My mother wasn’t one to over-police the time my siblings and I spent in front of a television. Back in the 1970s and before we had cable, the options were limited pretty limited for running into anything too mature for our eyes. She certainly had a sense of “that’s enough” for one day, time to go outside and play or otherwise do something else.
But there were a handful of occasions where she gathered us to watch things she felt were important for us to know and understand. One of those was the 1978 mini-series Holocaust. But before that was the January 1977 miniseries Roots, the adaptation of Alex Haley’s Roots: The Saga of an American Family.
Roots wasn’t just a mini-series; it was a cultural phenomenon. I honestly can’t think of anyone I knew at the time who didn’t watch it. It was a topic of discussion at school, not just amongst the students, but as part of class. When it aired, I was 11 years old and in the fifth grade at Sterchi Elementary. Granted, this was watching a made for television film adaption, not reading the book, which clocks in at 587 pages. However, just like Holocaust, Roots came with a warning that viewer discretion was advised. Because there’s nothing gentle or pretty about the history of slavery in the United States.
The mini-series lasted eight nights, and there was some discussion of it every day at school. I was in Frank Scimonelli’s split class of fifth and sixth graders, so students ranging in age from 10 to 12. Though the scene was not graphic in its depiction (nor is it in the book), and though we were indeed young, we understood what happened to Kizzy. We knew who Chicken George’s father was and understood the meaning of “child of the plantation.” We learned that certain things are just plain wrong, and we were not damaged by it.
Less than a decade after Roots aired, Haley had moved to Knoxville (he got hooked on East Tennessee during the World’s Fair) and was made an adjunct professor in communications and American studies at UT. I was initially in journalism school when I started college, and it was not uncommon to pass him in the halls of the Communications Building. He had made fast friends with Lamar Alexander as well as John Rice Irwin, founder of the Museum of Appalachia, so much so that he bought a small farm on the other side of I-75 from the museum.
I went out to that farm when I was a reporter for The Knoxville Journal for his announcement that he would be leaving the lion’s share of his papers to the University of Tennessee. I met Haley and interviewed him on several other occasions. For a man who set the template for how to compose an interview (he was the first and foremost interviewer for Playboy magazine. Regardless of what you feel about the rest of it, the interviews were top shelf), he was difficult to keep on task as the subject of one. No matter my list of questions, to which Haley might give a cursory response, he was gonna start telling tales. Because that is who he was, a storyteller.
Just a couple of years later he was gone. There is no need for me to list all of his accolades, but he won the Pulitzer Prize for Roots, which is an official state book for Tennessee. We have a whole statue and Heritage Square dedicated to him here in Knoxville. But now Knox County Schools has decided his signature work can’t sit in school libraries. I can understand not having it in elementary or middle schools. But HIGH SCHOOLS? It’s shameful and utterly ridiculous.
I have a first edition copy of Roots, which was published in 1976, the year of our bicentennial. The dedication reads as follows:
It wasn’t planned that Roots’ researching and writing would take twelve years. So I dedicated Roots as a birthday gift to my country within which most of Roots happened.
Fifty years on, we should honor that gift and not forsake it.
Beth Kinnane writes a history feature for KnoxTNToday.com. It’s published each Tuesday and is one of our best-read features.
Sources: The Knoxville Journal digital archives, The Tennessee State Museum, East Tennessee History Center – McClung Digital Archives
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