The success of Roots on television surpassed anything that Alex Haley, or anyone, had imagined. When he decided to produce Roots, David Wolper knew that he was taking a big chance. Blacks had hardly been seen in television drama up to that time. In 1976 the most popular black television personalities were the comedians Redd Foxx (Sanford and Son), Flip Wilson (The Flip Wilson Show), and Sherman Hemsley (All in the Family and The Jeffersons). A notable and recent exception was the 1972 production of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, based on Ernest Gaines’s novel. Relatively few cinematic dramas had featured black characters. Most of those had appeared since the late 1950s and starred Sidney Poitier—The Defiant Ones, Lilies of the Field, In the Heat of the Night, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner—all films with realistic racial messages that were not duplicated on television prior to Roots.1
In another way, the Roots miniseries was part of a new trend in television. It followed QB VII (1974), the first miniseries, based on Leon Uris’s Nazi-themed courtroom drama, and Rich Man, Poor Man, a family saga adapted from Irwin Shaw’s novel that had run in 1976 for seven consecutive Monday nights and won a large audience as well as four Emmys. The trend continued with the 1979 series Holocaust, which also won high praise and a big audience. Roots would follow the miniseries formula—a cast of established stars, suggestions of sex but nothing explicit, ample violence, and characters of unquestionable heroism. Each of the successful 1970s miniseries explored the experience of a group of “others”—Jews, women, or blacks—who had not been examined positively in popular treatments of American society. This revision of American popular history came in the aftermath of the civil rights movement and in the midst of the women’s movement and the rising consciousness among many Americans of European immigrant heritage in the 1970s.
Roots was a departure from past treatments of one of the most disturbing stories of American history, the experience of slavery. Wolper’s expectation of a high level of realism set Roots well apart from the last screen interpretation of slavery, the 1975 film Mandingo, which had dwelt on interracial sex and elicited harsh reviews. Having made that commitment, Wolper worried about how an American audience would tolerate a truly accurate account of the degradation of slaves. He was particularly concerned about scenes in the hold of the slave ship. But he thought the series would be accepted and watched by enough white Americans because it was a family story. The purposeful way that descendants of Kunta Kinte held on to their African heritage and survived slavery intact as a family gave the story the good feeling that offset the inhumanity—the beatings and family break-ups—that was necessary to portray. A master of the genre of documentary film, Wolper thought of himself as a “visual historian.” He insisted that his documentaries were especially effective educational instruments because they were also entertaining, and thus he made no apology for his didactic purposes in Roots. Wolper and Stan Margulies, his manager of daily production, had most recently enjoyed success with the cinema comedies Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, If It’s Tuesday This Must Be Belgium, and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. They had the confidence to try something new and, for the time, daring, by producing Roots.2
Wolper approached the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), whose executives were intrigued but also concerned that there had never been a successful black dramatic series on television and doubted that advertisers would support one. ABC agreed to go ahead but set a relatively low production budget—given the length of the series and the size of the cast—of $5 million, later raised to $6 million. The producers’ first concern in casting Roots for television was how whites would receive the show. Wolper said he was “trying to appeal to whites” since “they make up 90% of the audience,” and thus “to reach and manipulate” whites’ minds so they would watch the miniseries and not think of it as a “black” show. He lined up white television stars to win over white audiences. The ABC executive Brandon Stoddard said the network used actors whom white viewers had seen a hundred times before, “so they would feel comfortable.” The most familiar white actors included some who had starred in long-running television series: Lorne Green (Bonanza), Sandy Duncan (Funny Face), Lloyd Bridges (Seahunt), Chuck Connors (The Rifleman), Edward Asner (The Mary Tyler Moore Show), Ralph Waite (The Waltons), Macdonald Carey (Days of Our Lives), Doug McLure (The Virginian), and Yvonne De Carlo (The Munsters). The promotional trailers before the broadcast included many shots of those stars.3
To create the teleplay, the screenwriter William Blinn used drafts of the unfinished book. Haley had little to do with the writing of the script, although Wolper insisted that Haley controlled the story. He said that Haley never objected to or complained about the changes in character and plot: “He understood that a movie and a book differed and he trusted us.” Haley visited the set and advised on cultural matters: “How does a Gambian child address his mother? What animals are found in the village?”4
Shooting began in June 1976 in Savannah, Georgia, where replicas of an African village and a slave ship had been built. The ship’s hold was so authentic that the extras crammed into it cried during the shooting. One early effort for verisimilitude was to have African women shown naked from the waist up; the women were shown from a distance. Most viewers accepted the scenes without objection or even notice, but the mother of a twelve-year-old extra, who volunteered to appear nude in a scene, sued Wolper. The producers identified her in every frame of film and made sure that she was not exposed.5
Wolper cast many well-known black actors in the series. John Amos (Good Times) played the mature Kinte; Leslie Uggams (The Leslie Uggams Show) was Kizzy; Cicely Tyson (The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman) portrayed Kinte’s mother, Binta; and Richard Roundtree (Shaft) was a carriage driver and Kizzy’s lover. Though he had not worked in television, Ben Vereen had just won two Tony Awards for starring roles in Jesus Christ Superstar and Pippin. If the producers wanted mostly identifiable black actors, they sought an unknown for the role of the young Kunta Kinte. Stoddard said that “from a purely casting standpoint it was essential that Kunta Kinte be seen not as an actor being Kunta Kinta” but as embodying Kunta entirely. They cast LeVar Burton, who had no acting credits, in the role, and he proved to be a great success. Haley’s only input on the casting was to encourage the selection of a dark-skinned actor to play Kunta. He had gotten a strong impression in Africa of the blackness of the native people, as compared with the shades of brown found among most African Americans. Haley imagined Kunta to resemble the Gambian student Ebou Manga. For their work in Roots, nine black actors were nominated for Emmy Awards, and Olivia Cole (Mathilda) and Louis Gossett Jr. (Fiddler) received awards for, respectively, best supporting actress and actor. Leslie Uggams (Kizzy) won a Golden Globe Award. The large black cast of Roots hoped that the series would bring more opportunities for them in Hollywood. But neither Roots nor its sequel, Roots: The Next Generations, opened many new doors. In 2007 Uggams said the miniseries had very little long-lasting effect: “We all had high expectations and thought the world was going to be everyone’s oyster. It didn’t happen that way.”6
Each of the eight episodes of Roots followed a separate theme, and most ended on an upbeat note. For example, at the end of the first, when the captives are at the end of the Middle Passage, an African leads a chant by the captives: “We will live!” At the end of the second, when the overseer has beaten Kunta, the Fiddler character tells him, “There’s gonna be another day!” At the end of the third, after slave catchers have cut off part of Kunta’s foot and the cook Bell is trying to raise his spirits, Kunta says, “I’m gonna do better than walk. Damnit! I’m gonna learn to run!” In the fourth, Kunta tells Kizzy, “Your name means ‘stay put’—but it don’t mean ‘stay a slave.’” Each episode thus reinforced the series’ overarching theme of blacks’ individual endurance and strength, as well as the persistence of black families. When he chose not to attempt an escape to the North, Kunta affirmed his commitment to his family over the possibility of freedom. But the inhumanity of slavery provided a constant tension throughout the series. The fifth episode ended with Kizzy vowing vengeance against Tom Lea, the man who raped her. The sixth stopped with Chicken George’s owner, who has sold George’s family away while George fights cocks in Europe, saying that the returning slave will not be able to do anything about such cruelty. “He’ll come back a nigger. . . . And what’s a nigger to do?” The seventh ended with Tom Murray facing an ominous future for having killed the white man who raped his wife. After he has faced down the brother of the man he killed, Tom’s gaze looks fierce and unconquered. The eighth and final episode showed Chicken George and his progeny escaping from peonage and making their long journey to Tennessee, where the last generations of the family enjoy peace and prosperity, and ended with Alex Haley telling of his triumphant twelve-year quest to find his family’s history.
The script adaptation made the emphases in the miniseries drastically different from those in the book. Almost the first fourth of the book dwells on the African environment, but the television series devoted only part of the first episodes to it. The rich anthropological material that Haley used in the book was almost entirely lost. Stoddard of ABC explained that “what seems to interest Americans most are Americans. . . . In Roots, we got out of Africa as fast as we could.” The characters arrive in America early in the second episode. Roots on television hardly challenged the Eurocentric cultural perspective of Africa as the “dark continent.” In the book, Haley made a point of emphasizing the survival of African cultural elements among American slaves. That was lost on television. The script made some white characters “good,” whereas in the book there are almost no admirable white figures. The book said almost nothing about Captain Davies of the slave ship, but he was portrayed on television by Edward Asner as a religious man with a tortured moral character. Davies was paired in the plot with the seasoned slave trader called Slater, a violent, abusive character whose inhumanity makes Davies seem like a good white man in comparison. When Slater thrusts a young African girl on Davies for his sexual pleasure, and Davies accepts her, Davies seems human in his sinfulness and vulnerability. Asner won an Emmy for his performance.
The television interpretation of Roots diminished Haley’s black characters. Three characters who mentored Kunta were collapsed into one, eliminating the nuances that came from multiple black perspectives in the book. The producers and writers decided that they needed the continuity of a single, strong influence on Kunta, and Fiddler, played by Lou Gossett Jr., performed that function. On the other hand, the television script created a character, the slave woman Fanta, who is forced to have sex with Davies on the slave ship and later, in Virginia, becomes Kunta’s first love interest. She seems to have been inserted to titillate viewers. When she argues loudly with Kunta the morning after their night together, her explosion leads to his entrapment. This characterization seems false because a consistent point of Roots was that slaves were always careful in keeping their thoughts and emotions from whites.7
Nonetheless, Roots, as both book and the miniseries, was such a departure from previous popular interpretations of slavery that it shifted mass culture to a new understanding of slavery and the black family. More than a decade after Roots aired, the cultural historian Donald Bogle, perhaps the most astute critic of African Americans in film and television, thought that the series was rare among television dramas in that neither the black characters nor the actors in the series were “standard, comfy, middle-class, reassuring types” but were instead figures “larger than life with aches, pains, or struggles that filled the viewers with a sense of terror or awe. . . . None pulled back from a moment that might disturb or upset a viewer.” Bogle thought the weakest part of the series was the African portion: Kunta’s manhood rites looked like a “frat initiation.” Binta, Kunta’s mother, was a richly developed character in the book, but on television she was less fully realized and influential on Kunta, even as portrayed by the talented Cicely Tyson. On the other hand, John Amos as the mature Kunta and Madge Sinclair as Bell played off each other deftly, evoking real humanity. Louis Gossett Jr. took the Fiddler character to a high level, “displaying in turn Uncle-Tomish deference, fatherly care for Kunta, and strutting showmanship as the musician.” Bogle concluded that the black experience was “far wider, far denser, far more complicated, far more unmanageable than Roots implied” but that the series still “captured the raw, archetypal, mythic essence of human experience.” Seeing on commercial television the atrocities of American slavery but then “witnessing the victorious spirit of those who survived it all, audiences have been affected in unanticipated ways.” Bogle considered Roots a “pop triumph.”8
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The question remained whether Roots would have a significant impact on Americans. Would the mass of Americans really entertain a whole new interpretation of their history? To be sure, the civil rights movement had brought Gone with the Wind and its racial interpretations into question for many people. But a new cultural exemplar was needed to override that work’s influence on the American cultural understanding.9
Fred Silverman, head of entertainment programming at ABC, decided to run the show on consecutive nights rather than once a week for eight weeks. He said that to run the series over eight or ten weeks would have dissipated its emotional impact. That way, if the series was a failure, its effects on ABC’s ratings would be minimized. Wolper Productions and ABC had done something no one in television had ever done before, he said, so, “Let’s show it in a way that no one has ever shown television before!” ABC hoped that over those eight nights, Roots would garner fifty million viewers in total, not a big overall audience, and the network was not confident that it would do even that. It sold advertising on the promise of a 30 “share,” or percentage of television viewers watching the show. The network decided not to broadcast the series during the “sweeps” period, when network ratings were recorded and then used to set subsequent advertising charges. Advertisers paid $120,000 per minute for a spot during Roots, whereas the rates for a broadcast like the Super Bowl, which had the biggest audience of any program, pulled in $150,000 per minute of commercial time. This miscalculation would cost the network millions of dollars.10
Roots was broadcast from January 23 to January 30, 1977, in the midst of one of the hardest and most prolonged cold spells in American history, which, some commentators speculated, may have accounted for the huge viewership it earned from the first night. At least fifty million viewers, the audience that ABC hoped the entire series would generate, tuned in the first night. Nielsen Ratings service reported that the show received between a 62 and 68 share of those Americans watching television each night. Eighty million Americans, “the largest television audience in the history of the medium,” Nielsen reported, watched the final episode of Roots. That figure represented 51.1 percent of all television sets in homes across the country, or 36,380,000 homes, and exceeded by 2.4 million the audience reached by the first half of the television release of Gone with the Wind the previous fall. ABC estimated that 130 million viewers, about 85 percent of all homes with televisions in the United States, saw some part of the series.11
“For eight days and nights, the most talked-about men in the country were a middle-aged writer named Alex Haley and his great-great-great-great-grandfather, Kunta Kinte,” Newsweek reported. Regular patrons of a Harlem bar watched every episode together and became angry after one show when someone tried to play the jukebox. “They just wanted to talk it out,” the barkeeper reported. “It wasn’t until they had talked for a very long time that they finally remembered they were in a bar.” An ABC executive said the phenomenon was “like millions of people reading the same book simultaneously, instead of privately, making it a shared experience.” Vernon Jordan, executive director of the National Urban League, called Roots “the single most spectacular educational experience in race relations in America.” All over the United States, Roots dominated chats among friends and colleagues, preachers’ sermons, radio call-in shows, bull sessions in bars, and classroom discussions. During the time that Roots was running on television, the New York Times reported that a black man in business attire stepped on to an elevator and was greeted by a white colleague, “Good morning, Kunta Kinte.” The black fellow lowered his head and said, “Toby.”12
Almost nine of ten blacks watched some portion of the series, and more than seven in ten whites did. Blacks watched an average of six episodes, whites more than five. Eighty-three percent of the watchers thought Roots was one of the best television programs they had ever seen. Black and white viewers both thought the show was accurate in its portrayal of both blacks and whites, although blacks rated it a little higher for accuracy. The overwhelming feeling prompted by the show was the same for blacks and whites—sadness. White viewership tended to be a more liberal segment of the white population. Polls found that whites who did not watch the show were hostile to laws against housing discrimination and believed blacks were inferior to whites in intelligence and trustworthiness. A third of white viewers thought blacks’ historical experience was no worse than the struggles of European immigrants.13
Roots, both the book and the miniseries, was used as the syllabus for new college courses. By February 1977, 250 colleges were offering credit courses based on Roots. Random House sold 150 institutions a Roots curriculum. Black Studies departments were seeing a sudden upsurge of interest in their curricula.14 Travel agencies around the country reported a surge of interest in “heritage” tours to Africa, and some offered the special destination of Juffure.15 “[Roots] has produced a virtual explosion of American interest in travel to Africa,” said the marketing manager for Air Afrique. In New York City in the days after Roots aired, twenty black newborn babies were named Kunta Kinte or Kizzy; so were fifteen in Los Angeles, ten in Detroit, and eight in Atlanta. In Cleveland a pair of twins, male and female, were so named.16
A phenomenon so pervasive naturally drew some dissenters. Time magazine’s critic, Richard Schickel, was the most noted naysayer, calling the production a “Mandingo for middlebrows.” A well-to-do white woman in Atlanta thought Roots was awful: “The blacks were just getting settled down, and this will make them angry again.” David Duke, national director of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, charged ABC with airing a “vicious malignment of the white majority in America and a serious distortion of the truth.” A white woman in Queens complained, erroneously, that Roots did not have any good white characters. Her husband answered, “The good whites had their day with Gone with the Wind.” He added, “How good could any whites look to a slave? And that’s whose eyes we’re seeing it through.” The black journalist Chuck Stone called Roots “an electronic orgy in white guilt successfully hustled by white TV literary minstrels.” Haley knew Stone and had told him in 1974 that “the book aspires to be the symbol saga [sic] of all of us of African ancestry.” Perhaps so, but Stone thought the television drama “was aimed at a white market” and produced “to sell advertising for the enrichment of white TV executives.”17
A poll of one thousand Americans, half of them black and half white, taken a month after Roots aired, found that 42 percent of those who had watched at least two episodes thought the series would be “inflammatory.” But also important, 60 percent of blacks and whites thought they had an increased understanding of the psychology of black people. Respondents thought the most memorable scenes were those of violence—the capture of Kunta, the cutting off of his foot, the rape of Kizzy. Ninety-five percent of viewers believed Roots was realistic, and 77 percent thought it was relevant for contemporary race relations.18
The rape of Kizzy was cited for prompting a fight between black and white teenagers in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and disturbances occurred at schools in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Mississippi. Chanting “Roots, roots, roots,” a gang of black boys attacked whites at Detroit’s Ford High School. William “Fella” Haley, who was now an army sergeant specializing in race relations counseling in the military, had gauged the responses to Roots and found that it “gave some black people feelings that they just couldn’t handle all at once. They had to vent their feelings in words to ‘debrief’ themselves and their kids.”19
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All along, Doubleday executives expected the television series to boost sales of the book, but they did not imagine the scale of television’s impact. On the third day of the broadcast, Roots sold sixty-seven thousand copies. Doubleday had originally planned to print fifty thousand books. Stoddard responded, “Fifty thousand? That’s what I plan to buy. How many are you going to print for everybody else?” Afterward, Doubleday raised the print run to two hundred thousand. The television executives were sure that Doubleday was still underestimating the results of what was, in effect, twelve hours of prime-time advertising for the book. In fact, Roots sold one million hardback copies in 1977.20
During the airing of Roots, Haley was traveling every day from appearance to appearance, coast-to-coast, signing books. Wolper called him every morning to report on what the previous night’s audience count had been, and they shouted their joy to each other. Haley saw the last episode, after which he spoke on camera to eighty million viewers. At 3:30 the next morning, Haley was asleep in his hotel room when his door buzzer sounded. When he opened the door, a young white bellboy stood before him and said, “Sir, I want to thank you for what you’ve done for America.” At airports and on streets, Haley was mobbed by well-wishers and celebrity hounds.21
Amid the brouhaha, Haley was a likeable and adept celebrity. On February 2, 1977, just as the broadcast of the miniseries ended, Haley appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, whom he had interviewed for Playboy in 1968. He presented Carson with a bound book of Carson’s family’s genealogy. Carson was visibly moved by the gesture. At five bookstores in Los Angeles during the week after Roots aired, thousands of people stood in line to get Haley to autograph their copies of the book. He sat for hour after hour in each place, greeting people: “How you doing, (sister, babe, honey)?” he asked each one. “Thank you for the book,” the typically awed person said quietly. “Thank you very much,” Haley said. He started out by writing personal inscriptions, but the Doubleday sales staff stopped him because it was taking too long. A pregnant woman bought a book for her unborn child. “Bless your heart,” Haley said to many who expressed their admiration. “Haley seemed as overwhelmed by his near deification as were his admirers,” a reporter observed.22
The celebration of Roots continued for the remainder of 1977. In May a New York department store held “Roots Week” during which it offered consumers tips on researching their genealogy and learning about their heritage. “Heritage tours” to the Gambia and other points in Africa became popular. The number of letters of genealogical inquiry shot up at the National Archives. Haley received a stream of honorary degrees during commencement seasons in 1977 and 1978. He was named the third most admired black man among black American youth, behind only Muhammad Ali and Stevie Wonder. Fifty cities declared a “Roots Week.” Governor Ray Blanton of Tennessee declared “Alex Haley Days” in May 1977, and Haley led his family and friends on a triumphal return to Henning.
Roots was viewed as a driving force for a broad cultural movement toward Americans’ greater appreciation of their past. Newsweek reported on July 4, 1977 that “the quest for personal origins has turned phenomenal in the past six months,” prompted in part by Haley’s work. “Roots” travel had become big business, with Continental Trailways now offering a $75 fare to any United States destination and Pan American World Airways promoting international travel with the ad campaign slogan: “All of us came from some place.” The elitist British agency DeBrett’s Peerage had even opened a United States office to serve “the masses” in their quest for information regarding genealogy. Haley said that “very, very few people in their own lifetimes have the blessing to play a major role in something that is [as] patently affirmative for society,” as the new quest to find origins. “I work now with a sense of meant-to-be-ness, a sense of mission to tell people how much we have in common.”23
For the next year after the publication of the book and the airing of the miniseries, Haley took part in a continuous stream of talk shows, press conferences, autograph sessions, and events held in his honor. He received keys to cities, honorary degrees, and citations from Congress. He had lunch with former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, President Jimmy Carter, and the queen of Iran. The famous actors Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando sought to meet him. But he also got pleas for money, requests for help in getting others’ work published, and still more invitations for public appearances. For one six-month period, Haley had 802 lecture invitations. He still liked to lecture, but he declined far more invitations than he accepted. His fee was now at least $4,000.24
In February 1977 Haley, now fifty-six, was the biggest celebrity in the United States. “There ain’t no hashish powerful enough to make you dream up something like this,” he told Hans J. Massaquo, a reporter for Ebony magazine, long the primary publication for the celebration of black celebrity. “It’s bewildering when—literally over night—you become a person whom people recognize wherever you go.” Massaquo asked him about his new wealth. The money was rolling in. A publisher in Germany had paid $260,000 for the rights to publish Roots in that country, reportedly the highest figure ever paid for European rights to an American book. Haley told Massaquo, “It’s like that question, ‘How many slaves were brought from Africa?’ Who knows? My accountants tell me that I’m now a bona fide millionaire, maybe twice a millionaire.” He discounted the money’s importance to him. “I was broke so long that I got used to being without money. . . . All I’m concerned with is just being comfortable, being able to pay my debts, and having a little margin to buy something or make a gift to somebody.” He told of giving a Los Angeles waitress a fifty-dollar tip on a six-dollar tab. “She didn’t know me from Adam,” he said, but he admired her friendly way and her eagerness to please her customers. He was in the process of signing over all royalties to The Autobiography of Malcolm X to Betty Shabazz. He was funding the American education of students from Juffure and the building of a mosque in the village.25
Massaquo reported “the steep escalation of attention which women of all races and ages” were paying Haley. “Deluged with kisses, hugs, love letters, marriage proposals and plain invitations to ‘get it on,’” Haley demurred, saying he was too busy to take up any of the offers. He asked if Haley planned to marry again. “Marriage is the best state for a person,” Haley answered, glancing toward My Lewis, his editorial assistant and “close companion for three years.” He had already found his prospective third wife in Lewis, whom he called “the most comprehensively compatible woman I have ever known.” Haley and Lewis were married later in 1977.26
Haley had reached the height of the celebrity for which he had longed. He had expected that the benefits of big success would be freedom from money worries and the liberty to travel as he desired. From his many interviews with famous people, he knew something of the perils of celebrity, but writing about fame and coping with it were two separate matters. Two years later Haley would tell the readers of Playboy, “There are days when I wish it hadn’t happened.” Perhaps explaining what had happened, he said, would “serve as a reminder that our great god ‘success,’ with its omnipotent trinity of fame, wealth, and power, is something we should learn to respect rather than to worship—lest it enslave us.” Haley was still rushing around the country when the most troubling of all celebrity problems suddenly appeared, almost all at once, in April 1977.27