This coordinated marketing effort had its tensions. Wolper expressed frustration that ABC and Doubleday were producing promotional material that did not mention his name. “When you put out the ads for the book, be sure, when you say to the effect, ‘Soon to be a major ABC Television Program’ also say, ‘A David L. Wolper Production,’” Wolper wrote to Lisa Drew. “There are two reasons for this. One, it is good for me; and two, it will indicate to the people who read the ad that this is going to be a first-class production.”74 After Newsweek ran an article profiling Roots in June 1976, Wolper wrote a strongly worded letter to ABC. “I have just finished reading the wonderful article in Newsweek,” Wolper wrote. “I think it was absolutely terrific, except that I am extremely upset by the fact that, in all the references throughout the article, it was referred to as ‘ABC’s production of Haley’s epic,’ ‘ABC has signed LeVar Burton,’ and ‘An ABC film crew wrapped up Savannah shooting.’ All three of those statements are simply not true. The name of WOLPER should have been inserted for ABC.” Wolper continued, “In the future, I expect the ABC executives, and the ABC Press and Public Relations Departments to make a more-than-routine effort, in all releases and in all conversations regarding ROOTS, to see that ‘DAVID L WOLPER, EXECUTIVE PRODUCER’ or ‘A DAVID L. WOLPER PRODUCTION’ is mentioned.”75
Wolper’s demand for due credit is a useful reminder that in addition to being a history-making book and television series, Roots was above all else a commercial property. Its potential to expose millions of viewers and readers to the history of slavery was tied directly to the ability of ABC, Doubleday, Wolper, Haley, and other interests to profit from its commercial success. ABC’s marketing guide for their affiliate station promotion managers was unabashedly titled “‘Roots’ Exploitation Opportunities.” “We cannot overemphasize the importance of this series and need and encourage your support on this project,” the ABC guide read. “Roots offers you an extraordinary opportunity to enhance your station’s stature in your community as well as provide your viewers with a superlative and deeply moving entertainment.” The network advised stations to contact “bookstores, department stores, libraries [which] all have a vested interest in Alex Haley’s best seller—take advantage of it and contact them with your tie-in ideas for posters, point-of-purchase cards, etc. Remind them of the ‘Rich Man, Poor Man’ bonanza.”76 ABC told local affiliates that Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley had already agreed to declare January 23–30, 1977, as “‘Roots’ Week” and encouraged more stations to work with their local mayor to do the same. (Over two dozen cities eventually declared “Roots Week” at ABC’s suggestion.)77
All of this marketing effort was designed to get viewers to tune in for the first episode. “When you are doing a miniseries, so much of it is about the promotion, publicity, and advertising, because you have one night to get them in the house . . . if you don’t get them into the tent on the opening night, you are dead,” ABC’s Brandon Stoddard said. “We developed a war room . . . where we would meet with publicity, promotion, advertising, and on-air people once a week, and we would break it out and plan for something breaking on Roots for sixth months in advance . . . we planned out every story.”78 Critic Lawrence Laurent wrote in the Washington Post that the “heavy load of advance material for the telecast of ‘Roots’ brings back memories of a buildup for a Hollywood movie in the 1930s.”79 This extensive marketing campaign was in support of a series that promised to foreground black history in ways that had never been seen before on television.
In light of this massive promotional effort, it is remarkable that ABC was still scared that Roots would not attract an audience. In November 1976, Fred Silverman, ABC’s director of programming, announced that ABC would take the unusual step of airing Roots on eight consecutive nights. In the press release, Silverman framed this scheduling decision as a way to capture Roots’s emotional intensity. “We are taking this unprecedented approach to airing a ‘Novel for Television’ to insure maximum impact and continuity for what has already proven to be one of the most important dramatic stories of our time,” Silverman said. “By creating an ‘eight-day-week’ for this unique presentation we can provide the same kind of story concentration that is the very nature of a novel. A work this exceptional, this eagerly awaited, not only allows but requires exceptional treatment.”80 Silverman and his colleagues later acknowledged that ABC aired Roots in an unprecedented “eight-day-week” to limit the damage if the series did not catch on with television audiences. Brandon Stoddard, who championed Roots at ABC and reported to Silverman, said he knew his boss was “terrified” of Roots and figured, “We’re going to run it in a block in January” so that the network would only have “one bad week.”81 Silverman said he “loved the property” but was “nervous as can be” about airing it. Silverman was especially nervous about broadcasting any part of Roots during the crucial February sweeps period that helped set local advertising rates for the next period. “Maybe the best thing to do is back into January and do it all in one week,” Silverman concluded. Roots “tapped a chord that I didn’t call,” Silverman later admitted. “I would have put it in February. As it is we got seventy shares in January, which didn’t do us a hell of a lot of good in the sweeps. And I never heard the end of it from the affiliates.”82
By the time the first episode of Roots aired on January 23, 1977, Alex Haley’s book had sold over a million copies in hardcover, ABC had invested over $6 million in the production and marketing of Roots, and Roots’s producers had cast several white television stars to make white audiences comfortable watching a series about a black family in slavery. Despite all of this, there was still no guarantee that Roots would be a commercially successful television series. Wolper, Margulies, Stoddard, and Silverman bet that Roots could be a lucrative property, but on the night of the first broadcast all they could do was hope that Americans would tune in to watch Roots.
CHAPTER SIX
Reading Roots
Alex Haley’s Roots is three stories in one book. The first quarter of the book describes Kunta Kinte’s childhood in the Gambia, his capture, and his forced journey to America aboard the Lord Ligonier. This story of an African Eden and forced exile from it is followed by four hundred pages of family history, stretching across seven generations from Kunta Kinte’s arrival in America in 1767 to Haley’s birth in 1921. Finally, the book’s last twenty pages tell the story of Haley’s search for his roots, a story he told hundreds of times in lectures. Roots is a long and uneven book, but these three stories gave readers and critics plenty to enjoy, analyze, and debate.
Roots made Kunta Kinte the most famous African in American history. The long first section of Haley’s epic family history takes place in the small Gambian village of Juffure, where Kunta Kinte was born and lived as a free person for sixteen years. “The reason I devoted the first 126 pages of the book to Kunta’s life in Africa, which some critics found both long and boring, was that so little has been known up to now in the West, by white or black, about the depth and richness of African culture, which I happen to think we can all learn something from,” Haley said.1 Creating this vision of Kunta’s childhood in Africa became an overwhelming obsession for Haley. “I spent two years just researching and digging out actual facts of African cultural life—ceremonies, implements, etc., everything I could find on the subject,” Haley said. “But, when I finished, I had this unwieldy mass of material and I had to come up with some way of organizing it. I made a notebook for each of the 16 years that Kunta had spent in Africa, then separated the information I had gathered in terms of the age at which Kunta would have been exposed to it. This ordered the material and gave the early part of the book a feeling of authenticity, validity.”2
Some reviewers criticized Haley for idealizing life in eighteenth-century Juffure, Gambia, and Africa. “That the real Juffure of two hundred years ago was anything like the pastoral village Haley describes is not possible,” historian Willie Lee Rose wrote in the New York Review of Books. “Whate
ver bucolic character Juffure may have today, it was in the eighteenth century a busy trading center, inhabited by possibly as many as 3,000 people.”3 The Gambian officials who facilitated Haley’s research in the country told the author about this colonial history, but the author chose to portray the Gambia as an African Eden. “I, we, need a place called Eden,” Haley said. “My people need a Plymouth Rock.”4 Haley wanted Kunta Kinte’s childhood in Juffure to serve as a symbolic beginning for all African Americans. “In the case of blacks, there just simply hasn’t been anything like a valid history of the family culture, love and compassion,” Haley said. “History talked about the slaves amorphously, as a body of people who endured this and that. . . . [My hope is] that this story of our people can help alleviate the legacies of the fact that preponderantly the histories have been written by the winner.”5
In creating an idyllic image of Kunta Kinte’s life in Juffure, Haley hoped to displace the racist images of Africa he had seen in his youth. “I thought of Africa as being pretty much the way it had been depicted in the movies,” Haley said. “My far-off relatives were there, dancing and waving spears and raising hell while Johnny Weissmuller swung through the trees.”6 Like millions of filmgoers, Haley learned about Africa from the Tarzan and Jungle Jim films, which starred former Olympic swimming champion Johnny Weissmuller. “All of us, black and white, who are over 20 years of age thought of Tarzan or Jungle Jim as our concept of Africa,” Haley argued.7 Haley carried these childhood movie memories into adulthood and saw his book as an opportunity to tell a different story about Africa. After Roots had broken publishing and television ratings records, Haley said, “The thing I am proudest of is that [Roots] helped replace the prevailing African image of Tarzan with that of Kunta Kinte, which is more appropriate and accurate.”8 Roger Wilkins, a black civil rights activist, journalist, and historian, welcomed this new view of Africa. “My parents, as typical college-educated Americans, did not know enough of Africa or of slavery to protect me from the overwhelming shame that I felt because of the misinformation that washed over this culture,” Wilkins wrote. “Just as the revolution in black consciousness removed many of those shackles in the late sixties, the story of Kunta Kinte filled blacks at all levels with great pride and chased the shame.”9 Acclaimed writer Maya Angelou agreed that Roots challenged long-held stereotypes of Africa. “For centuries, we (all Americans) were led to believe that Africa was a country belonging to wild animals, where naked, primitive human beings spent their time either climbing trees, leading safaris, or eating each other; and, although we denied the teaching publicly, we at least half-believed the description,” Angelou wrote. “Then Alex Haley’s ‘Roots’ burst upon the national consciousness. Using the formidable work as lens, for the first time we were able to see Africans at home (on the continent) and abroad (three hundred years and thousands of miles removed to the United States, South America, the Caribbean, Nova Scotia) as simply human beings caught in the clutches of circumstances over which they had little and often no control.”10
In addition to replacing racist popular culture’s visions of Africa, Haley wanted readers to know Kunta Kinte as a free member of a family and community who loved him. “I wanted to plant Kunta’s roots so deep, as I told the story of his life from birth to capture, that the wrench of his being torn from the soil of his homeland would be as heartbreaking for the reader as it was for me,” Haley said.11 Haley needed Kunta Kinte to be the patriarch for his family history, but the family story Haley heard in Gambia did not flesh out Kunta Kinte as a person. Gambian storyteller Kebba Fofana Kinte told Haley who Kunta Kinte’s parents and siblings were and when he disappeared from the village, but for Roots to work Haley needed Kunta Kinte to be more than a name on a family tree.
In the lengthy Africa section of Roots, Haley asked readers to share his experience of creating Kunta Kinte. “The reader literally shared his birth. . . . We became beguiled by him as we shared his journey through life,” Haley said. “When I say ‘we,’ I mean I was as beguiled as anyone else in recounting the story of his life. There were many times when I would catch myself at the typewriter or with pen in hand, feeling as though I were standing off somewhere at the edge of the village watching Kunta doing the things I was writing about at the time.”12 Haley described writing about Kunta’s enslavement in similar terms. “When [Kunta] finally was captured, I felt as though I had been hit in the head with a two-by-four,” Haley said. “In fact, I was so broken up over his capture, that I quit writing for several weeks.”13 With Kunta’s capture, Haley said, “slavery ceased to be impersonal. Indeed, it became highly personal to millions of readers who identified with him in human terms, very much as I did.”14
By devoting the first third of Roots to Kunta Kinte’s life, Haley achieved the difficult task of making his book work as a specific story about one family’s journey through slavery, as a representative story about black enslavement and survival, and, most broadly, as a generalizable story about coming to America. Doubleday’s advertising for Roots emphasized this mix of specific black experiences and universal themes. “Twelve years ago, Alex Haley went searching for answers to questions we all ask,” a book advertisement read. “Who am I? Where did I come from? Who were my ancestors? The quest was more difficult for him than it would be for most Americans: his ancestors arrived in this country neither on the Mayflower nor in steerage, but in chains.”15 Doubleday and Haley welcomed readers to see Roots as a generalizable story of a family’s journey to America. “Searching for his roots, Alex Haley helps us discover our own,” Doubleday’s advertising promised. Indeed, Roots benefited from and contributed to a groundswell in interest in genealogy in the 1970s. How-to genealogy books like Ethel Williams’s Know Your Ancestors (1968), Gilbert Doane’s Searching for Your Ancestors (1973), Val Greenwood’s The Researcher’s Guide to American Genealogy (1974), and Suzanne Hilton’s Who Do You Think You Are? Digging for Your Family Roots (1976) preceded Haley’s, while Dan Rottenberg’s Finding Our Father: A Guidebook to Jewish Genealogy (1977) and Charles Blockson’s Black Genealogy (1977) came out shortly after Roots. Literary scholar Louis Rubin described Roots as producing “a kind of national vogue for root-grubbing.” Rubin joked, “I have no doubt that a minimum of one dozen New York publishing houses have since commissioned journalists to return to the jungles of such faraway places as Esthonia, the Orkney Islands, and the Schwartzwald and search out the peregrinations and former penal conditions of their forebears.”16 Newsweek’s July 4, 1977, cover picked up this theme with the headline “Everybody’s Search for Roots.” While Doubleday and Haley pitched Roots as a universal family story, everyone who picked up Roots knew that Haley’s farthest-back person would be captured and transported to United States on a slave ship. While readers could enjoy Haley’s “Saga of an American Family” without grappling with the horrible magnitude of slavery, Roots made it clear that the process of becoming American for black people was categorically different from that for European immigrants.
While Haley was not the first author to root the history of black Americans in Africa or to tell an uplifting story of a family’s survival during and after slavery, Roots had far more support from the commercial publishing industry (and later television) than previous works of black history. Doubleday’s extensive promotion of Haley’s book and the book’s physical size (it is 587 pages long) helped establish Roots as an important work that should be on the bookshelf in every black home. “For the first time in our history, there is a perfect gift for every child past the age of 10 years,” Jim Cleaver wrote in the Los Angeles Sentinel, a leading black newspaper, just before Christmas in 1976. “Of course, the ‘perfect gift’ to which we refer is a book entitled ‘Roots.’”17 Cleaver continued, “The past several years have seen this society evolve into a newly discovered kind of consciousness about blackness. There have been all kinds of groups formed that relate to the ‘black awareness’ aspect of our community. But never before has such a chronicle about the evolution of the Afric
an from freeman to slave to freeman been written.”18 A reviewer in the Atlanta Daily World, the city’s largest black newspaper, praised Roots in similar terms. “Haley’s book ‘Roots’ adds some dignity to our existence in America,” Charles Price wrote. “This is not because of the skillfulness of his writing or the novelty of the events that he writes about, but rather because he has taken the time to treat the experiences of blacks as human experiences.”19 Chuck Stone, a black journalist and scholar, looked to classical history to find an adequate comparison for Haley’s epic work. “For its literary gracefulness, Roots, the book, will stand in solitary preeminence, distinguished by its narrative sweep, historical detail, and eloquent craftsmanship,” Stone wrote. “Alex Haley is the Thucydides of our day, interpreting the Black Diaspora as majestically as the Greek historian catalogues the Peloponnesian War.”20
Roots also became part of ongoing debates about black families, much closer at hand than ancient Greece. The year after Haley signed the contract for Before This Anger, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, assistant secretary of labor in the Johnson administration, wrote the government report The Black Family: A Case for National Action (1965). Moynihan argued that black urban families were deeply troubled. “There is no one Negro problem,” Moynihan wrote. “There is no one solution. Nonetheless, at the center of the tangle of pathology is the weakness of the family structure. Once or twice removed, it will be found to be the principal source of most of the aberrant, inadequate, or antisocial behavior that did not establish, but now serves to perpetuate the cycle of poverty and deprivation.” Moynihan argued that this black family instability started in slavery: “It was by destroying the Negro family under slavery that white America broke the will of the Negro people.”21 The Moynihan Report influenced political and scholarly debates regarding black families for decades and prompted historian Herbert Gutman to research and write The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (1976), which argued that slave marriages and two-parent households were much more common than Moynihan or previous scholars of slavery had suggested.22
Making Roots Page 13