Roots | The Book that Changed America

In 1976 Haley published Roots: The Saga of an American Family, a novel based loosely on his family’s history, starting with the story of Kunta Kinte, kidnapped in The Gambia in 1767 to be sold as a slave in the United States. This work involved ten years of research, intercontinental travel and writing. Haley went to the village of Juffure where Kunta Kinte grew up, which was still in existence, and listened to a tribal historian tell the story of Kinte’s capture. Haley also traced the records of the ship, The Lord Ligonier, which carried his ancestor to America.

Roots was eventually published in thirty-seven languages. It won the 1977 National Book Award as well as a Pulitzer Prize and went on to become a landmark television miniseries in 1977. The book and ﬁlm both reached unparalleled success. The television miniseries attracted a record-breaking 130 million viewers when it was serialized on television. The series set records for the number of viewers, and the Sunday night ﬁnale achieved the highest ranking for a single television production. Roots emphasized that African-Americans have a long history and that not all of that history is lost, as many had previously believed. Its popularity sparked an increased public interest in genealogy as well.

Roots and Alex Haley attracted controversy over the years—which comes with the territory of path-breaking iconic books, particularly on the topic of race. In 1978, novelist Harold Courlander sued Alex Haley, claiming that portions of Courlander’s novel The African had been plagiarized in Roots. After a trial, Haley settled out of court for $650,000 after admitting that several passages of Roots were copied from Courlander’s novel. However, Haley stated that the appropriation of these passages was unintentional and also claimed that researchers helping him had given him this material without citing the source. The settlement permitted the continued publication of Roots as Alex Haley wrote it. In 1988 Margaret Walker also sued him, claiming that Roots violated the copyright for her novel Jubilee. Her case was dismissed by the court.

There were also some questions about whether Roots was fact or ﬁction, and whether Alex Haley confused these two issues. Haley addressed these issues head-on in the book itself:

To the best of my knowledge and of my effort, every lineage statement within Roots is from either my African or American families’ carefully preserved oral history, much of which I have been able conventionally to corroborate with documents. Those documents, along with the myriad textural details of what were contemporary indigenous lifestyles, cultural history, and such that give Roots ﬂesh have come from years of intensive research in ﬁfty-odd libraries, archives, and other repositories on three continents.

Since I wasn’t around when most of the story occurred, by far most of the dialogue and most of the incidents are of necessity a novelized amalgam of what I know took place together with what my researching let me to plausibly feel took place.