hostile or, at best, indifferent White world," and that Haley has reminded us "we know no way to think of the present or conceive of the future except with reference to our pasts … to our roots." Judith Mudd, giving two Indian views of Roots, quotes justice V. R Krishna Iyer, judge of the Supreme Court of India:

The dignity of a race is restored when its roots are known … and that explains how Gandhi in India could resist the imperial rulers with knowledge of our strength and sustenance from our roots. The Discovery of India by Nehru was prompted by the same urge to trace one's roots which induced Alex Haley to research the black Americans' roots.

In 1992, after Haley's death, his editor and cowriter Murray Fisher quoted black leader Jesse Jackson: "[Haley] made history talk.… He lit up the long night of slavery. He gave our grandparents personhood. He gave Roots to the rootless."

This refrain, of roots to the rootless, is one reason I have dwelt on the enormous commercial, critical and indeed world-wide success of this text. Roots must be the only non-religious text to have achieved such universal success and endorsement; Gone With the Wind has probably outsold it but certainly rarely found itself on a school or college syllabus, praised by statesmen and judges, and its writer was never compared with a figure of the stature of Nehru. This smash hit, which made its author a multi-millionaire, national black hero, and international roving ambassador, is of considerable cultural importance. If Haley is not the griot he is cracked up to be, the furor over the devaluation of Roots should be explosive.

Source: Helen Taylor, "The Griot from Tennessee': The Saga of Alex Haley's Roots," in Critical Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 2, Summer 1995, pp. 46-62.

Time Magazine called it "Haley's Comet." Black readers hailed it as the most important event in civil rights history since the 1965 march on Selma, Alabama. In January 1977 Roots was proclaimed the most popular television program in the medium's history, with the last of eight consecutive episodes reaching an unprecedented 90,000,000 viewers. Roots attracted a larger audience than such all-time favorites as Gone with the Wind and the 1977 Superbowl. Spurred by the television success, Alex Haley's novel went into fourteen printings after its initial publication in October 1976. During and after the nights it was telecast, long lines formed outside bookstores displaying Roots. Those too impatient to wait broke into bookstores to obtain copies of the bestseller. Haley was instantly transformed from writer into celebrity. The author's appearance at book parties frequently produced mile-long lines. Haley was deluged with fan mail, and he reportedly received about one thousand letters per week. Meanwhile, the American Broadcasting Company announced plans to air Roots Two, a production for 1979 which concentrated on the adventures of Haley's ancestors since the Civil War. Juffure, the village of Haley's famous African ancestor, Kunta Kinte, rapidly became a shrine for boatloads of tourists, and Gambian President Dawda Jwara declared the village a national monument. In South Africa, Roots threatened to spark an international incident when the white government there openly voiced its fears that the showing of Roots by the United States Information Service might provoke race riots. Meanwhile, the novel has been translated into twelve languages and made available to twenty-eight countries. The mini-series has been broadcast in thirty-two countries.

Despite the frequent criticism of Roots as a shallow melodrama, it has been granted academic respectability in 276 colleges and universities which adopted the novel as a standard part of the curriculum in black history. At least one Afro-American history text boasts Alex Haley as its consultant. Clearly, Roots is a significant phenomenon in American popular culture.

The almost universal acclaim the broadcast of Roots received startled its creators. In producing a period piece of slavery from the slave's perspective, ABC executives took a high risk gamble. They feared that white audiences might refuse to watch a twelve-hour drama in which whites were consistently portrayed as villains against a group of heroic blacks. One reason well-known television personalities like Loren Greene and Edward Asner were given parts was to counter a possible negative white reaction. Despite its heavily charged racial theme, Roots enjoyed a popularity rare for any television presentation. While one can easily understand why blacks hailed Haley as a "savior," Roots' popularity among its larger white audience requires further explanation. It seems likely that Roots failed to appreciably affect white attitudes, and perhaps no novel or television program could hope to accomplish such an enormous undertaking.

Why then did the Roots phenomenon succeed in capturing the white imagination? To better understand the appeals of Roots for white Americans, we should consider the noble savage, that long-held romantic image of the American Indian. From the time of the earliest American settlements, whites, when not viewing Indians as agents of Satan, have frequently perceived the red man as living in harmony with nature, possessing deep spiritual wisdom and extraordinary courage. By contrast, blacks have been pictured as either comic Sambos or fiendish devils in literature and popular culture. Even the recent departure from some of the more vicious stereotypes since the end of the Second World War has failed to produce a black hero the stature of Hiawatha or Chief Joseph. It was not until the publication of Roots that Africans and the descendants of Africans for the first time became heroes in the tradition of the noble savage. The concept of the noble African is central to an understanding of Roots' appeal to whites, because unintentionally, both novel and broadcast provided whites with a safe Negro. Just as popular treatment of the legendary noble red man fails to address the contemporary situation of Native Americans, so Kunta Kinte was palatable to white audiences precisely because of his failure to remind whites of the plight of contemporary blacks.

From the first white contacts with the New World, the American Indian has been romanticized. Christopher Columbus viewed Indians as innocent, kind, intelligent, and generous. Rationalistic philosophers of the eighteenth century invented the term noble savage as part of a larger attack upon the Christian doctrine of the fall of man. For these European philosophers, the Indian became an idealized "child of nature," not the savage fiend and child of the devil depicted by American frontiersmen. The noble savage experienced a primitive, unburdened existence in the wilderness free from tyrannical government and class distinctions. His simplicity enabled him to live in harmony with nature and his fellows. He was articulate, intelligent, and handsome. Being freer than civilized man, the noble savage was also happier. He was a stranger to the greed, materialism, and pretense of white civilization.

In his Notes on the State of Virginia Thomas Jefferson praised the political system of American Indians as having very little external coercive power. Since laws of nature were part of their normal condition, man-made laws did not need to be imposed from without. Jefferson also admired Indians because their society possessed no artificial class distinctions, and he speculated on the possible racial amalgamation between Indians and whites. On the other hand, Jefferson opposed any future racial union between whites and blacks. For Jefferson, noble savages were found only in America. For white Americans like Jefferson, much of the Indian's nobility grew out of his integration with nature. Throughout the early years of discovery and settlement, many Americans perceived America in Edenic terms. In a similar way, Europeans portrayed the new world as a Garden of Eden, a paradise on earth. Those who held the garden image also tended to view the Indian as a noble savage.

The noble Indian spoke with an eloquence and a wisdom few white men possessed. Chief Logan's famous speech to Lord Dunmore, for example, was used in McGuffey's fourth- and fifth-grade readers in the 1850s and 1860s. The speech taught white children Christian ethics and further served to idealize the American Indian.

No early American writer popularized the myth of the noble savage more than James Fenimore Cooper. Cooper's Leatherstocking tales offered nineteenth century readers two types of Indians: the savage fiend and the noble savage. While in no way minimizing the importance of the Indian as the devil in Cooper's works, characters like Satanstoe, Uncas, Chingachgook, Hard-Heart, and Rivenoak all perpetuated the noble savage myth in the popular mind. Cooper gave his noble Indians physical beauty and a keen intelligence. Like the slaves in Roots, Cooper's Indians looked backward to an earlier age of glory. As a species already vanishing, at least some Indians could be sentimentally regarded. The hero Chingachgook, for example, emerges as a "brave and just-minded Delaware," respected by his "fallen people." White civilization's depravity ultimately corrupts Cooper's Indian. The white man brings firewater which disrupts the Indian's harmonious integration with nature.

Unlike their image of the American Indian, the image of Africans held by whites was conceived in almost wholly negative terms. Sixteenth century Europeans likened Africans to the apes that inhabited the Dark Continent. For Elizabethan Englishmen, a fine line existed between black people and anthropoid apes like the chimpanzee ("orangoutangs"). Like apes, Africans were thought of as lewd, wanton savages devoid of humanity. Similarly, Europeans imagined Africa a hostile, forbidding place inhabited by dangerous animals and an appropriate home for uncivilized men. Unlike America, the black man's home was never seen in idyllic paradisic terms. The black man was a savage, without nobility and a Garden of Eden. Perhaps for these reasons, Negroes were therefore fit only for the ignominious burden of slavery.

Despite his eighteenth century rationalist convictions, Thomas Jefferson found it impossible to place blacks on the same level, either intellectually or physically, with whites. Jefferson rejected environmental arguments for the intellectual equality of the races. Jefferson reluctantly concluded that Africans were therefore incapable of future intellectual growth. He favored African colonization, not integration, as the most desirable alternative to slavery, and opposed any future racial union between blacks and whites. Jefferson attributed the peculiar body odor of blacks to their skin glands, which secreted more, and to their kidneys, which secreted less than whites. Even on a purely aesthetic level, Jefferson chose red and white rather than black as nature's most beautiful colors.

James Fenimore Cooper's novels juxtaposed blacks to Indians. In The Redskins, the Littlepages' English servant observes that "the nigger grows uglier and uglier every year, … while I do think sir, that the Indian grows 'andsomer and 'andsomer." Cooper believed that the black's intellect was also inferior to the Indian's, and because Indians possessed an integrity and independence surpassing blacks, the two were never natural allies. The common enemy, the white man, in no way made for common interest between the two races. For Cooper, the lack of nobility in the black man's character meant he could never rise to the level of the noble savage. The Indian's death provided another source of nobility over the African, for even though the red man was destroyed physically, he endured spiritually while the black man merely survived on a physical level.

White Americans during the nineteenth century often viewed the Negro as entertaining, but never as noble. Negroes figured largely in the popular culture of the early republic. The nineteenth century minstrel show, which accurately mirrored the common man's thinking, portrayed blacks as comic Sambo figures. The minstrel show served important cultural and psychological needs for their white audiences. Minstrels created "a ludicrous Northern Negro character that assured audience members that however confused, bewildered, and helpless they felt, someone was much worse off than they were." Minstrel shows provided a non-threatening view of race at a time when race threatened the Union, while at the same time helping to justify racism.

In the twentieth century, a new form of popular culture, the motion picture, continued to deny black nobility. David Wark Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) was in many respects the first modern motion picture. This hundred-thousand dollar spectacle achieved unparalleled heights of screen realism. Griffith boasted "magnificent settings, gorgeous costumes, thousands of actors and smiles, tears and thrills." In The Birth of a Nation the Negro was portrayed as a brute whose demonic instincts were unleashed with emancipation. Freedom for blacks during Reconstruction ended in tragedy as freedmen attempted to soil the purity of white womanhood. Only the dramatic intervention of the Ku Klux Klan at the film's climax saved the white South and reconciled the two sections.

With the advent of the talkies, negative black stereotypes were heard as well as seen. Two popular types in the 1930s were "coons" and "Toms." "Coons" were lazy, good for nothing and shiftless, and were constantly getting into trouble. The best known "coon" of the 1930s was Stepin Fetchit, who became the most successful Negro in Hollywood. Stepin Fetchit was laziness and ignorance personified. His performances followed in the tradition of the nineteenth century minstrel characters, for the characters he played lacked humanity, much less nobility.

Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, the most famous "Tom" of the era, frequently co-starred with Shirley Temple. Unlike Stepin Fetchit, "Uncle Billy" was well-mannered and always knew his place. Robinson delighted Shirley by dancing for her. He was both intelligent and reliable. For white audiences, he represented a safe, if hardly noble, Negro.

By the end of the thirties the black Hollywood image underwent considerable improvement. Negro characters in Gone with the Wind (1939) were a far cry from those in Birth of a Nation. In Gone with the Wind, Hattie McDaniel turned in an exceptionally strong performance as the mammy of the O'Hara household. As both counselor and manager, she was much more than a fawning servant. McDaniel became the first black to receive an Oscar, an honor that divided liberals, some of whom objected to her demeaning servant role. Yet even those who found her role demeaning found it difficult to criticize her Oscar. Gone with the Wind represented a turning point in which Negroes began to take more attractive roles in films. Like McDaniel, however, most continued in traditionally inferior roles.

Despite improvement during and following the Second World War, the black image in American film remained fundamentally dissimilar from white perceptions of Indians as noble savages. War against a racist power necessitated opposition to racism at home. Typical of the improved image was Dooley Wilson as Sam, the piano player in Casablanca (1942). Following the war, Home of the Brave (1949) became the first movie to attack white bigotry openly. In Lost Boundaries (1948), whites rejected a light-skinned negro family that passes as white in a small New England community. Their race is finally discovered, and white friends turn against them until the town's minister persuades the community to accept the family.

In the 1950s and the 1960s individual stars and movies with racial themes won white audience approval, but none captured the white imagination like Roots. Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, Richard Roundtree, and Pamela Greer enjoyed widespread popularity among whites, but none of these stars performed in any motion picture whose popularity matched Roots.

Source: Michael Steward Blayney, "Roots and the Noble Savage," in North Dakota Quarterly, Vol. 54, No. 1, Winter 1986, pp. 1-17.