Roots

Alex Haley's extensive 12-year research into his family genealogy produced the epic novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976) and inspired the 1977 television miniseries of the same name. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, the narrative spans 200 years and six generations, originating with Haley's male progenitor, Kunta Kinte, who Haley determined was born in Juffure, Gambia, in 1750. As a child in Henning, Tennessee, Alexander “Alex” Murray Palmer Haley (1921–92) often heard his grandmother recount fragments of their family story. The “carefully preserved” oral tradition that enabled pieces of his family history to be passed down from generation to generation foreshadowed the griot (historian or storyteller) whom he would eventually meet in Gambia, West Africa. The majestic narrative of this senior griot finally linked Haley's grandmother's stories to a specific forebear in the village of Juffure, Gambia, of the Kinte family.

In the process of uncovering his family history—a journey that took him to three continents and countless libraries and archives—and piecing together a narrative from his maternal line, Haley was keenly aware that his genealogical narrative would represent the “symbolic saga of the African American people.” Thus, Haley conducted his research with the knowledge that the story of Kunta Kinte and his descendants in the United States embodied, to a certain extent, the story of all black Americans.

Not only did the mammoth book his research produced initiate national dialogue around heritage, history, and the painful wounds of slavery, but it also modeled a method for genealogical research, especially for Americans of African descent. No longer would black Americans futilely yearn for and dispiritedly accept an “erased” African past and lost maternal language. Haley's narrative demonstrated the possibility of recovering an African ancestral family history, down to the very village of origin. Thus, Haley's ambitious undertaking reclaimed an African past for the millions of Africans “exiled” in America. On a practical level, the research documented in the final chapters of the book also outlined a framework for genealogical searches that made finding one's “roots” an essential component of black identity formation.

Given the huge swath of history the narrative covers, Haley decidedly emphasized Kunta Kinte's complex and fulfilling life in Gambia before captivity. Although Kinte was kidnapped and enslaved as a teenage boy when he was chopping wood to build a drum, his story does not begin there. Refusing to start the narrative of his family history at the moment of his African ancestor's capture, Haley instead devotes a considerable section of the book to Kinte's life of freedom in Gambia before captivity and the terrors of the Middle Passage. This attention to the pre-captivity Africa years and Kinte's fierce resistance once enslaved in the New World suggests how rich a history the “Kintes” of America's racial past experienced in their homeland. Haley seems to refute early-20th-century scholars who lamented the absence of “Africanisms” for black Americans in the United States.