Roots

When Alex Haley was a child, his grandmother told him wondrous stories about his family. The stories had been passed down orally from generation to generation for almost 200 years. The “furtherest-back-person” in those stories was Toby, “the African,”, whose real name was “Kin-tay.”

Many years later, Haley began a quest to trace his family’s history back to its African beginnings. Roots, the 1976 book about what he found, was a best-seller. And the following first part of the book made television history. It was watched by more than half of all Americans, many of whom came to understand for the first time the heroic struggle of African-Americans to regain their freedom.

Roots begins in 1750 in Gambia in West Africa. There Haley’s ancestor, Kunta Kinte---Toby, the African, in Haley’s grandmother’s stories---is captured by slave traders and shipped to America in chains. The miniseries then follows seven generations of the Haley family through a century of slavery. It concludes with their emacipation after the Civil War.

Roots won nine Emmy Awards. Its final episode was the highest-rated television program up to that time. And it inspired many Americans of all ethnic backgrounds to search for their own roots.

A second miniseries, Roots, the Next Generation, was aired in 1979. Based on the second half of Haley’s book, it continued the Haley family saga through the 1960s.