‘Roots: The Saga of an American Family’ by Alex Haley turns 50
TheGrio...
50 years after Alex Haley’s groundbreaking “Roots: The Saga of an American Family” landed on shelves, its legacy remains urgent.
Sitting on my parents’ bookshelf is a copy of the novel “Roots: The Saga of an American Family” by Alex Haley that’s been in this family longer than me.
Not a copy purchased years after the fact or one scored from a collector who had it tucked behind some glass. No, the one my mother carried home, signed after interviewing its author when he visited the small New Hampshire town where she and my father happened to be living at the time. Or so the story goes.
In the years since, the book has managed to survive moves, children, pets, grandchildren, house floods, mouse infestations, moths, and many other fates that many other books, photographs, and other long-held and long-loved items failed to. In a way, it’s kind of ironic that “Roots” should be one of the books that gets passed down in my family, and with it a piece of my own family’s history, as that’s kind of the whole point of the book.
This August, “Roots,” which was originally published in 1976 and introduced the world to the story of an African man named Kunte Kinte who ends up enslaved and spans generations of his descendants, turns 50.
Inspired by that late writer’s own search to trace his family’s history back to Africa, the award-winning book became one of the most consequential works on the transatlantic slave trade and Black ancestry in American pop culture. Fifty years later, its legacy, while complicated by controversy, remains as timely as ever.
Haley spent years tracing his maternal family history through oral histories passed down, archival research, and travel, eventually tracing his lineage to Gambia, where he believed he had found the origins of his ancestor Kunta Kinte. He turned that search into a multigenerational saga spanning Kunta’s capture in West Africa through the lives of his descendants in America. The book became a publishing phenomenon and inspired legions of Black Americans to begin digging into their own family histories.
Then, in January 1977, when “Roots” was turned into a television event on ABC starring a then 19-year-old LeVar Burton as Kunta, it brought the horrors of the realities and brutality of the transatlantic slave trade into the living rooms of America. It was a watershed moment for the culture for so many families across America, in particular white families, to see the terror and the violence up close.
Of course, the legacy Haley left behind is not without its blemishes, much like the copy of his book that my mom has, with frayed edges. Questions were later raised about the accuracy of portions of his genealogical research, and in 1978, author Harold Courlander accused Haley of plagiarizing passages and material from his novel “The African.” Haley ultimately settled the lawsuit, and those controversies have remained part of the conversation around “Roots” ever since.
But don’t get me wrong, this isn’t to say any of that diminishes the importance of doing what Haley set out to do. If anything, frankly, it reinforces why Black people should have the resources, access, and opportunity to rigorously research, preserve, and tell our own histories — especially histories that were deliberately fractured, poorly documented, and recorded by people who did not consider the lives behind them wholly human.
Plus, fifty years after “Roots” arrived on shelves, DEI programs are disappearing, Black history has become a political target, schools continue to battle over how race and slavery are even taught, and immigration is under threat. Whether you trust Haley’s words or not, America has to stop ignoring who it has been so it can honestly name who it is, hopefully to become something better. We need to understand our roots.
While promoting the book when it first arrived, Haley famously said: “In all of us there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritage—to know who we are and where we have come from. Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning. No matter what our attainments in life, there is still a vacuum, an emptiness, and the most disquieting loneliness.”