[In the following essay, Fishbein discusses the merits and shortcomings of the use of television drama as a medium for preserving history.]

Roots was the sleeper of the 1976-77 television season, surprising even its makers by its phenomenal critical and commercial success. An unusual risk, ABC's production of Alex Haley's 885-page opus represented the first time that a network actually made a movie based on a major unpublished book.¹ While blacks had gained visibility on television during the 1970s, their presence had been confined largely to situation comedies and variety shows rather than drama—with the notable exception of CBS's much-touted success with The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974)—and Roots' makers had serious reservations about whether the public would accept a historical drama about slavery as seen from the vantage point of the slave. Advance sales of commercial spots in the miniseries were sold on the prediction of a relatively modest 30 share. Shortly before its airing date, program executive Fred Silverman rescheduled the show: instead of running on twelve successive weeks, it would run for eight consecutive nights, so that if it failed the agony would not be prolonged.² Silverman's decision contributed to Roots' phenomenal success, but that decision itself derived from an odd blend of courage and caution. Producer Stan Margulies initially suggested the concept of a Roots week, but an ABC executive was fearful of the consequences of a low audience share the first night, so the idea was dropped for a year. “A year later,” Margulies noted, “when we had completed production, and the big decision of how to show Roots came up again, this was raised, and to his credit Freddie Silverman, who was then head of the network, said, ‘We've done something in making this that no one has ever done before. Let's show it in a way that no one has ever shown television before!’” To avoid losing the week in case of Roots' failure, Silverman kept strong programs like Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley and parceled Roots out in one- and two-hour segments; his innovative use of consecutive programming made television history.³ Brandon Stoddard, then the executive in charge of ABC's novels for television, views Silverman's decision as simultaneously bold and circumspect: “It's certain that Fred's idea of scheduling it in one week was at the time very daring and innovative and theatrical and, I think, added a tremendous amount to the success of Roots—there's no question about it.” Stoddard noted, however, the caution implicit in scheduling the series in January rather than in the more significant sweeps week in February, a rating period in which network audience share is assessed as a means of calculating the attractiveness of each network to advertisers seeking a mass audience.⁴

Roots marked a dramatic shift in the nature of television programming, even though its ultimate format may have been a product of caution as much as daring. Although Roots already was in production when Silverman arrived at ABC from CBS, he was primarily responsible for radically altering the format of network programming by introducing limited miniseries in lieu of open-ended weekly series, by abandoning the rigid television season in a shift to real-time programming, and by de-emphasizing the situation comedy and police/adventure series in favor of the drama of the television novel.⁵ ABC's previous ratings success with Leon Uris's QB VII in 1975 and Irwin Shaw's Rich Man, Poor Man in 1976 had paved the way for Roots by demonstrating that the mini-series form pioneered by British television had genuine appeal for American audiences.⁶ The miniseries format allowed television to achieve the thematic power and narrative sweep ordinarily reserved for film; in reviewing Roots as a successful competitor to the movies, film critic Pauline Kael remarked: “These longer narrative forms on TV enable actors to get into their characters and take hold of a viewer's imagination.”⁷

The dramatic power of Roots sustained audiences' attention for eight consecutive nights, 23-30 January 1977. According to Newsweek,

A. C. Nielsen reported that a record 130 million Americans—representing 85 percent of all the TV-equipped homes—watched at least part of the twelve-hour miniseries. The final episode attracted a staggering 80 million viewers, surpassing NBC's screenings of Gone with the Wind and the eleven Super Bowls as the highest-rated TV show of all time.⁸

All eight episodes ranked among the top thirteen programs of all time in terms of estimated average audience.⁹ Despite the fact that Roots' cast was predominantly black and its villains largely white, none of the ABC affiliates North or South rejected Roots. In fact, more than twenty southern cities, all formerly citadels of segregation, declared the eight-day period of the telecast “Roots week.” More than 250 colleges and universities decided to offer courses based on the television program and the book.¹⁰

While even during production some critics of the miniseries had feared that Roots would exacerbate racial tensions, if anything it served to promote racial harmony and understanding.¹¹ A handful of violent incidents did follow the broadcast. After a rape episode on Roots, black youths clashed with white youths in the parking lot of a Hot Springs, Arkansas, high school, leaving three students injured and eighteen arrested.¹² According to Kenneth Kyoon Hur and John P. Robinson, “Roots was also blamed for racial disturbances at schools in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Mississippi, and for a siege in Cincinnati in which a man took hostages and demanded the return of his son he had abandoned 19 years previously.”¹³ But apart from these isolated instances of hostility, Roots seemed to have had a genuinely humanitarian influence on its audience. An informal survey of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People branch leaders in selected cities nationwide revealed highly positive local response; Roots was credited with reviving and strengthening the black-history offerings in schools and colleges, with enlightening whites about the black heritage, and with improving the quality of television programming.¹⁴

Various local surveys of black and white viewers indicated either that Roots had relatively little impact upon viewers' attitudes, since those most sympathetic to the plight of slavery were most likely to watch the programs in the first place, or that its effects were largely humanitarian. A Cleveland, Ohio, survey found that racially liberal whites viewed the programs in disproportionate numbers and were predisposed to be sympathetic to the shows' content; the data suggested that such liberals were most influenced by Roots' depiction of the hardships of slavery.¹⁵ An investigation of the response of teenagers in metropolitan Cleveland similarly revealed that the racial attitudes of the teenagers rather than the degree of viewing was the most accurate predictor of perceptions of the hardships of slavery; Roots had the most impact on already liberal youths of both races.¹⁶ A study of the racially heterogeneous southern community of Austin, Texas, a city with substantial representation of both nonwhites and Mexican Americans, revealed a generally favorable impact of Roots upon its viewing audience. The white community in particular was overwhelmingly positive in its response: “They felt that the program was an accurate depiction of slavery, that the cruel and generally senseless whites depicted in the program were accurately portrayed, and they may have learned a great deal about the black culture and heritage that was previously ‘missing.’”¹⁷ A national telephone survey of 971 respondents revealed that, although it was widely hypothesized that whites would react to Roots with increased tolerance and blacks with increased hatred or prejudice, in fact both black and white respondents overwhelmingly indicated sadness to have been their predominant reaction to the programs. Roots appears to have been a learning experience for both races, to have increased understanding of blacks, and to have fostered interracial communication.¹⁸ A summary of research findings from five studies of the Roots phenomenon, including the three mentioned above, indicates that Roots either reinforced audience preconceptions or “performed a prosocial, humanistic, and informational role for viewers.”¹⁹ At any rate, the miniseries did nothing significant to exacerbate racial tensions and may well have eased them by fostering understanding and communication.

Roots' popular success was matched by the critical attention it received. The dramatization garnered an extraordinary thirty-seven Emmy nominations, far surpassing the record of twenty-three nominations for Rich Man, Poor Man the year before. The show actually received nine Emmys in fourteen categories, including that for outstanding limited series.²⁰

It also was named program of the year at the Television Critics' Circle Awards.²¹Roots' author, Alex Haley, was himself deluged with honors, including a National Book Award and a special Pulitzer Prize.²²

Roots' extraordinary popularity was the product of a combination of factors, some largely fortuitous and others the result of shrewd programming and marketing techniques. Published 1 October 1976, Alex Haley's book, Roots: The Saga of an American Family, on which the series was based, became the nation's top best-seller within a month.²³ Prior to the book's appearance, its author estimated that, as a result of his indefatigable lecturing during the previous six years, more than a million people had learned of his family history and of the book in which it had been reconstructed.²⁴ Actual publication transformed Haley into an instant public hero: “It was perhaps the first time in history a writer was so quickly elevated to this kind of ‘celebrity.’”²⁵ But the ABC dramatization further fueled the demand for the hardcover edition, and sales hit a one-day peak of sixty-seven thousand on the third day of the TV series.²⁶ Haley's publisher, Doubleday, expected a favorable public response to the book, but initially the firm projected a first print run of fifty thousand copies. When Doubleday executives met with David Wolper, executive producer of the ABC miniseries, and Brandon Stoddard, both men indicated that such a projection was ludicrously low, that Haley's material was far more powerful than the publisher realized. Nor did the Doubleday executives fully appreciate the degree to which the television version would be a twelve-hour commercial for their product.²⁷ Perhaps buoyed by Wolper's and Stoddard's optimism, Doubleday proved sufficiently confident of the book's success to risk a record first printing of a hardcover edition of two hundred thousand, which paid off royally once the miniseries was televised; Roots remained on the best-seller list for months and sold more than a million copies at ＄12.50 during 1977.²⁸ Hence part of Roots' popularity as a television miniseries was predicated upon the startling success of the book on which it was based.

Roots' success also may derive from the craftsmanship of its structure. The narrative structure of the miniseries is highly satisfying, combining the lure of end-of-episode teasers with thematic coherence within individual shows. Each show treats a single theme, an approach unique to Roots and to its sequel, Roots: The Next Generation, and provides thematic resolution for the viewer by the end of the episode. While this thematic approach was employed far more blatantly in Roots: The Next Generation two years later, it is already present in Roots. For example, the first show deals with the pain and hardship slaveholding caused the whites engaged in the slave trade, a theme treated only marginally in later episodes.²⁹ We see the gradual corruption of a man of Puritan temperament, Captain Thomas Davies, a man of honor and steel determination, who succumbs to temptation and proves to be corruptible because he is willing to set aside his scruples to carry a cargo of slaves. Captain Davies initially merits our sympathy and respect. The script describes him as “a man who commanded by intelligence and preparation. … Any ship of which he's master is going to arrive on time and intact.” Davies is a naïf regarding the means of torture employed to subdue the captured slaves; he takes refuge from the troubling world by reading the Bible, and he prefers to sail on the Sabbath to bless even this mercenary voyage—“Seems the Christian thing to do”—a decision that contrasts ironically with his distasteful inspection of the thumbscrews used to achieve compliance from the captured female slaves.

Davies regrets his decision to take command and confides his disenchantment in a letter to his wife, telling her how he rues his separation from his family, leaving unstated the moral degradation this venture has entailed, as first mate Slater enters with a terrified black girl brought to be a “belly-warmer” for the captain: “Little flesh to take the chill off them cold sheets. Didn't figure it'd be any problem to a highborn Christian man like you, sir.” Although Davies insists that he does not approve of fornication, he longs for human warmth to allow him respite from his moral struggle, and he attempts to dissolve her terror, ironically introducing himself by his Christian name to the uncomprehending female and invoking heaven when he realizes that she does not understand him. Davies is ordinarily a righteous man who is corrupted by his participation in a mercenary, racist enterprise. The gradual progress of his corruption makes it seem inevitable, and we are meant both to pity him and to identify with him as a man buffeted by forces beyond his control. It is satisfying to unmask him as human and fallible even as we condemn his lapses from Christian morality.

Moreover, the narrative structure of Roots is surprisingly upbeat for a drama dealing with so grim a subject as slavery. With the exception of the sixth and seventh shows, which end ominously, each evening's viewing ends with a minor triumph or on a note of promise. Roots never sinks into despair regarding the fate of the slaves it portrays. After its harrowing scenes of the Middle Passage, the first show concludes with the exhortation of the Wrestler, a tribal leader, for the slaves to unite as one village, to learn each other's languages, so that they may destroy their enemies, ending with Kunta Kinte's voice repeating in incantatory rhythm: “We will live! We will live!”³⁰

The second show ends similarly. The overseer Ames has ordered Kunta to be beaten until he submits to his slave name, Toby. Fiddler ministers to the defeated Kunta, offering him solace, reassuring him of his African identity. Fiddler fondly soothes Kunta and consoles him: “There goin' to be another day! you hear me?—There gonna be another day.”³¹ The verbal promise is reinforced both visually and auditorily. The camera pulls back from the scene as Fiddler rocks Kunta in his arms, sponging his wrists, a Christological image made more emphatic by the cross formed by the fencing; as we see the final image of the plantation, we hear the drumbeats of Africa, a reminder that Kunta's African identity has not been effaced. The ending of the third show reinforces this theme. Kunta has been maimed by brutal slave catchers, who amputated his foot; he has recovered his health due to the kindly ministrations of the main-house cook, Bell, who has taunted him into walking. Her pleasure at his accomplishment dims as Kunta reasserts his African identity: “Bell—I ain't no damn Toby! I Kunta Kinte, son of Omoro and Binta Kinte. … A Mandinka fightin' man from the village of Juffure … and I'm gonna do better than walk. (beat) Damnit! I'm gonna learn to run!”³² Kunta exults in his newfound strength, and his forward movement is our last image of him.

The triumphs are proof of human will, of the persistence of identity despite the obliterating impact of slavery. At the end of the fourth show, Kunta has opted to remain with Bell and their newborn daughter rather than follow the Drummer north to freedom. To reassure Bell, whose two children had been sold away from her after her first husband tried to escape, Kunta has given their daughter the Mandinka name Kizzy to remind her that she has come from a special people and that she has a special destiny. The scene ends with the camera tightly focused on the baby Kizzy as we hear Kunta's voice: “Your name mean ‘stay put’—but it don't mean ‘stay a slave’—it won't never mean dat!!!”³³ Although this tiny creature cannot possibly comprehend her father's meaning, his words may serve to chart her future course; in her new life is the family's hope of redemption. In the fifth show, the promise of Kizzy's name is betrayed as she is sold away from her parents because she aided her young beau, Noah, in his futile attempt to escape. Purchased by cockfighter Tom Moore, who rapes her the first night she is on his plantation, Kizzy recovers from her wounds by vowing vengeance against her oppressor. She grimly informs Malizy: “When I has my baby … he's gonna be a boy. (beat) And when that boy grows up, I promise you one thing … Massa Tom Lea is gonna get what he deserve.”³⁴ Kizzy's eyes glow with a hatred that will give her the sustenance her family no longer can provide.

The sixth and seventh shows end more ominously than the others, but they too bear witness to the small triumphs possible even in slavery. The sixth show was revised significantly for telecast, its penultimate and final scenes transposed. In the 11 August 1976 script by James Lee and William Blinn, the show ends as Kizzy takes revenge on the now-ancient Missy Anne, after the latter refuses her recognition, by surreptitiously spitting into her drinking cup before she hands it to her, small revenge for a betrayal of friendship yet a minor victory that makes life worth living.³⁵ As actually telecast, that scene precedes another in which Mrs. Moore asks her husband how Chicken George will react when he returns from England only to learn that his family has been sold off. Moore replies cynically: “He won't come back white, my dear … he'll still come back a nigger. (then) And, really, what's a nigger to do?” He takes up his drink and continues to stare emptily out the window.³⁶ The televised version reduces the significance of Kizzy's minor triumph and builds suspense regarding how Chicken George will seek to reunite his family and bring it to freedom.

The seventh show also juxtaposes triumph and ominous suspense. Tom has been forced to kill Jemmy Brent, a Confederate deserter caught trying to rape Tom's wife, Irene. In killing Brent, Tom has taken up his father's mantle. When Irene turns to Tom for guidance, “he draws himself up commandingly and suddenly we see the stamp of Chicken George on him, as never before—father and leader,” as he tells her they will “bury him deep … and forget his name!” The episode actually ends, however, with Jemmy's brother Evan Brent, suspicious about Tom's battered face, menacing Tom: “You ain't seen the last of me,” as he jerks on his horse's bit and rides away. The camera focuses tightly on Tom: “His gaze is burning, fierce and unconquered. As he watches Brent go, a small flicker of triumph forms in his expression as we: Fade Out.”³⁷

While the note of promise or minor triumph in the earlier shows is tempered by the bitter reality of slavery, by the end of the eighth show black-white power relationships have been altered significantly, and true optimism is possible. The final show concludes with a series of major triumphs: through a ruse of Chicken George, the family escapes from peonage; it moves to its own land in Tennessee and pays tribute to its African forebear, Kunta Kinte. Chicken George intones:

Hear me Kunta. … Hear me, ol' African … you who was took from your father's house in chains … an' made a slave in a strange land … you who endured because you dreamed of bein' free. … Hear me, African … the flesh of your flesh has come home to freedom. … An' you is free at last … and so are we.

By invoking Kunta Kinte, this speech provides dramatic closure for the entire series. Its rhetoric echoes the famous “I Have a Dream” speech by Martin Luther King, Jr., in its final peroration. The show then telescopes the remainder of the family history even more drastically than Haley's own book does and ends with the camera revealing the narrator of that history to be Haley himself, who tells of his obsessive search to learn of his family and its history, a search that took twelve years to complete and that resulted in a book called Roots.³⁸ At this point, the show's optimism is complete: not only have Haley's ancestors achieved freedom and even prosperity but Haley has done what blacks had only dreamed to be possible, he has traced his ancestry back to Africa; he has found his roots, and those roots have made him free.

In translating Haley's epic tale of slavery and emancipation to the television screen, Newsweek pointed out, “ABC could not resist applying the now standard, novels for television formula: lots of softcore sex, blood, sadism, greed, big-star cameos and end-of-episode teasers.”³⁹Roots represented the first time nude scenes would be shown on prime-time network television. The frontal nudity, however, was allowed only during the first four hours to preserve the authentic look of the Mandinka women in Africa and on the slave ship.⁴⁰ And ABC exerted a bizarre form of censorship to preserve decorum as it titillated its audience: “By the fine calibration of ABC's censors, no bared female breast could be larger than a size 32 or shown within 18 feet of the camera,” Newsweek reported.⁴¹ The episodes with sadistic appeal included the lashing of young Kunta Kinte to force him to accept the slave name Toby and the brutal amputation of his foot by depraved slave catchers. Yet not all of the sex portrayed was sensationalistic. Haley's ancestors exhibited remarkable sexual restraint, with Kunta and Kizzy experiencing prolonged periods of volitional celibacy. As Brandon Stoddard has noted, however, Roots contained “some wonderfully erotic and sexually alive scenes with some of the black families.”⁴² But with the exception of Genelva's attempted seduction of Kunta, Haley's ancestors are sexually expressive only in love relationships with potential or actual mates. Their marriages are uniformly blessed with sexual fulfillment, with satisfaction lasting even into old age, as in the case of Matilda and Chicken George, so Roots' portrayal of sexuality also constitutes a paean to familial values.

Roots debunked the myth that white Americans would reject a black dramatic miniseries of obvious social significance.⁴³ But the makers of Roots ensured this success by deliberately catering to the white middle-class sensibility. Roots happened to be telecast during a record cold spell at a time when many people stayed home anyway on account of the gasoline crisis, and it profited from the fact that, anticipating little serious competition, the other networks had scheduled no strong counterprogramming.⁴⁴ While such extrinsic factors might account for a greater likelihood of tuning Roots in, they hardly explain Roots' ability not only to capture but to hold white attention over a period of time. The acting in Roots was of a higher quality than that found in much of the contemporary cinema, according to critic Pauline Kael, so Roots provided gratis what films no longer could assure their paying public.⁴⁵

Because of the decision to cast the hitherto unknown LeVar Burton in the key role of the young Kunta Kinte, ABC hedged that risk by selecting a star supporting cast for the University of Southern California drama student.⁴⁶ The choice of an unknown actor, requiring his introduction to the American audience, provided ABC with what Stoddard calls “a whole new layer of publicity and promotion.” But, more important, “from a purely casting standpoint it was essential that Kunta Kinte be seen not as an actor being Kunta Kinte but this being Kunta Kinte, which is exactly what happened.”⁴⁷ Since the public had no prior image of LeVar Burton, it became easier to suspend disbelief and to forget the fact that this young man was merely acting a role. To tempt whites into viewing, the rest of the cast was laden with familiar television actors. David Wolper, executive producer of the miniseries, explicitly admitted the use of television stars to lure white viewers in particular:

You have got to remember that the audience, the TV audience, is mostly white, middle-class whites. That's why we picked Ed Asner, Sandy Duncan, Lloyd Bridges, Chuck Connors, Lorne Greene, Cicely Tyson, Ben Vereen, and Leslie Uggams, all known TV actors. This was planned like this, because again here, we were trying to reach the maximum white audience.⁴⁸

While Haley's book had devoted more than a fifth of its text to a richly detailed account of Kunta Kinte's life in Africa, the television miniseries extracts Kunta Kinte from Africa well before the first two-hour segment is over.⁴⁹ Brandon Stoddard, then a vice president for novels for television at ABC, explained retrospectively why his gamble on Roots paid off so extravagantly in terms of its appeal to the parochial interests of its audience:

What seems to interest Americans most are Americans. A miniseries about the French Revolution wouldn't do it. In Roots, we got out of Africa as fast as we could. I kept yelling at everyone, ‘Get him to Annapolis [Maryland]. I don't care how. Tell the boats to go faster, put on more sails.’ I knew that as soon as we got Kunta Kinte to America we would be okay.

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The African segment of Roots is an exotic, Edenic interlude, an excursion into an explicitly primitive world to which we, like Kunta Kinte, can never return; hence it poses no challenge to the social assumptions of white Americans.

Just as Alex Haley had subtitled his book The Saga of an American Family, so too did the miniseries aim at catholicity of appeal by advertising itself as “the triumph of an American family.”⁵¹ Critic Karl E. Meyer has noted that Roots, in fact, is a dramatic allegory comparable to a medieval morality play, being neither fact nor fiction but a didactic popular entertainment.⁵² As such it is concerned with Everyman, a figure representing the problems and limits of the human condition.

Kunta Kinte and his heirs have a universal symbolic significance that overshadows their individual histories. Alex Haley argued that the universal appeal of Roots derived from the average American's yearning for a sense of heritage, from the equalizing effect of thinking about family, lineage, and ancestry, concerns shared by every person on earth.⁵³ This longing for rootedness transcended racial divisions. As James Monaco has noted, “Black Americans are not alone in their search for ethnic roots, and it seems likely that millions of white viewers were attracted as much by the saga of immigration and assimilation as by the racial politics.”⁵⁴

Although Haley's slave family was certainly atypical—Kunta Kinte came directly from Africa to American shores, a fate reserved for fewer than 6 percent of all slaves; his family had an exceptionally precise oral tradition; and Haley's ancestors were unusually privileged, both in Africa and in America—the television version of Roots consistently presented Haley's family as symbolic of all blacks.⁵⁵ Interviewed in his ancestral village of Juffure, Gambia, Haley claimed that his authorial purpose had been more universal than personal: “I began to realize then that the biggest challenge I had was to try and write a book which, although [sic] was the story of my family would symbolically be in fact the saga of Black people in this country.” For Haley, the family history of any American black would differ only in detail from that of any other; the fundamental outlines of their heritage remain identical.⁵⁶ Since historical details seem irrelevant to such archetypal experience, whites too could respond equally well to the search for roots. Haley argued, “What Roots gets at, in whatever its form, is that it touches the pulse of how alike we human beings all are when you get down to the bottom, beneath these man-imposed differences we set one between the other.”⁵⁷ The television miniseries echoed Haley's approach: LeVar Burton was presented as “a young man everybody could identify with” rather than as “a true African of two hundred years ago,” and Roots was mounted as “a drama about black people for everybody.”⁵⁸

The telecast created burgeoning interest in genealogy and in popular searches for ethnic and familial heritage. “Following the TV-special, letters to the National Archives, where Haley did genealogical research in census manuscripts, tripled, and applications to use the research facilities increased by 40 percent,” one scholarly journal reported. Genealogy was absorbed into the university curriculum and inspired books on Jewish and black ethnicity.⁵⁹ Alex Haley even donated one hundred thousand dollars of his royalty money to the Kinte Foundation to provide guidance but no financial aid for those engaged in genealogical research.⁶⁰ The interest in genealogy may well have eclipsed the concern with slavery for many viewers. Significantly, when Haley himself appeared on The Tonight Show following the broadcast of Roots, he did not want to discuss slavery or its evils but instead appeared obsessed with genealogy and with the notion that blacks could be integrated into American society because they too had families.⁶¹

French theorist Ernest Renan once argued that an essential factor in the making of a nation was “to get one's history wrong,” that new historical research that illuminated the deeds of violence upon which all political formations must be founded may pose a danger to nationality.⁶²Roots attempted to correct a political amnesia that had buried the horrors of slavery; but instead of threatening national self-image, Roots generated a search for personal heritage that transcended racial lines. In illuminating certain aspects of slavery—the victimization of blacks—it obscured others: the degree of their complicity and the degradation of character that might accompany powerlessness. ABC's promotional material for Roots emphasized the veracity of Haley's monumental research, explicitly billing the series as a nonfiction “ABC Novel for Television”: “The epic narrative, an eloquent testimonial to the indomitability of the human spirit, involved 12 years of research and writing during a half-million miles of travel across three continents.”⁶³ Despite their claims to essential truth, Haley's Roots and the television miniseries create a new mythology to replace the older one: if slavery never robbed Kunta Kinte's heirs of their essential dignity, how oppressive could the “peculiar institution” have been? It is a myth, the epic story of the African, that sustains them during all their trials and tribulations. And Haley and the makers of the miniseries use Roots to conjure with, to provide a viable mythology to enable a modern audience to find rootedness in a troubled world.

In an era of mass society, in which the concept of the self-made person seems of only antiquarian value, Roots created a compelling symbolic alternative. Roots, and even more blatantly Roots: The Next Generation, may be viewed as success stories recounting the rise of Haley's family as it achieved not only freedom but respect, prosperity, and status within the community. Roots differs, however, from most examples of American fictional or filmic treatment of the success theme. There are very few American success stories with happy endings, perhaps reflecting a national ambivalence toward success that allows Americans to dissipate any guilt regarding their envy of success by noting the psychological price to be paid. Novels like Theodore Dreiser's Financier and F. Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby and films like Citizen Kane and Mildred Pierce seem to imply that the acquisition of wealth and personal power precludes true happiness and fulfillment. Roots breaks with this pattern, since in the culminating episode the family has achieved freedom and dignity on its own land in Tennessee. In an essay on the rise of ethnic consciousness during the 1970s, James A. Hijiya has noted a significant shift in the American myth of success: “The fascination with the family and the ethnic group signals, I believe, a partial retreat from the traditional ideal of the self-made man. To an unaccustomed degree, Americans are conceiving themselves as products of groups.”⁶⁴

In Roots what makes the family “special” and, therefore, more worthy than its peers is its preservation of its ethnic heritage and its celebration of familial values. Chicken George returns from his triumphs as a cockfighter in England not to pursue personal success, nor to achieve individual freedom, but to win those accomplishments for his entire family. Because the family never forgets its roots nor its obligations to its patriarch, it remains in Alamance County, North Carolina, after the emancipation until Chicken George returns and sets into motion the chain of events that will lead to its genuine freedom from the debt slavery accompanying Reconstruction. That ultimate success may be acceptable to an American audience because it fulfills certain essential criteria: the blacks were tricked out of their freedom by the duplicity of Senator Justin—hence they deserved a better fate; their success came through cooperation with a good white, Ol' George—hence black success is not necessarily linked to white deprivation; they deserved some reward for their uncompensated hard labor on the former Harvey plantation; and, most important, their success was familial rather than individual, so that it avoided the corruption of the sin of pride. If success is not personal, it can be enjoyed without anguish, since it is not tainted with selfishness. Many American success stories, including those listed above, are bittersweet or tragic precisely because success entails the betrayal of familial values; by effacing the dichotomy between family and success, Roots offers a far more tantalizing promise than most other versions of the American Gospel of Success.

Roots also mythologized the African past. For example, Haley and the makers of Roots recreated Haley's ancestral village of Juffure as a primal Eden.⁶⁵ The African jungle in the dramatization appeared “as manicured as a suburban golf course.”⁶⁶ In fact, Juffure was no isolated, bucolic haven but rather the center of an active slave trade in which the villagers were complicit. Historical research by Philip D. Curtin places eighteenth-century Juffure in the center of one of the region's most thriving Afro-American trading networks. But Haley preferred to ignore Juffure's complicity in the violence and brutality of the slave trade and instead celebrated it as untouched by sordid reality.⁶⁷ In the year in which Kunta Kinte was captured, 1767, a commercial war was brewing between Ndanco Sono, the powerful king of Nomi, and the English, who refused to pay tribute for navigating the Gambia River in pursuit of the slave trade. In reviewing Haley's book, historian Willie Lee Rose noted: “It is inconceivable at any time, but particularly under these circumstances, that two white men should have dared to come ashore in the vicinity of Juffure to capture Kunta Kinte, even in the company of two Africans, as Haley describes it.” If such whites had appeared, the king would have exacted a terrible revenge by using his fleet of war canoes, each carrying forty or fifty men armed with muskets. According to Rose, Kunta's childhood was based on a myth of tribal innocence. “In fact history seems entirely suspended in the African section. No external events disturb the peaceful roots of Kunta Kinte's childhood.”⁶⁸ Although Haley's prose portrait of Juffure had been subject to substantial historical criticism, it was re-created intact in the television miniseries. Haley ultimately admitted his intentional fictionalization of Juffure, which actually had far more contacts with whites than the village he described: “Blacks long have needed a hypothetical Eden like whites have.”⁶⁹

The portrait of slavery that appears in the televised version of Roots is laden with inaccuracies, including many that had been criticized after the publication of Haley's book. For example, Dr. Andrew Billingsley has noted that the manhood rites of the Mandinka took three or four years, not the several days depicted in the film.⁷⁰ John Reynolds is portrayed farming cotton in Spotsylvania County in an era in which the crop would have been tobacco.⁷¹ Chicken George's fate makes little sense after he is taken to Britain for five years by a wealthy Englishman to train his fighting cocks:

Despite Lord Mansfield's 1771 ruling in the Somersett case, announcing that once a slave set foot on British soil he became free, Haley has George remain a slave to the British lord. Sent back to America in 1860, George continues a slave, even though he stops off in New York, where the personal liberty laws would certainly have guaranteed his freedom, and he returns docilely to the South to entreat his master for liberty.

(72)

Subsequent to the telecast, the genealogical foundations upon which Roots was based were challenged on several fronts. A British reporter with a reputation for integrity, Mark Ottaway, spent a week in Gambia studying Haley's factual claims.⁷³ Ottaway's investigation revealed that Juffure in 1767 was hardly a “combination of third-century Athens and Club Mediterrané with peripatetic philosophers afoot!” but rather was a “white trading post surrounded by white civilization.” Its inhabitants were not victims of the slave trade but collaborators in it, aiding whites in the capture of other Africans living farther up the river, hence the improbability of one of its residents being captured in 1767. Haley seems to have chosen 1767 as the year of Kunta Kinte's capture not on the basis of information obtained in Gambia but rather because it was the only year that would coincide with Haley's American research data. Kebba Fofana, whom Haley believed to be a griot who had preserved his family's oral tradition, was in fact not a member of that hereditary caste. A reckless playboy youth, Fofana had been a drummer (jalli), which in Mandinka can also mean griot, but he had received no formal training in the griot's complex art and learned his stories from listening to the village elders. There is strong evidence to indicate that Fofana knew in advance the nature of Haley's quest and sought to flatter his guest by reciting a narrative pleasing to him. Shortly before his death, Fofana made a deposition of the tale he had told Haley for the Gambian Archives. The names of Kunta's father and brothers do not coincide with the names used in Roots. It seems highly improbable that any resident of Juffure could have been captured by slavers in 1767, since the British were allowed peaceful trade by the king of Barra on the condition that none of his subjects should ever be captured as a slave. The African evidence makes it likely that Fofana's Kunta Kinte was captured after 1829. Ottaway argued, “It is undoubtedly on the assumption of accuracy that the book's commercial success is founded”; while Ottaway's investigation cast doubt on that accuracy, he conceded that the symbolic truth of Roots remained untarnished.⁷⁴

More recently Professor Gary B. Mills of the University of Alabama and his wife, Elizabeth Shown Mills, a certified genealogist who specializes in the ethnic minorities of the South, have demonstrated the utter unreliability of Haley's pre-Civil War genealogical research. Crucial to Haley's narrative is the linkage of the identity of the captured Kunta Kinte to that of the American slave Toby. The Millses discovered that the “Waller slave Toby appeared in six separate documents of record over a period of four years preceding the arrival of the [ship] Lord Ligonier. Toby Waller was not Kunta Kinte.” Strong circumstantial evidence indicates that “Toby died prior to the draft of the 1782 tax roll which was at least eight years prior to the birth of Kizzy, according to Roots.” Nor is it possible to substantiate that Dr. William Waller ever owned a slave named Bell who had been callously sold away from her infants. Moreover, a “Deed of Gift” by William Waller of 1767 and additional county records indicate that the doctor's niece, Ann, was a fully adult married woman at the time Haley portrayed her as Kizzy's childhood playmate. A thorough study of the Waller documents filed in Spotsylvania County prior to 1810 and a continued study of family probate records filed through 1833 failed to uncover a single Waller slave by the name of Kizzy or by any of the other names Haley used to designate the Waller slaves. Nor does an analysis of county, state, and federal records substantiate Haley's portrait of the Lea family (renamed Moore for television). The only Thomas Lea in Caswell County, North Carolina, who was head of a household in 1806-10 was far more affluent than the cockfighter pictured in Roots; Mrs. Lea was not barren and, in fact, bore at least two boys and two girls, with at least one son and one daughter surviving long enough to produce progeny of their own. The members of the Lea household do not correspond with Haley's account in Roots, nor could Tom Lea's economic disaster in the mid-1850s account for the dispatch of Chicken George to England in satisfaction of his debts, because Thomas Lea died between October 1844 and March 1845. In short, Haley appears to have misinterpreted or misrepresented the historical record in order to create a dramatic, stereotyped version of his family history, one with enormous popular and commercial appeal.⁷⁵

Even the inaccuracies known at the time of the telecast were allowed to stand because the facts were far less significant than the myths Roots wished to generate. Haley himself conceded that Roots was not so much a work of history as a study in mythmaking. Haley called his methodology faction: “All the major incidents are true, the details are as accurate as very heavy research can make them, the names and dates are real, but obviously when it comes to dialogue, and people's emotions and thoughts, I had to make things up. It's heightened history, or fiction based on real people's lives.”⁷⁶ Haley's book, much like Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851), is, as Meg Greenfield pointed out in Newsweek, “a work of historical imagination and re-creation,” ultimately a powerful, provocative fiction.⁷⁷

Subsequent events raised fundamental questions regarding Haley's authorial role in this research. In the wake of the success of the television miniseries, Alex Haley was barraged by a series of lawsuits charging him with plagiarism. While the court dismissed the charges of Dr. Margaret Walker Alexander that Haley had pilfered substantial portions of her 1966 epic novel, Jubilee, Haley did agree to a half-million-dollar out-of-court settlement with Harold Courlander, who had charged him with plagiarizing several sizable segments of his 1967 novel The African. The trial illuminated the degree to which Haley had succeeded in creating an authorial persona that bore little relation to his actual experience as a writer. He denied ever having read either Jubilee or The African, an incredible omission for a writer who had spent a dozen years researching his family history. A scholarly journal asserted: “For him to have missed these books is almost akin to someone doing a book on the history of the Black church in America and knowing nothing of W. E. B. Du Bois and E. Franklin Frazier.”⁷⁸ In testimony given at the trial, Haley conceded that three brief passages in Roots had been derived from Courlander's novel. The plagiarism was depicted as inadvertent by Haley's lawyer, but his rationalization of it reveals a new side of Haley to his American audience.

Haley's counsel, George Berger of Phillips Nizer, said passages from “The African” had probably been given to Haley during lecture tours while he was researching Roots when many of his listeners would volunteer material. The collected materials were subsequently culled by graduate students who did not identify their sources, Berger said.⁷⁹

This account contradicts Haley's repeated characterization of his twelve-year search as an arduous solitary one during which the author had to support himself with freelance articles and lectures because any monetary return seemed so unlikely.⁸⁰ Clearly Roots was not simply the product of one man's quest and suffering as Haley had claimed in so many public forums, nor did it draw strictly upon his own family's authentic historical record.

The television dramatization had no more genuine respect for historical authenticity than the book did. For example, one of the most striking episodes in the televised Roots, the slave rebellion aboard the Lord Ligonier, did not occur in Haley's original version on account of seasickness and flux among the slaves.⁸¹ There are numerous discrepancies between the miniseries and Haley's 1972 account in the New York Times Magazine. That account claims that the doctor, William Waller, was the one who named the African Toby after he had been maimed by slave catchers, whereas the miniseries has Kunta Kinte being beaten into submission less than a year after he has been acquired by the doctor's brother. In the Times version, Kunta is captured while chopping wood to make himself a drum; whereas in the film, he is making that drum at his grandmother's request for his younger brother, Lamin. In the Times narrative, Kunta Kinte is the eldest of four sons; perhaps to increase the pathos of his capture, he is given only one remaining brother in the film.⁸² The character of Fiddler in the film has no historical basis; he is a composite of three characters in the book in order to provide continuity. David Wolper explicitly disparaged scholarly efforts to chide the film for its lack of historical accuracy:

Some critics complained because we showed a mountain peak in Henning, Tennessee, because that section of the country doesn't have mountains. Nobody cares; it is totally irrelevant. A film is not for reference, but for emotional impact to let you know how it was to live at a certain moment in time. Roots was supposed to let the viewing audience feel how it was to be a slave. If you're not moved by watching a film, then the film has failed.⁸³

While the genealogy of Roots may have been flawed or even fictitious and many of the historical details inaccurate, both the book and the television miniseries provide a valuable corrective of traditional images of slavery. Certainly Roots effectively debunks many of the stereotypes of slave life propounded by historian Stanley M. Elkins in his seminal work, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1959). Elkins argues that the slave experience closely approximated the closed institutional framework of the Nazi concentration camp, with the slaves forced to assume a strategy of accommodation via role playing in order to deal with their oppressors. Elkins claims that the role of Sambo, an infantile and utterly dependent creature, “docile but irresponsible, loyal but lazy, humble but chronically given to lying and stealing,” was the most pervasive one assumed by American slaves. Roots argues that slaves had a remarkable ability to avoid this role, that the institution of slavery was neither coherent enough nor oppressive enough to coerce predominantly Sambolike behavior. Kunta Kinte never becomes servile despite repeated punishments, including mutilation, for his escape attempts; nor do any of his heirs identify with their owners as “good fathers”—Chicken George has to be restrained from killing his actual father when he realizes that he is no more than valuable chattel to the man. Elkins contends that slaves brought to North America were so shocked by the effectiveness with which they were detached from their cultural background in Africa that they had no choice but to become infantile in the interests of physical and psychic survival. Roots shows that the African heritage was not obliterated with the first generation, that remnants of tribal culture might be transmitted even into modern times. Elkins argues that the slave child had no other viable father image than that of the master, since the actual male parent was divested of any effective authority over the child. Roots presents Kunta Kinte, Chicken George, and Tom as patriarchal figures, able to command respect and to wield authority within the familial context. The miniseries makes it clear that the slave family was a viable counterweight to the oppressive nature of the “peculiar institution.”⁸⁴

In fact, Roots reflected the complexities of the slave experience revealed by modern historians who objected to Elkins's monolithic view of slavery. It recognized the persistence of African culture in slave society. As Lawrence W. Levine subsequently noted in Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (1977):

From the first African captives, through the years of slavery, and into the present century, black Americans kept alive important strands of African consciousness and verbal art in their humor, songs, dance, speech, tales, games, folk beliefs, and aphorisms. They were able to do this because these areas of culture are often the most persistent, because whites tended not to interfere with many of these culture patterns which quickly became associated in the white mind with Negro inferiority or at least peculiar Negro racial traits, and because in a number of areas there were important cultural parallels and thus wide room for syncretism between Africans and Europeans.⁸⁵

In Roots Kunta Kinte and his heirs are able to preserve vestiges of African language, folk beliefs, and customs, including the ritual of naming a newborn child by lifting it upward toward a full moon, a gesture of symbolic renewal of the link to Africa.

The willingness of modern historians to do “history from the bottom up,” to take seriously as evidence slave narratives and other documents illuminating, even if indirectly, the vantage point of the slave, has revealed a hitherto undisclosed pattern of quotidian slave resistance to oppression. Gilbert Osofsky takes note of numerous slave narratives that demonstrate the slaves' “perpetual war to prevent debasement”: “The powerful, the self-willed, those whose spirits could not be broken and who sometimes repulsed physically all attempts to whip them, presented the ultimate challenge to the mystique of the master caste.”⁸⁶ Certainly both Kunta Kinte and Tom Moore fit this rebellious image, one that modern research demonstrates to be far more common than the Elkins model of slavery would assume.

While slave narratives were written from the perspective of those who successfully escaped the toils of slavery and thus may be biased toward expressing resistance and rebellion, the Slave Narrative Collection of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration, compiled during the years 1936-38 as a result of more than two thousand interviews with former slaves, similarly debunks the Elkins thesis. The interviews reveal that the “peculiar institution” left “room for maneuver, for tactics and strategies, for blacks as well as for whites.” The editor of these narratives, George P. Rawick, argues that it was the slave community, rather than the more tenuous institution of the slave's nuclear family, subject to dissolution at the master's whim, that was “the major adaptive process for the black man in America.” The existence of the slave community ensured that slaves did not suffer total domination by the master class; it enabled its members to alleviate the worst of their oppression and at times even to dominate their masters. Built out of materials from both their African past and their American present, “with the values and memories of Africa giving meaning and direction to the new creation,” the slave community provided nurture for its members, who sought dignity and identity despite their physical subjugation.⁸⁷ In Roots the slave community is similarly portrayed as one largely supportive of its members, whether it be Bell inspiring the injured Toby to walk again or Kunta aiding the young Noah in his plan to flee to the North.

In fact, Roots reflects the historiographical insights of Herbert G. Gutman's Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (1976). Relying heavily upon census manuscript materials, Gutman discovered that the prevailing stereotype of the tenuous nature of the slave family was erroneous. “Evidence of long marriages is found in all slave social settings in the decade preceding the Civil War.” Despite the oppressive nature of slavery, Gutman argues, blacks were able to retain and develop familial and kinship ties that allowed them to “create and sustain viable Afro-American culture.” Roots, too, emphasizes the degree to which the family, based as it was on strong affectional ties and preserving remnants of the African heritage, allowed slaves to sustain dignity and identity despite generations of oppression by whites. In debunking the assertion of Daniel Patrick Moynihan that “it was by destroying the Negro family that white America broke the will of the Negro people,” both Gutman's work and Roots have done a major service to black historiography, for they have demonstrated the essential role played by the black family in transmitting Afro-American culture across generations of enslavement.⁸⁸

If historical details are of only peripheral interest, the miniseries's true concern, much like Haley's, is with mythmaking. And the most potent myth that the television version has to offer is that of the family. It is ironic that Haley himself was a poor family man who had left home as a youth and subsequently was twice divorced.⁸⁹ Haley spent little time with his two children as they were growing up; he kept his family life so private that some of his oldest friends in Los Angeles did not know until Haley became a celebrity that he had grown children. Richard M. Levine has written of Roots' author: “Clearly, in Alex Haley, television has finally found a man whose insatiable nostalgia for the vanishing dream of the American family matches its own.”⁹⁰

The myth of the family may be a source of pride and dignity for its members, sustaining their morale despite adversity; but the family also was an institution that subverted slave efforts at escape and rebellion. The myth of the family perpetuates a nostalgic desire for self-reliance; it nourishes the belief that problems can be solved in small, decentralized units instead of preaching a wider scope for human interdependency. Historian Eric Foner has written of the constrictive effects of Roots' notion of the family:

It is not simply that the narrow focus on the family inevitably precludes any attempt to portray the outside world and its institutions. To include these institutions would undermine the central theme of Roots—the ability of a family, through unity, self-reliance, and moral fortitude, to face and overcome adversity. Much like the Waltons confronting the depression, the family in Roots neither seeks nor requires outside help; individual or family effort is always sufficient.

Here, I believe, lies one reason for the enormous success of Roots among whites as well as blacks. The emphasis on the virtues and self-sufficiency of family life responds to a nostalgia for a time before divorce had become widespread, women had challenged their traditional homemaker role, and children had become rebellious, when the American family existed as a stable entity. Despite the black-nationalist veneer, in other words, the values of Roots are quintessentially American.⁹¹

Roots was acceptable to white audiences because of its essential conservatism; it unabashedly celebrated the family. Despite its own evidence to the contrary, Roots upheld the notion that the revolutionary spirit of the slaves was nurtured by the family unit. One film commentator has remarked, “Not for Alex Haley the more disturbing implications of William Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner—that it was only when blacks were allowed to separate themselves from that family unit that their revolt became possible.”⁹² While for over a century historians and sociologists have debated the ravages to the black family wrought by slavery, Alex Haley may well have been the first to suggest that slavery may have made a positive contribution to family life.

But family life, in fact, can constrain freedom. The birth of Kizzy keeps Kunta Kinte from making a final attempt to escape to freedom. Although Kizzy had vowed to avenge her rape by Tom Moore by having her firstborn man-child kill him, Kizzy ultimately dissuades Chicken George from that course by revealing that “it'd be killing your own flesh and blood. He's your papa. You're his son.” And even after emancipation the family decides to remain in North Carolina, despite the depredations of the night riders, because George's wife, Matilda, refuses to let the family leave until her husband has returned: “We is a family and we is gonna stay a family.” Roots fails to acknowledge that family and freedom may be mutually incompatible.⁹³ Nor does it ever question whether the family, as a product of hostility, may not crumble once prejudice and oppression are removed. The network may have championed Roots as “the triumph of an American family,” but that triumph may have been purchased at the expense of freedom and social consciousness.

Notes

1. Harry F. Waters with Vern E. Smith, “One Man's Family,” Newsweek, 21 June 1976, p. 71.

2. David L. Wolper with Quincy Troupe, The Inside Story of T.V.'s “Roots” (New York: Warner Books, 1978), 50, 138; Richard M. Levine, “Roots and Branches,” New York Times, 4 September 1978, p. 54; James Monaco, “Roots and Angels: U.S. Television 1976-77,” Sight and Sound 46 (summer 1977): 159.

3. Stan Margulies (Roots producer), interview and discussion with Margulies and John Erman (Roots director) in Arthur Knight's cinema class, University of Southern California, 15 February 1979. Film: Roots: The Next Generation, 1 reel, 7″, University of Southern California Special Collections. Also see Wolper with Troupe, Inside Story, 136-39.

4. Telephone interview with Brandon Stoddard, vice president for ABC Entertainment, Century City, California, 20 June 1981 (hereafter referred to as Stoddard interview).

5. Monaco, “Roots and Angels,” 159.

6. Karl E. Meyer, “Rootless Mini-Series,” Saturday Review, 20 January 1979, p. 52.

7. Pauline Kael, “Where We Are Now,” New Yorker, 28 February 1977, p. 90.

8. Harry F. Waters, in Bureau Reports, “After Haley's Comet,” Newsweek, 14 February 1977, p. 97.

9. “Nielsen All-Time Top 25 Programs,” Nielsen Newscast, no. 1 (1977): 6. Rankings based on reports through 17 April 1977.

10. Wolper with Troupe, Inside Story, 164; Les Brown, The New York Times Encyclopedia of Television (New York: Times Books, 1977), 369.

11. Stoddard interview.

12. Waters, “After Haley's Comet,” 97-98.

13. Kenneth Kyoon Hur and John P. Robinson, “The Social Impact of Roots,” Journalism Quarterly 55 (spring 1978): 19.

14. Gloster B. Current, “Cross-Country Survey on Roots—The Saga of Most Black Families in America,” The Crisis 84 (May 1977): 167-72.

15. Hur and Robinson, “Social Impact,” 20-24, 83.

16. Kenneth Kyoon Hur, “The Impact of Roots on Black and White Teenagers,” Journal of Broadcasting 22 (summer 1978): 289-98.

17. Robert E. Balon, “The Impact of Roots on a Racially Heterogeneous Southern Community: An Exploratory Study,” Journal of Broadcasting 22 (summer 1978): 299-307. Quotation appears on p. 306.

18. John Howard, George Rothbart, and Lee Sloan, “The Response to Roots: A National Survey,” Journal of Broadcasting 22 (summer 1978): 279-87.

19. Stuart H. Surlin, “Roots Research: A Summary of Findings,” Journal of Broadcasting 22 (summer 1978): 309-20. Quotation appears on p. 319.

20. R. Kent Rasmussen, “Roots—A Growing Thicket of Controversy,” Los Angeles Times, 24 April 1977, p. 5; Wolper with Troupe, Inside Story, 164.

21. Morna Murphy, “TV Critics' Circle Picks Roots as Program of Year, ABC Top Net,” Hollywood Reporter, 13 April 1977.

22. Rasmussen, “Roots—Growing Thicket,” 1; Hans J. Massaquoi, “Alex Haley in Juffure,” Ebony, July 1977, p. 42.

23. “Why Alex Haley Is Suing Doubleday: An Outline of the Complaint,” Publishers Weekly, 4 April 1977, p. 25.

24. “PW Interviews Alex Haley,” Publishers Weekly, 6 September 1976, p. 9.

25. Wolper with Troupe, Inside Story, 136-31.

26. “Why Roots Hit Home,” Time, 14 February 1977, p. 69.

27. Stoddard interview.

28. David A. Gerber, “Haley's Roots and Our Own: An Inquiry into the Nature of a Popular Phenomenon,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 5 (fall 1977): 87.

29. Stoddard interview.

30. Roots, show no. 1, as telecast, by William Blinn and Ernest Kinoy, p. 6. Scripts of all the episodes of Roots were provided courtesy of David L. Wolper, David L. Wolper Productions, Warner Brothers Television, Burbank Studios, 4000 Warner Boulevard, Burbank, California, pp. 19, 89, 93-94. Quotation appears on p. 94.

31. Roots, show no. 2, as telecast, by William Blinn and Ernest Kinoy, p. 98.

32. Roots, show no. 3, teleplay by James Lee and William Blinn, 15 June 1976, fifth hour, p. 56.

33. Roots, show no. 4, by James Lee and William Blinn, 17 June 1976, sixth hour, p. 58.

34. Roots, show no. 5, by James Lee, second draft, 19 April 1976, seventh hour, p. 57. Note that rather than Tom Moore, in the script the name Tom Lea was actually used, as in Haley's book.

35. Roots, show no. 6, teleplay by James Lee and William Blinn, 11 August 1976, eighth hour, p. 51.

36. Roots, show no. 6, part 2, 28 January 1977, Museum of Broadcasting, New York City. All the videotapes of Roots, Roots, One Year Later, and Roots: The Next Generation were viewed courtesy of the Museum of Broadcasting.

37. Roots, show no. 7, by M. Charles Cohen, revised second draft, 30 August 1976, tenth hour, pp. 48, 50. For the last quotation, the line in the actual telecast was: “You ain't seen the last of me, nigger” (Roots, show no. 7, 29 January 1977, Museum of Broadcasting).

38. Roots, show no. 8, by M. Charles Cohen, final draft, revised final draft, 6 September 1976, pp. 100-101.

39. Harry F. Waters, “The Black Experience,” Newsweek, 24 January 1977, p. 59.

40. Wolper with Troupe, Inside Story, 73, 141.

41. Waters, “Black Experience,” 59.

42. Stoddard interview.

43. Waters, “After Haley's Comet,” 98.

44. “Roots Takes Hold in America,” Newsweek, 7 February 1977, p. 26; Monaco, “Roots and Angels,” 161.

45. Kael, “Where We Are Now,” 90.

46. Waters with Smith, “One Man's Family,” 73.

47. Stoddard interview.

48. Quoted in Frank Rich, “A Super Sequel to Haley's Comet,” Time, 19 February 1979, p. 87; Wolper with Troupe, Inside Story, 62, 148.

49. Alex Haley, Roots: The Saga of an American Family (New York: Doubleday, 1976; reprint, New York: Dell, 1977), 11-166 out of 729 pages (all references to Haley's book to the mass-market paperback edition, since that would be more widely available for classroom use); Roots, show no. 1, as telecast, by William Blinn and Ernest Kinoy, 27.

50. Quoted in Wolper with Troupe, Inside Story, 44; Jean Vallely, “Brandon Stoddard Made a Monster Called Roots,” Esquire, 13 February 1979, p. 76.

51. Haley, Roots, cover; Gerber, “Haley's Roots,” 94.

52. Meyer, “Rootless Mini-Series,” 52.

53. “Haley's Rx: Talk, Write, Reunite,” Time, 14 February 1977, p. 72.

54. Monaco, “Roots and Angels,” 161.

55. Gerber, “Haley's Roots,” 90; David Herbert Donald, “Family Chronicle,” Commentary 62 (December 1976): 70-72; Harry F. Waters, “Back to Roots,” Newsweek, 19 February 1979, p. 87.

56. Kalamu ya Salaam, “Alex Haley Root Man: A Black Genealogist,” Black Collegian, November-December 1976, p. 32. Also see Roots, discussion between Alex Haley and Stan Margulies, 1977, Pacifica Tape Library.

57. Ya Salaam, “Alex Haley Root Man,” 33.

58. Wolper with Troupe, Inside Story, 81, 172.

59. Quoted in Gerber, “Haley's Roots,” 87-88.

60. Lois Armstrong, “Roots Is Back with Brando and a Bumper Crop of Stars to Be,” People, 26 February 1979, p. 59.

61. Stuart Byron, “Family Plot,” Film Comment 13 (March-April 1977): 31.

62. Ernest Renan, What Is a Nation? (1882), translated by Alfred Zimmen (London: Oxford University Press, 1939 edition), cited in Ali A. Mazrui, “The End of America's Amnesia,” Africa Reports 22 (May-June 1977): 7-8.

63. “Roots: Gripping 12-Hour, Multi-Part Story of an American Family, Traced from Its African Origins through 100 Years of Slave Life, Will Air on ABC Starting in 1977,” press release, 14 June 1976, ABC Television Network Press Relations, 1330 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10019. Supplied courtesy of ABC Public Relations Department.

64. James A. Hijiya, “Roots: Family and Ethnicity in the 1970's,” American Quarterly 30 (fall 1978): 549.

65. Paul D. Zimmermann, “In Search of a Heritage,” Newsweek, 27 September 1976, p. 94.

66. John J. O'Connor, “Strong Roots Continues Black Odyssey,” New York Times, 16 February 1979, p. C1.

67. Gerber, “Haley's Roots,” 98-99; Rasmussen, “Roots—Growing Thicket,” 1.

68. Willie Lee Rose, “An American Family,” review of Alex Haley's Roots, New York Review of Books, 11 November 1976, pp. 3-4.

69. Quoted in Kenneth L. Woodward with Anthony Collins in London, “The Limits of ‘Faction,’” Newsweek, 25 April 1977, p. 87.

70. Research cited in “Roots Grows into a Winner,” Time, 7 February 1977, p. 96.

71. “Living with the ‘Peculiar Institution,’” Time, 14 February 1977, p. 76.

72. Donald, “Family Chronicle,” 73.

73. Woodward with Collins, “Limits of ‘Faction,’” 87; Robert D. McFadden, “Some Points of Roots Questioned: Haley Stands by Book as a Symbol,” New York Times, 10 April 1977, pp. 1, 29.

74. Mark Ottaway, “Tangled Roots,” Sunday Times (London), 10 April 1977, pp. 17, 21.

75. Gary B. Mills and Elizabeth Shown Mills, “Roots and the New ‘Faction,’” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 89 (January, 1981): 7-13, 16-19, 24-26. Quotations appear on pp. 8 and 10; italics in original.

76. Lewis H. Lapham, “The Black Man's Burden,” Harper's, June 1977, pp. 15-16, 18; “PW Interviews,” 9, 10.

77. Meg Greenfield, “Uncle Tom's Roots,” Newsweek, 14 February 1977, p. 100.

78. Herb Boyd, “Plagiarism and the Roots Suits,” First World: An International Journal of Black Thought 2 (1979): 32.

79. “Haley Settles Plagiarism Suit, Concedes Passages,” Publishers Weekly, 25 December 1978, p. 22.

80. Haley, Roots, 716-29; “PW Interviews,” 8-9, 12; Waters, “After Haley's Comet,” 98.

81. Haley, Roots, 184-207.

82. Alex Haley, “My Furthest Back Person—‘The African,’” New York Times Magazine, 16 July 1972, pp. 13, 16.

83. Wolper with Troupe, Inside Story, 150, 178.

84. This discussion of Elkins's thesis derives from Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964); see especially pp. 82, 88, 128-30.

85. Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). While this particular formulation of Levine's thesis was published after the appearance of Roots as a television mini-series, Levine's basic argument was readily accessible to historians in paper and article form.

86. Gilbert Osofsky (ed.), Puttin' on Ole Massa: The Slave Narratives of Henry Bibb, William Wells Brown, and Solomon Northrup (New York: Harper & Row, Harper Torchbooks, 1969), 40.

87. George P. Rawick (ed.), The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, vol. 1 of From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community, Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies, no. 11 (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1972), xv-xvii, 9-12.

88. Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (New York: Pantheon, 1976), xvii, 14, 327-60 passim. Quotations appear on pp. xvii, 14, 360.

89. Gerber, “Haley's Roots,” 107; “View from the Whirlpool,” Time, 19 February 1979, p. 88.

90. R. Levine, “Roots and Branches,” 57.

91. Eric Foner, article in Seven Days (March 1977), reprinted in Wolper with Troupe, Inside Story, 263-64.

92. Byron, “Family Plot,” 31.

93. R. Levine, “Roots and Branches,” 56.