Roots’s most direct inspiration is Henry Louis Gates’s PBS genealogy shows African American Lives (2006–8) and Finding Your Roots (2012–16), which examine the family ancestry of celebrities. Gates described Roots as motivating his interest in genealogy. “You can say I had a severe case of Roots envy,” Gates said. “I wanted to be like Alex Haley, and I wanted to be able to . . . do my family tree back to the slave ship and then reverse the Middle Passage, as I like to put it, and find the tribe or ethnic group that I was from in Africa.”13 Gates found Haley’s story powerful despite its inaccuracies. “Most of us feel its highly unlikely that Alex actually found the village whence his ancestors sprang,” Gates said. “‘Roots’ is a work of the imagination rather than strict historical scholarship. It was an important event because it captured everyone’s imagination.”14 On the one hand, Gates’s advocacy of DNA genetic testing is both an embrace of contemporary technology and, in light of the questions that plagued Haley’s research, a way to add scientific evidence to the study of black genealogy: “Alex Haley in a test tube,” as Gates put it.15 On the other hand, genetic testing is similar to Roots in that it relies on storytelling and belief to make disparate pieces of data meaningful. “While today’s popular genealogy television programs would lead us to believe that root-seekers take up wholesale the information provided to them by genetic ancestry tests and accept it unconditionally, something far more complex is at play,” sociologist Alondra Nelson argues. “Genetic genealogy tests are deemed reliable to the extent that they are useful for consumers’ myriad aims; for many, this involves strategically marshaling the data. Some use their genetic results as usable narratives that open up new avenues of social interaction and engagement.” Nelson describes how Roots piqued the interest of a generation of genealogists of African descent and how “racial composite testing had proved unsatisfactory to some root-seekers who want to re-create Alex Haley’s Roots journey in their own lives.”16
Almost every year brings some sort of popular culture reference to Alex Haley and Roots. From Robert Townsend’s joke about an “Epic Slaves” acting class in Hollywood Shuffle (1987) to the Chappelle Show’s parody of outtakes from the twenty-fifth anniversary DVD of Roots (2003), Roots remains a touchstone to reference what has and has not changed for black performers in Hollywood. Dozens of hip-hop artists have referenced Roots, including A Tribe Called Quest (the song “What?” in 1991: “What’s Alex Haley if it doesn’t have roots?”), Missy Elliot (the song “Work It” in 2002: “Kunta Kinte a slave again, no sir / Picture blacks saying, Oh yes’a massa / No!”), and Kendrick Lamar (the song “King Kunta” in 2015: “Now I run the game got the whole world talkin’, King Kunta / Everybody wanna cut the legs off him, Kunta”). Artists keep returning to Roots with the expectation that their audiences will understand, or be encouraged to learn about, the reference. Roots remains a generative story because it has been part of the national consciousness for generations of Americans.
The second reason why Roots still matters is that it is a cautionary story about the inevitability of progress. With the largest black cast in the history of commercial television, Roots seemed to herald new possibilities for black employment in television and for the possibility that more black-themed shows would cross over to white audiences. Four months after Roots, New York Amsterdam News reporter Phyllis Lu Simpson interviewed representatives from ABC, CBS, and NBC regarding whether there would be more black-themed shows or black actors in the fall lineup. Each network told Simpson there were no new black programs on deck, to which she asked, “Roots inspired nothing?”17 For television executives, Roots helped legitimize the miniseries format and led to several follow-up projects—Roots: The Next Generations (1979), Roots: The Gift (1988), and Alex Haley’s Queen (1993)—but did not convince executives of the profitability of black programming more broadly. Even producer David Wolper, one the most ardent boosters of Roots, did not believe Roots changed the industry. “I don’t think [Roots] changed race relations,” Wolper told an interviewer in 1998. “I think for a moment it had an impact. Did it help African American actors? No. A lot of them couldn’t get work even after Roots came on. Did more stories about African Americans show on television? No.”18 By these lights Roots should be remembered as television’s unfulfilled promise to reflect the diversity of the country.
Roots is also a cautionary story about the difficulties of speaking honestly about slavery in public forums. Since Roots no treatment of slavery has captured the public consciousness in the same way, and it is unlikely that anything ever will. Producer David Wolper joked that with so many channels now, “You couldn’t get a 71 share if you had the returning of the Lord.”19 Mass commercial culture, on rare occasions, encourages people to spend time thinking and talking about serious subjects. By making Roots, Alex Haley and many publishing and television professionals asked readers and viewers to see slavery as an American story.
As I finish writing this book, America is again struggling with how to memorialize slavery, how to talk about the history of racism in this country, and how to address the generational legacies of unfreedom. The lesson we can take from Roots and how quickly American culture moved on to the next phenomenon is that it takes consistent work to give these issues traction in public discourse. Scholars know much more about the histories of slavery and racism today than they did when Roots was published and broadcast. Within the academy we can work to make slavery a subject of inquiry for scholars outside of early American history and African American studies, we can produce resources to make recent scholarship available to high school teachers and students, and we can work beyond the classroom to motivate people to talk more, and more honestly, about the history of slavery. As media consumers we can push producers and publishers to make work that takes on serious subjects, such as Steve McQueen and John Ridley’s adaption of Solomon Northup’s narrative 12 Years a Slave (1853; 2013), BET’s miniseries based on Lawrence Hill’s novel The Book of Negroes (2007; 2015), and WGN’s Underground (2016). And we can adapt lessons from museums, such as the New York Historical Society’s Slavery in New York exhibit (2005), the Whitney Plantation Museum (opened in 2014), and the National Museum of African American History and Culture (opening in the fall of 2016), to tell local, national, and transnational stories about slavery. This moment of renewed attention to America’s original sin is important, but it is not guaranteed to last. The four decades since Roots have underscored how uncommon it is to have black actors, culture, and history featured in a mass commercial production and how difficult it is to speak honestly about slavery. If we appreciate the varied creative energies that went into making Roots, we can better understand what it takes to make Americans reckon with slavery and its legacies.
NOTES
The following are abbreviations used in the notes:
Goodwin
Hoffman Family Library, Goodwin College, East Hartford, CT
Schomburg
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York
UT
University of Tennessee Libraries Special Collections, Knoxville
USC
Doheny Memorial Library, University of Southern California, Los Angeles
INTRODUCTION
1. The Tonight Show, NBC, February 2, 1977.
2. Mary Beth Crain, “‘Birth of a Nation’—The Other Side of ‘Roots,’” Los Angeles Times, February 13, 1977.
3. John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd, and Celeste-Marie Bernier, Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American (New York: Liveright, 2015); Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Enduring Truths: Sojourner’s Shadows and Substance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
4. Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Shawn Michelle Smith, “Looking at One’s Self through the Eyes of Others: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Photographs for the 1900 Paris Exposition,” Af
rican American Review 34, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 581–99.
5. Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900–1942 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).
6. Melvin Patrick Ely, The Adventures of Amos ’n’ Andy: A Social History of an American Phenomenon (New York: Free Press, 1991).
7. Joan Hauer, “‘Roots’ Crushes ‘Gone with the Wind,’” Baltimore Afro-American, February 12, 1977.
8. Henry Louis Gates Jr. et al., The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 3rd ed. (New York: Norton, 2014).
9. Arnold Rampersad, “Review of Roots,” New Republic, December 4, 1976, 23–24.
10. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1987); Philippe Vergne, Sander Gilman, and Kara Walker, Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2007); Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007); Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
11. Quoted in Murray Fisher, ed., Alex Haley: The Playboy Interviews (New York: Ballantine Books, 1993), vii.
1. BEFORE THIS ANGER
1. Alex Haley, “August 5, 1964” notecard, n.d. [ca. 1974], box 29, folder 34, Alex Haley Collection, UT.
2. Alex Haley, interview by Anne Romaine, September 29, 1991, transcript, p. 2, box 2, folder 31, Anne Romaine Collection, UT.
3. Robert Norrell, Alex Haley and the Books That Changed a Nation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2015), 15.
4. Alex Haley, “Smithsonian Institution Bicentennial Speech,” n.d. [ca. 1976], box 5, folder 3, Schomberg.
5. Norrell, Alex Haley, 16.
6. Joan Wixen, “Home Village Visit Cherished,” Lubbock Avalanche Journal, January 23, 1977.
7. Quoted in Norrell, Alex Haley, 20.
8. Alex Haley to Paul Reynolds, April 23, 1967, box 3, folder 25, Anne Romaine Collection, UT.
9. “The Black Scholar Interviews: Alex Haley,” Black Scholar 8, no. 1 (September 1976): 35.
10. Norrell, Alex Haley, 29.
11. Ibid., 17, 27–32.
12. Alex Haley, “The Harlem Nobody Knows,” Reader’s Digest, July 1954.
13. Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” April 16, 1963, http://okra.stanford.edu/transcription/document_images/undecided/630416–019.pdf.
14. Alex Haley, interview by Anne Romaine, December 18, 1990, transcript, p. 6, box 2, folder 32, Anne Romaine Collection, UT.
15. Quoted in Norrell, Alex Haley, 34.
16. “Black Scholar Interviews,” 36.
17. Alex Haley, interview by Anne Romaine, December 18, 1990, transcript, p. 7, box 2, folder 32, Anne Romaine Collection, UT; “Search Chapter 4,” n.d. [ca. 1975], box 1, folder 5, Alex Haley Collection, Goodwin.
18. “Black Scholar Interviews,” 37.
19. Alex Haley, “Search Chapter 4,” n.d. [ca. 1975], box 1, folder 5, Alex Haley Collection, Goodwin.
20. “Roots: The Second Hundred Years,” transcript of meeting with Alex Haley, John McGreevey, and Stan Margulies, January 9, 1978, p. 18, box 38, folder, 6, Alex Haley Collection, UT.
21. Ibid., p. 52.
22. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952; repr., New York: Vintage, 1995), 3.
23. “Roots: The Second Hundred Years,” p. 2.
24. “Playboy Interview: Miles Davis—Candid Conversation,” Playboy, September 1962, 60.
25. Alex Haley to Paul Reynolds, September 3, 1963, box 3, folder 24, Anne Romaine Collection, UT.
26. Alex Haley to Paul Reynolds, September 5, 1963, box 3, folder 24, Anne Romaine Collection, UT.
27. Norrell, Alex Haley, 63.
28. Alex Haley to Paul Reynolds, September 22, 1963, box 3, folder 24, Anne Romaine Collection, UT.
29. Alex Haley to Paul Reynolds, October 24, 1963, box 3, folder 24, Anne Romaine Collection, UT.
30. Ibid.
31. Alex Haley to Paul Reynolds, January 28, 1964, box 3, folder 24, Anne Romaine Collection, UT.
32. Alex Haley to Paul Reynolds, July 14, 1964, box 3, folder 24, Anne Romaine Collection, UT.
33. Alex Haley to Phoebe, November 7, 1964, box 3, folder 24, Anne Romaine Collection, UT.
34. Alex Haley to Ken McCormick and Paul Reynolds, November 26, 1963, box 3, folder 24, Anne Romaine Collection, UT.
35. Alex Haley to Paul Reynolds, August 16, 1964, box 3, folder 24, Anne Romaine Collection, UT.
36. Paul Reynolds to Alex Haley letter, December 12, 1963, box 3, folder 26, Anne Romaine Collection, UT.
37. Joan Cord to Paul Reynolds, August 28, 1964, box 3, folder 26, Anne Romaine Collection, UT; Paul Reynolds to Alex Haley, September 24, 1964, box 3, folder 26, Anne Romaine Collection, UT; Paul Reynolds to Lou [Blau], October 26, 1976, box 3, folder 27, Anne Romaine Collection, UT.
38. Alex Haley to Paul Reynolds, September 9, 1964, box 3, folder 24, Anne Romaine Collection, UT.
39. Alex Haley to Paul Reynolds, October 15, 1964, box 3, folder 24, Anne Romaine Collection, UT.
40. Alex Haley to Paul Reynolds, July 9, 1965, box 3, folder 24, Anne Romaine Collection, UT.
41. Alex Haley to Paul Reynolds, October 15, 1964, box 3, folder 24, Anne Romaine Collection, UT.
42. Ibid.; Alex Haley to Paul Reynolds, October 17, 1964, box 3, folder 24, Anne Romaine Collection, UT.
43. Alex Haley to Paul Reynolds, October 28, 1964, box 3, folder 26, Anne Romaine Collection, UT.
44. Alex Haley to “Susannah-O,” November 3, 1964, box 3, folder 24, Anne Romaine Collection, UT.
45. Alex Haley to Paul Reynolds, January 30, 1965, box 3, folder 10, Alex Haley Collection, UT.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
48. Alex Haley, Roots: The Saga of an American Family (New York: Doubleday, 1976), 570.
49. Ibid., 573.
50. Alex Haley to Paul Reynolds, January 30, 1965, box 3, folder 10, Alex Haley Collection, UT.
51. Ibid.
52. Paul Reynolds to Alex Haley, February 8, 1965, box 3, folder 10, Alex Haley Collection, UT.
53. Norrell, Alex Haley, 86–87; Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (New York: Viking, 2011), 418–49.
54. Quoted in Norrell, Alex Haley, 88.
55. Paul Reynolds to Alex Haley, May 11, 1965, box 3, folder 26, Anne Romaine Collection, UT.
56. Alex Haley to Paul Reynolds, August 24, 1965, box 3, folder 10, Alex Haley Collection, UT.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid.
59. Stan Margulies to Conrad Holzgang, July 14, 1975, box 105, folder 019, David Wolper Collection, USC.
60. Alex Haley, Search for Roots draft, n.d. [ca. 1975], p. 99, box 14, folder 13, Alex Haley Collection, Goodwin.
61. Alex Haley to Ken McCormick, November 24, 1965, box 3, folder 24, Anne Romaine Collection, UT.
62. Ibid.
63. Alex Haley, “Preface: August 19, 1966,” box 6, folder 10, Alex Haley Collection, Goodwin.
64. Alex Haley, “Notes on ‘America America,’” n.d. [ca. 1965], box 6, folder 10, Alex Haley Collection, Goodwin.
65. Alex Haley to Paul Reynolds, October 24, 1966, box 3, folder 25, Anne Romaine Collection, UT.
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid.
68. Dr. Kathryn Graupner to George Haley, December 16, 1966, box 8, folder 5, Alex Haley Collection, Goodwin; Karen Lawman to Alex Haley, December 21, 1966, box 8, folder 5, Alex Haley Collection, Goodwin.
69. George Haley to Alex Haley et al., February 1, 1967, box 8, folder 5, Alex Haley Collection, Goodwin.
70. Simon Haley to Alex Haley, September 8, 1965, box 8, folder 5, Alex Haley Collection, Goodwin; Alex Haley, “From Dad Night of 10–11 January 1965” notes, box 8, folder 5, Alex Haley Collection, Goodwin.
71. Simon Haley to Alex Haley, April 26, 1966, box 8, folder 5, Alex Haley Collection, Goodwin.
72. Alex Haley, “Anecdotes about Dad” notecard, n.d. [ca. 19
74], box 1, folder 3, Alex Haley Collection, Goodwin.
73. Alex Haley to Paul Reynolds, March 9, 1967, box 3, folder 25, Anne Romaine Collection, UT.
74. Alex Haley to Paul Reynolds, March 5, 1967, box 3, folder 25, Anne Romaine Collection, UT.
75. Ibid.
76. Alex Haley to Paul Reynolds, March 9, 1967, box 3, folder 25, Anne Romaine Collection, UT.
77. Ibid.
78. Paul Reynolds to Alex Haley, March 10, 1967, box 3, folder 27, Anne Romaine Collection, UT.
79. Ibid.
80. Ibid.
2. THE GAMBIA
1. Lloyd Garrison, “Gambia a Nation, Tiniest in Africa,” New York Times, February 18, 1965.
2. “Independent Gambia,” February 20, 1965, New York Times, February 20, 1965.
3. William Hogan, “A Bookman’s Notebook,” Corona Daily Independent, January 11, 1966.
4. Alex Haley, “Primary Tribes Then in Gambia,” n.d. [ca. 1973], box 2, folder 4, Alex Haley Collection, Goodwin, and “Mungo Park” notes, n.d. [ca. 1971], box 2, folder 4, Alex Haley Collection, Goodwin.
5. Alex Haley to Ken McCormick, August 8, 1966, box 3, folder 10, Alex Haley Collection, UT.
6. Alex Haley to Paul Reynolds, October 18, 1966, box 3, folder 10, Alex Haley Collection, UT.
7. Alex Haley to Paul Reynolds, October 29, 1966, box 3, folder 25, Anne Romaine Collection, UT.
8. Alex Haley, Roots: The Saga of an American Family (New York: Doubleday, 1976), 573–74.
9. Ebou Manga, interview by Anne Romaine, March 4, 1992, transcript, pp. 2–3, box 3, folder 15, Anne Romaine Collection, UT.
Making Roots Page 20