20. LeVar Burton, commentary, in Roots: The Triumph, disc 1.
21. Ibid., disc 1, side B.
22. ABC Press Relations, “LeVar Burton,” n.d. [ca. 1976], box 30, folder 6, Alex Haley Collection, UT.
23. Roots: The Triumph, disc 1, side B.
24. “The Cast of Roots,” YouTube video, posted by Wendy Williams, February 5, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EqO1680evM.
25. LeVar Burton, commentary, in Roots: The Triumph, disc 1, side B.
26. John Erman, commentary, in Roots: The Triumph, disc 1, side B.
27. Mrs. John Pelli to Alex Haley, February 3, 1977, box 11A, folder 8, Alex Haley Collection, Goodwin.
28. Murray Fisher, “A Candid Conversation with the Author of the American Saga Roots,” Playboy, January 1977, 76.
29. John Amos, commentary, in Roots: The Triumph, disc 2.
30. Roots: The Triumph, disc 2.
31. Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” July 5, 1852.
32. Mary McCauley, “Alex Haley, A Southern Griot: A Literary Biography” (PhD diss, Vanderbilt University, 1983), 183–84.
33. “Page 253: Roots Working Calendar,” n.d. [ca. 1973], box 29, folder 34, Alex Haley Collection, UT.
34. Leslie Uggams, commentary, in Roots: The Triumph, disc 3.
35. Roots: The Triumph, disc 2, side B.
36. Ibid., disc 2, side B.
37. Stan Margulies to Lou Rudolph, June 2, 1976, box 104, folder 024, Wolper Collection, USC.
38. Roots: The Triumph, disc 2, side B.
39. Ibid., disc 3.
40. Stan Margulies to Irwin Russell, June 8, 1976, box 104, folder 005, Wolper Collection, USC.
41. William Blinn, interview by Gary Rutkowski, October 7, 2005, Web video, www.emmytvlegends.org/interviews/people/william-blinn.
42. Benjamin Hooks, “Another Word on Roots,” New Journal and Guide, March 19, 1977.
43. Charlayne Hunter-Gault, “‘Roots’ Getting a Grip on People Everywhere,” New York Times, January 28, 1977.
44. W. Clyde Williams, “The Power of the Roots Search,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, April 30, 1977.
45. Robert Williams, “Postscript,” Washington Post, February 14, 1977.
46. Janice Turner, letter to the editor, Los Angeles Sentinel, March 10, 1977.
47. Clarissa Steedley, letter to the editor, State (Columbia, SC), February 9, 1977.
48. Joan Lawrence, letter to the editor, Seattle Daily Times, February 20, 1977.
49. Gregory Sweigert, letter to the editor, Fort Wayne News Sentinel, March 22, 1977.
50. “Seething Southerner,” letter to the editor, Pasadena Star-News, February 4, 1977.
51. “Kizzy,” letter to the editor, Pasadena Star-News, March 3, 1977.
52. Roger Wilkins, “The Black Ghosts of History,” New York Times, February 2, 1977.
53. “Why ‘Roots’ Hit Home,” Time, February 14, 1977, 71.
54. Timothy Havens, Black Television Travels: African American Media around the Globe (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 48–49.
55. William Chapman, “‘Roots’ Becomes Japan’s Latest Fad: ‘Roots’ Is a National Hit in Japan,” Washington Post, October 23, 1977.
56. Havens, Black Television Travels, 45–46.
57. Chuck Stone, “Roots: An Electronic Orgy in White Guilt,” Black Scholar 8, no. 7 (May 1977): 39.
58. David Wolper, interview by Quincy Troupe, June 20, 1977, transcript, p. 65, David Wolper Collection, USC.
8. A TROUBLESOME PROPERTY
1. John Egerton, “Homecoming,” New Times, July 8, 1977.
2. “The Making of a Millionaire,” Michigan Chronicle, February 19, 1977; “Alex Haley Finds ‘Roots’ Means Bucks,” Staten Island, May 19, 1977; “Bio: Alex Haley. Writer Alex Haley’s Slave Ancestors Help Him Make It Rich,” People, October 18, 1976.
3. “‘Roots’ Captures America’s Heart,” Cleveland Call and Post, February 5, 1977.
4. Mary Ellen Ferry, “The Commercial Success of ‘Roots,’” Oakland Tribune, February 25, 1977.
5. Alex Haley to John Hawkins, March 24, 1974, box 3, folder 25, Anne Romaine Collection, UT.
6. David Wolper to Al Ashley, June 14, 1977, box 282, folder 027, David Wolper Collection, USC.
7. David Wolper to LeVar Burton et al., June 14, 1977, box 282, folder 027, David Wolper Collection, USC.
8. David Wolper to Georg Stanford Brown, June 17, 1977; David Wolper to Ron Yatter, September 28, 1977; Irwin Russell to David Wolper, September 2, 1977, box 282, folder 027, David Wolper Collection, USC.
9. Mildred Bain and Ervin Lewis, eds., From Freedom to Freedom: African Roots in American Soil: Selected Readings Based on Roots (Milwaukee, WI: Purnell Reference/Random House, 1977); Morris Johnson, William Primus, and Sharon Thomas, From Freedom to Freedom: African Roots in American Soil: Study Guide (Milwaukee, WI: Purnell Reference/Random House, 1977).
10. Gale Livengood to Charles Benton, December 16, 1976, box 282, folder 022, David Wolper Collection, USC.
11. Films Incorporated to “Film and Videotape Customers,” n.d. [ca. January 1977], box 282, folder 022, David Wolper Collection, USC.
12. David Wolper to James Benton, February 9, 1977, box 282, folder 022, David Wolper Collection, USC.
13. Hollie West, “The Roots of Haley’s Suit,” Washington Post, March 19, 1977.
14. “Re Haley vs. Doubleday Matter,” n.d. [ca. March 1977], box 10, folder 10, Alex Haley Collection, Schomburg.
15. Eleanor Blau, “For Alex Haley, Work Is a Voyage,” New York Times, December 10, 1988; Quoted in Norrell, Alex Haley, 177.
16. Mark Ottaway, “Tangled Roots,” Times (London), April 10, 1977, 17.
17. M.D. N’Jie, “Gambian on ‘Roots,’” Baltimore Afro-American, March 26, 1977.
18. Alex Haley, telegram to B.L.K. Sanyang, April 10, 1977, box 3, folder 10, Alex Haley Collection, Schomburg.
19. Robert Smith, “Roots Country Waits for Sons of the Soil,” the Guardian, April 16, 1977.
20. John Darton, “Haley, Assailing Critic, Says ‘Roots’ Is Sound,” New York Times, April 19, 1977.
21. Linda Witt, “Stung by Accusations, Alex Haley Returns to the Village Where He Found His Roots,” People, May 9, 1977, 31.
22. Alex Haley to Murray Fisher, August 6 [1971], box 6, folder 13, Alex Haley Collection, Goodwin.
23. A.S. Doc Young, “Roots: Tangled and Untangled,” Los Angeles Sentinel, April 21, 1977.
24. Quoted in Robert Norrell, Alex Haley and the Books That Changed a Nation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2015), 186.
25. Alexander v. Haley, 460 F. Supp. 40, 45 (1978).
26. Harold Courlander, “‘Roots,’ ‘The African,’ and the Whiskey Jug Case,” Village Voice, April 9, 1979, 33.
27. Harold Courlander to Herbert Michelman, February 4, 1977, box 41, folder 3, Alex Haley Collection, UT.
28. Ibid.
29. Harold Courlander to Nat Wartels, February 9, 1977, box 3, folder 28, Anne Romaine Collection, UT.
30. Courlander, “‘Roots,’” Village Voice, April 9, 1979, 33.
31. Witt, “Stung by Accusations,” 32.
32. Mary McCauley, “Alex Haley, A Southern Griot: A Literary Biography” (PhD diss, Vanderbilt University, 1983), 199.
33. Ibid., 200–201.
34. “Defendants’ Pretrial Memorandum: Courlander v. Haley,” 1978, box 41, folder 2, Alex Haley Collection, UT.
35. Quoted in Norrell, Alex Haley, 195.
36. McCauley, “Alex Haley,” 199.
37. Alex Haley, interview by Anne Romaine, September 29, 1991, transcript, p. 10, box 2, folder 31, Anne Romaine Collection, UT.
38. C. Eric Lincoln, interview by Anne Romaine, June 11, 1992, transcript, p. 9, box 3, folder 14, Anne Romaine Collection, UT.
39. Alex Haley to Murray Fisher, October 18, 1975, box 10, folder 8, Alex Haley Collection, Schomburg.
40. Alex Haley to Sandra Stevens, March 2, 1973,
box 10, folder 6, Alex Haley Collection, Schomburg.
41. Alex Haley to Amelia Fry, March 2, 1973, box 10, folder 6, Alex Haley Collection, Schomburg.
42. Charles Powers, “Haley Locked in Suit on Origin of ‘Roots,’” Los Angeles Times, December 11, 1978.
43. Alex Haley to Bill Leigh, December 28, 1977, box 14, folder 8, Alex Haley Collection, Schomburg.
44. Alex Haley to George Sims, June 1, 1979, box 10, folder 15, Alex Haley Collection, Schomburg.
45. Detine Bowers, “On the Alex Haley Auction: Disintegrating Roots: African American Life and Culture Returns to the Auction Block,” Black Scholar 22, no. 4 (Fall 1992): 5.
46. Diana Lachatanere to James Lloyd, January 4, 1993, box 3, folder 22, Anne Romaine Collection, UT; Kimball M. Sterling, Inc. invoice, October 1, 1992, box 3, folder 22, Anne Romaine Collection, UT.
47. Genevieve Millet Landau, “Alex Haley on Kids in Search of Their Roots,” Parents’ Magazine, September 1977, 85.
CONCLUSION
1. Toni Morrison, “A Bench by the Road,” World, January/February 1989, 4.
2. Quoted in Dan White, “Toni Morrison and Angela Davis on Friendship and Creativity,” October 29, 2014, University of California Santa Cruz Newscenter, http://news.ucsc.edu/2014/10/morrison-davis-q-a.html.
3. Jori Finkel, “A Reluctant Fraternity, Thinking Post-Black,” New York Times, June 10, 2007.
4. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Random House, 2004), 248.
5. Ibid., xviii.
6. Alex Haley, Roots: The Saga of an American Family (New York: Doubleday, 1976), 127.
7. Mary McCauley, “Alex Haley, A Southern Griot: A Literary Biography” (PhD diss., Vanderbilt University, 1983), 185.
8. Robert Hobbs, Kara Walker: Slavery! Slavery! (Washington, DC: International Arts and Artists, 2001), 31.
9. Jerry Saltz, “Kara Walker: Ill-Will and Desire,” Flash Art, November/December 1996, 84.
10. Rhonda Stewart, “Still Here: Artist Kara Walker in Black and White,” Crisis, January/February 2004, 50.
11. “Stories: Kara Walker,” Art 21, September 9, 2003, PBS, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGZ7ijeiCW0.
12. Arlene Keizer, “‘Our Posteriors, Our Posterity’: The Problem of Embodiment in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus and Kara Walker’s Camptown Ladies,” Social Dynamics 37, no. 2 (June 2011): 206.
13. “Henry Louis Gates Jr.: A Life Spent Tracing Roots,” NPR, May 8, 2012, www.npr.org/2012/05/08/152273032/henry-louis-gates-jr-a-life-spent-tracing-roots.
14. Alex Beam, “The Prize Fight over Alex Haley’s Tangled ‘Roots,’” Boston Globe, October 30, 1998.
15. “Henry Louis Gates Jr.”
16. Alondra Nelson, The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation after the Genome (Boston: Beacon Press, 2016), 77.
17. Phyllis Lu Simpson, “No New Black Shows on TV,” New York Amsterdam News, May 21, 1977.
18. David Wolper, interview with Morrie Gelman, May 12, 1998, Web video, www.emmytvlegends.org/interviews/people/david-wolper.
19. David Wolper, commentary, in Roots: The Triumph of an American Family, 30th Anniversary Edition (Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2011), DVD, disc 3, side B.
BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY
In writing Making “Roots” I have tried to focus on the experiences and perspectives of Alex Haley and the many publishing and television professionals who transformed Haley’s family story into a best-selling book and record-breaking television series. As a scholar, I have read widely on African American history, the history of slavery, and media representations of race and history. The purpose of this essay is to identify some of the sources that have influenced my analysis of Roots.
Given the series’ commercial success and influence, the scholarship on Roots is surprising limited. The best work includes Robert Norrell, Alex Haley and the Books That Changed a Nation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2015); David Chioni Moore, “Routes,” Transition, no. 64 (1994): 4–21; Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Donald Bogle, Primetime Blues: African Americans on Network Television (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 234–50; J. Fred MacDonald, Blacks and White TV: Afro-Americans in Television since 1948 (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1983); David Gerber, “Haley’s Roots and Our Own: An Inquiry into the Nature of a Popular Phenomenon,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 5 (Fall 1997): 87–111; Timothy Havens, Black Television Travels: African American Media around the Globe (New York: NYU Press, 2013); Malgorzata Rymsza-Pawlowska, “Broadcasting the Past: History Television, ‘Nostalgia Culture,’ and the Emergence of the Miniseries in the 1970s in the United States,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 42 (2014): 81–90; Leslie Fishbein, “‘Roots’: Docudrama and the Interpretation of History,” in American History/American Television: Interpreting the Video Past, ed. John O’Connor (New York: Ungar, 1983), 279–305; Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 81–110; Leslie Fiedler, The Inadvertent Epic: From Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Roots (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979); Color Adjustment (dir. Marlon Riggs, 1992); and Eric Pierson, “The Importance of Roots,” in Watching While Black: Centering the Television of Black Audiences, ed. Beretta Smith-Shomade (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 19–32. Two important books on Haley and Roots are due out soon: Erica Ball and Kellie Carter Jackson, eds., Reconsidering Roots: The Phenomenon That Changed the Way We Understood American Slavery (Athens: University of Georgia Press, forthcoming); and Timothy Haven, Roots, Forty Years Later: Television, Race, and America.
Roots is about slavery, memory, and history. The books that have most helped me think about the challenges involved in writing histories of slavery and recovering black identities and kinship ties that were fractured by slavery are Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007); James Campbell, Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787–2005 (New York: Penguin, 2006); Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Alondra Nelson, The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation after the Genome (Boston: Beacon Press, 2016); Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Gender and Reproduction in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Heather Andrea Williams, Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Salamishah Tillet, Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post–Civil Rights Imagination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Terri Snyder, The Power to Die: Slavery and Suicide in British North America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); and Maria Diedrich, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Carl Pedersen, eds., Black Imagination and the Middle Passage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Roots also brought slavery into public discussions in ways that resonate with works on slavery and public history, such as Ana Lucia Araujo, Politics of Memory: Making Slavery Visible in the Public Space (New York: Routledge, 2012); James Oliver Horton and Lois Horton, eds., Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); and James DeWolf Perry and Kristin Gallas, Interpreting Slavery at Museums and Historic Sites (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014).
Making “Roots” is indebted to works on black popular and visual culture, such as Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Huey Copeland, Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America (Chic
ago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Nicole Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Mark Anthony Neal, Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities (New York: New York University Press, 2013); Mark Anthony Neal, Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 2001); Leigh Raiford, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Marcus Wood, Black Milk: Imagining Slavery in the Visual Cultures of Brazil and America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Cora Kaplan and John Oldfield, eds., Imagining Transatlantic Slavery (New York: Palgrave, 2010); 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); Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); and Daniel Widener, Black Arts West: Culture and Struggle in Postwar Los Angeles (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
I was drawn to Roots by my interest in the intersections among television, history, and race, and my analysis of the series is influenced by Herman Gray, Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for “Blackness” (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), Christine Acham, Revolution Televised: Prime Time and the Struggle for Black Power (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Aniko Bodroghkozy, Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012); Gayle Wald, It’s Been Beautiful: Soul! and Black Power Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Devorah Heitner, Black Power TV (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Darnell Hunt, ed., Channeling Blackness: Studies of Television and Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); and George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990).
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