Looking Back at the Roots Phenomenon - Critical Essay

Black Issues Book Review, July, 2001 by A'Lelia Bundles

Twenty-five years ago, Doubleday published Alex Haley's "factional" account of his African American family, launching a juggernaut that redefined Americans' perceptions of slaves and slavery.

During the summer of 1976, cascading fireworks and majestic tall ships ushered in this nation's Fourth of July bicentennial. A few weeks later, a Southern governor named Jimmy Carter became the Democratic Party's candidate for President of the United States. And that October, Alex Haley's Roots: The Saga of an American Family went on sale for $12.50, igniting an American cultural revolution.

As a pioneering writer of the Playboy interview format and co-author of the widely read The Autobiography of Malcolm X (Grove Press, 1965), Haley had already established his bona fides as a writer to be taken seriously. But he was hardly a household name and nothing could have prepared him or his publisher for the thousands of Americans who would cram into auditoriums, bookstores and church basements with hopes of touching the stocky, fleshy-jowled, brown-skinned man whose search for his African ancestors had begun to redefine America's perception of slaves and slavery.

Doubleday's initial 200,000 print run--unprecedented for a book by a black author--was quickly exhausted as Roots pushed its way onto the New York Times bestsellers list. Within the first year of publication, readers purchased more than a million hardcover copies. By 2000 it had sold 8.5 million copies in 26 languages.

Looking back, Roots editor Lisa Drew (now with her own imprint at Scribner) likens the sales frenzy that engulfed Haley's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to last summer's Harry Potter craze. "One can't overemphasize the impact of Roots," she reflects. "It filled a huge gap in our country's past--not only African American history, but all Americans' history--and sold more copies at a faster rate than any previous book."

Before the Roots phenomenon, most Americans--black and white--had few media images to counter the Tarzan version of Africans and the Gone with the Wind depiction of African American slaves. Beginning in 1914, when the first of 23 Tarzan novels appeared, and for much of the twentieth century, Englishman Edgar Rice Burroughs' portrayal of primitive black savages and superstitious cannibals reigned almost without challenge. As late as 1963, one of every 30 paperbacks sold had been written by Burroughs, and many of the more than 50 Tarzan movies remained Saturday afternoon television staples.

Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind endured with similar persistence if not pervasiveness. Initially published in 1936, it hit the million copy sales mark in less than a year. When David O. Selznick's star-wattage GWTW movie premiered during the 1939 Christmas season, hundreds of thousands of fans partied and paraded in the streets of Atlanta for three straight days.

Through the decades, African Americans had watched Tarzan and Gone with the Wind with wary, but not entirely unaccepting eyes. Who among us black Baby Boomers did not spend at least a few moments of childhood swinging from playground monkey bars as we imitated Johnny Weismuller's yodel? If later a few of us little black girls were charmed by Rhett Butler's swagger, we cringed each time we heard Butterfly McQueen's simple-minded Prissy squeal about "birthin' babies." With so few black faces on the silver screen, Hattie McDaniel's portrayal of Scarlett O'Hara's mammy left us ambivalent. Were we proud that she was the first black person to receive an Oscar, or embarrassed that her character personified the bossy, but loyal stereotype that seemed to amuse white people?

Finally in early 1977, with the transformation of Roots, the book, into Roots, the mini-series, Gone With the Wind lost its unchallenged claim on our collective psyche. Scheduled for eight consecutive nights in late January--and positioned by ABC executives to precede sweeps month just in case it flopped--all or part of this record-breaking television extravaganza was seen in 85 percent of the nation's households, and thirty cities officially observed "Roots Week." "Teachers taught Roots in their classrooms, and socialites gave dinner parties centered around watching it" editor Drew remembers. On each successive night, as restaurants lost business and bar owners switched their overhead television sets from basketball to Roots, the audience mushroomed until the Sunday night finale reached 100 million viewers. By week's end, in a deliciously ironic triumph, Roots had toppled Gone With the Wind--which had made its television debut just a year earlier--from its perch at the top of the nation's ten most watched programs.

By tracing seven generations of his own family to the Gambian village of Juffere, Haley had turned whatever lingering shame black Americans felt about Africa into pride. Equally as important, his story had challenged many white Americans' long held belief that blacks were intellectually inferior with no history or culture worth recognizing. When Kunta refused to accept Massa Waller's attempts to change his name to Toby, we cheered because we could confirm that our great-great-great-grandparents had not been the docile figures of our high school history texts. When half of Kunta's foot was amputated to prevent him from trying to escape, our agony was tempered by the knowledge that our ancestors had resisted their bondage. As we watched Kizzy being sold off the plantation and dragged from her parents' arms, centuries of pain and anger welled inside us. On those eight nights, Haley's family story became a quintessentially American story. And if Haley and the producers of the mini-series had romanticized and embellished as the critics charged, at least they had begun the process of chipping away the ubiquitous mountain of misinformation.