Alex Haley: Roots: The Saga of an American Family

One of the most important books and television series ever to appear, Roots , galvanized the nation, and created an extraordinary political, racial, social and cultural dialogue that hadn’t been seen since the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin . The book sold over one million copies in the first year, and the miniseries was watched by an astonishing 130 million people. It also won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Roots opened up the minds of Americans of all colors and faiths to one of the darkest and most painful parts of America’s past.

Over the years, both Roots and Alex Haley have attracted controversy, which comes with the territory for trailblazing, iconic books, particularly on the topic of race. Some of the criticism results from whether ROOTS is fact or fiction and whether Alex Haley confused these two issues, a subject he addresses directly in the book. There is also the fact that Haley was sued for plagiarism when it was discovered that several dozen paragraphs in Roots were taken directly from a novel, The African , by Harold Courlander, who ultimately received a substantial financial settlement at the end of the case.

But none of the controversy affects the basic issue. Roots fostered a remarkable dialogue about not just the past, but the then present day 1970s and how America had fared since the days portrayed in Roots . Vanguard Press feels that it is important to publish Roots: The 30th Anniversary Edition to remind the generation that originally read it that there are issues that still need to be discussed and debated, and to introduce to a new and younger generation, a book that will help them understand, perhaps for the first time, the reality of what took place during the time of Roots .

Vanguard Press

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

It wasn’t planned that Roots ’ researching and writing finally would take twelve years. Just by chance it is being published in the Bicentennial Year of the United States. So I dedicate Roots as a birthday offering to my country within which most of Roots happened.

I owe deep gratitude to so many people for their help with Roots that pages would be required simply to list them all. The following are pre-eminent:

George Sims, my lifelong friend from our Henning, Tennessee, boyhood, is a master researcher who often traveled with me, sharing both the physical and emotional adventures. His dedicated combing through volumes by the hundreds, and other kinds of documents by the thousands—particularly in the U. S. Library of Congress and the U. S. National Archives—supplied much of the historical and cultural material that I have woven around the lives of the people in this book.

Murray Fisher had been my editor for years at Playboy magazine when I solicited his clinical expertise to help me structure this book from a seeming impassable maze of researched materials. After we had established Roots’ pattern of chapters, next the story line was developed, which he then shepherded throughout. Finally, in the book’s pressurized completion phase, he even drafted some of Roots’ scenes, and his brilliant editing pen steadily tightened the book’s great length.

The Africa section of this book exists in its detail only because at a crucial time Mrs. DeWitt Wallace and the editors of the Reader’s Digest shared and supported my intense wish to explore if my maternal family’s treasured oral history might possibly be documented back into Africa where all black Americans began.

Nor would this book exist in its fullness without the help of those scores of dedicated librarians and archivists in some fifty-seven different repositories of information on three continents. I found that if a librarian or archivist becomes excited with your own fervor of research, they can turn into sleuths to aid your quests.

I owe a great debt to Paul R. Reynolds, doyen of literary agents—whose client I have the pleasure to be—and to Doubleday Senior Editors Lisa Drew and Ken McCormick, all of whom have patiently shared and salved my frustrations across the years of producing Roots.

Finally, I acknowledge immense debt to the griots of Africa—where today it is rightly said that when a griot dies, it is as if a library has burned to the ground. The griots symbolize how all human ancestry goes back to some place, and some time, where there was no writing. Then, the memories and the mouths of ancient elders was the only way that early histories of mankind got passed along ... for all of us today to know who we are.

From the very beginning, Alex Haley’s Roots counted as much more than a mere book. It tapped deeply into the black American hunger for an African ancestral home that had been savaged by centuries of slavery and racial dislocation. More than the sum of its historical and literary parts—some of which have been rigorously criticized and debunked—Haley’s quest for his roots changed the way black folk thought about themselves and how white America viewed them. No longer were we genealogical nomads with little hope of learning the names and identities of the people from whose loins and culture we sprang. Haley wrote black folk into the book of American heritage and gave us the confidence to believe that we could find our forebears even as he shared his own. Kunta and Kizzy—and Chicken George too—became members of our black American family. That’s why no flaw or shortcoming in Haley’s tome could dim the brilliant light he shed on the black soul. Haley’s monumental achievement helped convince the nation that the black story is the American story. He also made it clear that black humanity is a shining beacon that miraculously endured slavery’s brutal horrors.

I was a seventeen-year-old boarding school student when Haley’s comet of a book hit the nation’s racial landscape. It immediately changed the course of our conversations around school and provided a powerful lens onto a period of history that few of us really understood. Until Haley’s book, there was little public grappling with the drama of American slavery. Of course, the epochal television miniseries that grew from Haley’s text seized us in its thrilling exploration of chattel slavery’s vast and vicious evolution. The book and miniseries also sparked the phenomenon of black self-discovery. For too long, slavery had been an American terror that left the lives of black folk scarred by memories of pain and humiliation. Haley’s book brought black folk out of the shadows of shame and ignorance. It also spurred many of us for the first time to speak openly and honestly about the lingering effects of centuries-old oppression. If the black freedom struggle of the ’60s had liberated our bodies from the haunting imperatives of white supremacy, Haley’s book helped free our minds and spirits from that same force.

Roots also prodded white America to reject the racial amnesia that fed its moral immaturity and its racial irresponsibility. As long as there was no book or image that captured slavery’s disfiguring reach, the nation could conduct its business as if all racial problems had been solved when it finally bestowed civil rights on its black citizens. But Haley helped us to resist that seductive lie with a tonic splash of colorful truth: that the nation had yet to successfully negotiate its perilous ties to an institution that built white prosperity while crushing black opportunity. Roots was a soulful reminder that unless we grappled with the past, we would be forever saddled by its deadening liabilities. Since it was published during the nation’s blithely romantic celebration of its bicentennial, Haley’s book provided a touchstone for alternative history. Haley’s book helped conscientious citizens to challenge the self-image of America as an unqualified champion of democracy and freedom.