ALEX HALEY AND THE "ROOTS" REVOLUTION
THE COUNTRY OF TELEVISION — JANUARY, 23, 1977 — Another night in Prime Time. ABC leads with “The Brady Bunch.” CBS has “Rhoda” and “Phyllis.” NBC serves up “McMillan and Wife.” But at 9 p.m., the revolution — in the country of TV, at least — is about to be televised.
Since October, readers have made Roots: The Saga of an American Family a best-seller. Now “Roots,” the mini-series, is coming to TV. But is Prime Time ready for slavery?
For more than a century, whenever slavery was the subject, denial was the default mode. Yes, slaves were kept in bondage, but didn’t “Gone With the Wind” tell us that slaves sang, slaves danced, slaves “weren’t miserable?”
Truth, when it finally surfaced, came from an unlikely revolutionary.
Alex Haley, born 100 years ago this week, was a mild-mannered Coast Guard veteran turned journalist. Haley honed his craft at “Reader’s Digest” and “Playboy,” where he specialized in interviews — Miles Davis, football’s Jim Brown, actress Julie Christie.
But in the summer of 1964, after interviewing Christie in London, Haley visited the British Museum. There he saw the Rosetta Stone whose hieroglyphs reminded him of African words his grandmother taught him back in Tennessee. Haley also recalled a name his grandmother told him — Kunta Kinte, aka Toby.
Haley’s Playboy interview with Malcolm X soon led to his ghost-writing of Malcolm’s ground-breaking autobiography, but in his spare time, Haley began digging in archives. His goal was to trace his own roots all the way back to Africa. He expected the book to take a year or two.
Learning that his grandmother’s African terms were ion the Mandinka language, Haley went to Gambia, source of 1.5 million slaves. There he met a griot — story-teller and local historian. The man led him to the village of Juffure where, he said, a boy named Kunta Kinte had disappeared long ago.
Returning to England, Haley found insurance records for a ship, The Lord Ligonier, running slaves out of Gambia to Maryland in the 1760s. Annapolis was the port of call, and there Haley found records of a slave landed in September 1767, soon sold under the name Toby. . .
Haley’s digging lasted a decade. When finally published in 1976, Roots struck a nerve. The recent bicentennial had been a flop. After Vietnam and Watergate, a critical mass of Americans were questioning all that stars and stripes stuff. Many seemed ready to face our history’s hardest lesson — that Americans once owned other Americans.
Reviewing Haley’s book, James Baldwin wrote of Kunta Kinte: “We are shackled with him, in his terror, rage, and pain, his stink, and the stink of others, on the ship which brings him here. It can be said that we know the rest of the story -- how it turned out, so to speak, but frankly, I don't think that we do know the rest of the story.”
Bringing “Roots” to TV, ABC worried about that “rest of the story.” “The scene on the slave ship is as strong a scene as ever has been shown on prime‐time commercial television,” producer Stan Margulies said. “It's so strong that some people might tune out.” To soften the truth, ABC padded the cast with veteran white actors — Lorne Greene, Chuck Connors, Ed Asner. Asner’s conscience stricken captain of The Lord Ligonier was nowhere in Haley’s book.
To get “Roots” finished before Nielsen’s’ “sweeps week,” ABC aired all eight episodes on consecutive nights. The rest of the story, of course, is now known. Seen through the questioning window of the Seventies, “Roots” drew record audiences. Night after night, first 40 percent, then 60 percent, then 70 percent of American households tuned in. And saw. . .
Kunta Kinte clubbed, chained, thrown onto the slave ship. The Middle Passage, slaves packed below deck, lying in their own filth. Kunta escaping, escaping again, until half his foot is chopped off. His daughter sold away, raped by her owner, giving birth. . . And the saga, the horror marched on.
“Roots,” historian Roger Wilkins wrote, was as important to Civil Rights as the Montgomery Bus boycott and the Selma march. In colleges, black studies had struggled for acceptance, but in the wake of “Roots,” some 250 began teaching the history of slavery.
Haley soon drew fire for his scholarship. Details were challenged — this family or that out of place, out of time. Haley defended his saga as “a symbolic history of a people,” and took solace in ordinary Americans, white and black, who “just walk up and hug you and then say 'Thank you'!”
Haley’s masterwork, translated into 37 languages, sold in the millions. In 1998, six years after his death, TIME named Roots one of the century’s ten most influential books. There were sequels and a recent re-make, but nothing ever matched the shock, the breakthrough of that Sunday night in 1977 when Jim Crow finally met his toughest foes — television and the truth.
Roots, James Baldwin concluded, “suggests, with great power, how each of us, however unconsciously, can't but be the vehicle of the history which has produced us. Well, we can perish in this vehicle, children, or we can move on up the road.”
