COMMENTARY: 50 Years Later, is ‘Roots’ on the Wrong Side of History?

By Erin Kaplan | Guest Columnist

Fifty summers ago, in 1976, journalist and author Alex Haley published his masterwork, “Roots: The Saga of an American Family.”

The timing was exquisite: As the nation celebrated the bicentennial with fireworks and paeans to freedom, “Roots” countered it with a deeply personal, Black-centered narrative of American history that began in Africa and cast the horror of slavery as foundational, not incidental, to the country’s founding and its character.

Despite its unflinching truths, “Roots” was an instant success — both the book and the miniseries that aired on network television the following year — a cultural landmark that resonated across color lines and far beyond literary circles. Its most groundbreaking truth is that Black stories not only matter, they are central to America’s identity.

So it was really only a matter of time before the MAGA movement targeted “Roots” for a takedown. Last month, the Knox County school board in Tennessee banned the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel from libraries after deciding a single scene of white-on-Black rape violated a state law, the Age-Appropriate Materials Act, passed in 2022.

“Roots” became one of more than 100 titles banned in Knox County schools, part of a wider effort sanctioned by the Trump administration to diminish or disappear Black history in public institutions. The outcry about the ban was so immediate and intense that school officials lifted it a few weeks later.

Some of that can be credited to pushback from Haley’s own family members. I’ve been friends for years with his niece, Anne Haley, a lawyer who has spent her career in the Los Angeles city attorney’s office. Anne, 64, grew up intimately acquainted with “Roots” first with the stories about an ancestor named Kinte she’d heard from her Uncle Alex, and with the dozen years it took him to produce a book that wove those stories into a singular account of the Africa-to-America experience.

The ban wasn’t too surprising given the current political tenor, she said. Anne has always proudly touted her connection to the legacy of “Roots” and had been looking forward to observing the 50-year anniversary in August. She had been writing an essay about the anniversary that mused about whether the near-universal embrace that “Roots” enjoyed in 1976 was even possible now. The ban definitely answered that question.

“It hurt,” she said. “It was like going through the stages of grief. One was indignation — how dare you? “Roots” put Tennessee on the map!”

Alex Haley himself had roots in Tennessee, the place where he and his brothers, including Anne’s father, spent summers hearing stories about his African forebears from their grandmother. A towering bronze statue of Haley sits in Alex Haley Heritage Square in Knoxville.

Clinton, a town in the Knoxville metropolitan area, is where Alex Haley bought a farm and where, after “Roots” became a singular cultural phenomenon, he chose to return and live the remainder of his life; he died in 1992. (The farm was bought by the Children’s Defense Fund and turned into a center that, according to the website, grows justice.)

So taking the book written by a local hero out of school libraries because of one objectionable scene is myopic at best. At worst, it’s another blatant effort to whitewash history, and an exercise of the white domination that “Roots” illuminates so thoroughly.

The single offending scene was a description of “my great-great-great-great-grandmother being raped by her enslaver. Not a unique circumstance,” Anne Haley said dryly.

As a Black story, “Roots,” for all of its acclaim, was always vulnerable to being de-classicized because in this country, the significance of Black people’s stories in the national narrative has never been a settled matter. To the contrary, they pose an ongoing challenge to the country to fulfill its own promises of fairness and equality. Right now the country is utterly failing to do that, and so “Roots” must fail too.

Yet “Roots” itself remains unique, and indelible. Anne Haley and I were 14 in 1977 when the TV miniseries galvanized the nation for a week with unforgettable characters like Kunta Kinte, Fiddler, Kizzie and Chicken George, who battled the oppression of slavery while somehow living lives full of courage, love and humor.

At the same time, “Roots” was fundamentally tough to watch, and sometimes to hear; I remember being startled by the liberal use of the N-word on primetime TV. Also, it was a revelation to see famous white actors I knew from mainstream family fare — Robert Reed from “The Brady Bunch,” Chuck Connors of “The Rifleman,” Sandy Duncan of “Peter Pan” fame — portraying slavers and racist Southerners so convincingly.

That, of course, made people uncomfortable. But discomfort was not the enemy back then. Indeed, it was the point.

“Roots” was part of a tradition of realistic ’70s filmmaking — including “The Deer Hunter,” “Taxi Driver,” “Midnight Cowboy” and “The Godfather” — that was gritty, straightforward and interested not in making America look good, but in exposing America to itself.

As was true with many of those films, the gritty details of the “Roots” story were compelling and eye-opening for everyone. “Roots” was inclusive — not warm and fuzzy or politically correct — because its detailed truth necessarily included all of us.

In Haley’s American family saga, a good many Americans saw for the first time the full saga of themselves, and of the country. And for a brief moment that created community.

Recalling that communal moment is why Anne said she has often had a hard time accepting the intentional divisiveness of this one. She is encouraged by the continued resistance against Black erasure, including the pushback that forced Knox County schools to rescind the ban.

“Uncle Alex always said, ‘Find the good and praise it,’” she said. The lesson for her, especially given the fact that “Roots” was inspired by one family’s oral history, is that Black people must keep telling their stories.

To that end, as part of the 50-year commemoration of the book’s publication in August, Anne is planning to deliver “Roots”–related lectures aimed at young people and stage a marathon reading. She also continues to work on her own family memoir.

“My hope is to make people realize, especially Black people, that we need to coalesce,” she said. “We need to remain a village. We need to reinstitute the village.”

Erin Aubry Kaplan examines the persistent barriers to racial justice and opportunities for progress in an era of receding Black presence in Los Angeles and Californiafor Capital & Main, a nonprofit publication focused on inequality. It is published here with permission.