Making Roots Read online

  Making Roots

  ALSO FROM UC PRESS BY MATTHEW F. DELMONT

  The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock ’n’ Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia

  Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation

  Making Roots

  A Nation Captivated

  Matthew F. Delmont

  UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

  University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

  University of California Press

  Oakland, California

  © 2016 by The Regents of the University of California

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Delmont, Matthew F., author.

  Title: Making Roots : a nation captivated / Matthew F. Delmont.

  Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2016] | “2016 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016002212 (print) | LCCN 2016004108 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520291324 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520965133 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Haley, Alex. Roots. | Roots (Television program : 1977)

  Classification: LCC E185.97.H24 D45 2016 (print) | LCC E185.97.H24 (ebook) | DDC 973/.0496073—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016002212

  Manufactured in the United States of America

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  In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

  CONTENTS

  List of Illustrations

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  1. Before This Anger

  2. The Gambia

  3. Speaking Roots

  4. Writing Roots

  5. Producing Roots

  6. Reading Roots

  7. Watching Roots

  8. A Troublesome Property

  Conclusion

  Notes

  Bibliographic Essay

  Index

  AT MAKINGROOTS.NET

  Video Clips

  Images

  Selected Research Materials

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  1. Alex Haley with children in the Gambia, 1967

  2. Alex Haley takes notes on boat en route to Fort James in the Gambia, 1967

  3. Alex Haley listens to Kebba Fofana Kinte tell the story of the Kinte family

  4. Kebba Fofana Kinte, the Gambian elder who told Haley the story of Kunta Kinte

  5. Alex Haley gave hundreds of lectures across the country as a client of the W. Colston Leigh speakers’ bureau

  6. Alex Haley seated with members of the Kinte clan in the Gambia, 1967

  7. Stan Margulies and David Wolper celebrate their Emmy win for Roots, 1977

  8. LeVar Burton with David Greene on the set of Roots

  9. Louis Gosset Jr. and LeVar Burton filming a scene from Roots in Savannah, Georgia

  10. Alex Haley holds a galleys copy of Roots on the set in Savannah, Georgia

  11. LeVar Burton and Alex Haley

  12. Director Gilbert Moses watches over filming, with director of photography Joe Wilcots behind the camera

  13. Haley signing copies of Roots at mall in Los Angeles, 1977

  14. Binta Kinte (Cicely Tyson) and midwife Nyo Boto (Maya Angelou) show baby Kunta to Omoro and viewers

  15. Omoro Kinte (Thalmus Rasulala) holds baby Kunta skyward

  16. Ed Asner as the slave ship captain Thomas Davies, a much larger role in the television version of Roots than in Alex Haley’s book>

  17. Middle Passage scene in Roots

  18. Two students from Savannah State University who served as extras in the Middle Passage scene

  19. Kunta Kinte (LeVar Burton) whipping scene

  20. Kizzy Kinte (Leslie Uggams) talks with Missy Anne Reynolds (Sandy Duncan)

  21. Patrons watching Roots at a bar in Harlem

  22. Alex Haley signing a copy of Roots for Dr. Robert McCabe while George Sims looks on, 1976

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am fortunate to have received encouragement from family, friends, mentors, and colleagues for as long as I can remember. My mom, Diane Delmont, did an amazing job of raising me, and I am eternally thankful for her love and support. Thank you also to Frank Bowman, Bobbie and Lindy Stoltz, Katie Stoltz, Leari Jean and Jewel Anderson, and my late grandmother Kaye Henrikson, for their love and support.

  I’ve found at Arizona State University a wonderful place to teach history and American studies. Thank you to Matt Garcia, Desiree Garcia, Bambi Haggins, Aaron Bae, Karen Leong, Calvin Schermerhorn, Chris Jones, Sujey Vega, Lee Bebout, Don Fixico, Victoria Thompson, Don Critchlow, Gayle Gullet, Pen Moon, Catherine O’Donnell, Paul Hirt, Rashad Shabazz, Marlon Bailey, Gaymon Bennett, Julian Lim, and my other colleagues in history and American studies at Arizona State University for discussing my research and helping me strengthen my arguments.

  Thank you to Alexus Stewart, Elizabeth Blevins, Maggie Yancey, Don LaPlant, Amanda Daddona for working as research assistants on this project.

  Thank you to Dean George Justice, Vice Provost Patrick Kenney, Provost Mark Searle, and President Michael Crow for welcoming me to Arizona State University and for supporting my research.

  Thank you to Niels Hooper, my editor at University of California Press, for supporting this project from the earliest proposal. Thank you to Jessica Moll, Bradley Depew, and Ryan Furtkamp for guiding this book through production and to Elisabeth Magnus for her careful copyediting. Thank you to Cynthia Savage for preparing the book’s index. Thank you to Lorraine Weston, Kate Pinnick, and Elizabeth Shreve for their work promoting this book.

  Thank you to Cynthia Hunt, Sona Basmadjian, and the other archivists and librarians at Goodwin College, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, and the University of Southern California for their invaluable assistance. Thank you to Erica Ball, Adam Bradley, Kimberly Juanita Brown, Marcia Chatelain, Kellie Carter Jackson, Bambi Haggins, Alondra Nelson, and other scholars for taking the time to talk with me about Roots.

  Thanks to my friends from the Jackal club: Shawn Anderson, Tim Arnold, Victor Danh, Jessie Davis, Jake Ewart, Kara Hughes, Jake Lentz, Ken Miller, and Cabral Williams.

  Finally, thank you to Jacque Wernimont, Xavier, and Simone for their love.

  Introduction

  “You know who we have on the show tonight?” Johnny Carson asked his audience during his monologue on February 2, 1977. “We have the author who wrote that amazing, wonderful novel, Roots. Alex Haley is with us tonight.” Haley, the author of the best-selling book in the country, appeared on the Tonight Show just days after the Roots television miniseries completed its record-breaking run on ABC. “If there’s anyone watching who does not know about Roots, you must have either been out of the country or on Mars someplace,” Carson joked. As Haley waited in the green room while actor Tony Randall and singer Mel Tillis performed and bantered with Carson, he must have thought of how far he and his family story had come over the past fifteen years. If he was nervous, it did not show. Haley settled into the guest’s chair and soon started telling Carson about how he had come to write his multigene
rational story, tracing his family’s history from West Africa through emancipation in the United States. “The thing that actually did it for me was that my grandmother in Henning, Tennessee . . . told me, all while I was growing up, a story about the family, about where her parents had been slaves in Alamance County, North Carolina, and about the families preceding them,” Haley told Carson. “I didn’t really understand much of the story. It was like biblical parables.” It was a story Haley had told hundreds of times to audiences all across the country. Haley described how he had found information about different members of his family in archival records before reaching the most remarkable part of his story: “Ultimately, that research over the nine years would take me back to my fourth great-grandfather, seven generations back, an African who was named Kunta Kinte. He was born and reared in a little village called Juffure, in the Gambia, West Africa. He was brought here on a ship called the Lord Ligonier. And it left Africa July 5, 1767.”1 With Roots Haley achieved two incredible feats. He tracked his family’s history across the abyss of transatlantic slavery to a specific ancestor, and, almost as improbably, he made the slave trade and black history inescapable parts of national popular culture.

  Roots, published by Doubleday in the fall of 1976 and broadcast by ABC in the winter of 1977, was read by millions and watched by millions more, but today Roots is neither acclaimed by critics nor much studied by academics. Roots fell out of favor in part because Haley’s story started to unravel as soon as it was in print. Haley fabricated parts of his story, paid over half a million dollars to settle a plagiarism suit brought by Harold Courlander, and relied heavily on an editor, Murray Fisher, to finish Roots. Other people were upset with how ABC, Doubleday, Haley, and associated parties seemed to be wringing money from the history of slavery. This explicit commercialization allowed Roots to reach millions of people, but it has made it difficult to see the book or the television series as a serious contribution to our nation’s understanding of the history of slavery.

  Making “Roots” explores how Alex Haley’s idea developed from a modest book proposal into an unprecedented cultural phenomenon. This book is guided by two themes. First, I emphasize how Roots demonstrates the importance, contradictions, and limitations of mass culture. Alex Haley always approached his family history as a story that had both emotional and economic value. There would have been no Roots without Haley, but there also would have been no Roots without white publishers and producers who pitched the work primarily to white audiences. It is likely that Haley never would have finished Roots without the financial incentive and pressure offered by his deal with television producer David Wolper and ABC. Roots never existed wholly apart from the mass market. This was and is uncomfortable for many critics, readers, and viewers to acknowledge. Rather than lamenting that Roots was somehow sullied by Haley’s relationships with Reader’s Digest, Doubleday, the W. Colston Leigh speakers’ bureau, and ABC, it is more interesting and productive to consider how Haley, especially as a black writer in the 1960s and 1970s, created a story that could be successfully marketed to so many people.

  Roots began as a book called Before This Anger, which Alex Haley pitched to his agent in 1963. Haley signed a contract the following year to write the book for Doubleday, while he was also finishing work on The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Haley originally planned for Before This Anger to focus on his hometown of Henning, Tennessee, in the 1920s and ’30s, and to use this nostalgic vision of rural southern black life as a contrast to the urban unrest and racial tensions of the 1960s. Haley’s vision for the book expanded after family elders told him about someone they called “the Mandingo,” who had passed down stories of having been captured in Africa and sold into slavery. This initial family story sent Haley on a research quest motivated by both personal and financial concerns. On a personal level, Haley felt a natural human desire to understand his family’s history. For Haley, like other descendants of enslaved people, this desire for genealogical knowledge was thwarted by the fact that his ancestors had been forcibly uprooted from Africa and treated as property for generations in America. The Middle Passage, where enslaved people were transported from Africa to the New World, both claimed lives and ruptured histories. When Haley eventually identified Kunta Kinte, from the Gambian village of Juffure, as his family’s “original African,” he felt as if he had reclaimed something that had been stolen from him.

  Haley also understood that searching for and finding Kunta Kinte made for an amazing and lucrative story. Money problems followed Haley for the years he worked on Roots, and Haley supported himself during these years by lecturing across the country. Haley was a dynamic speaker, and on the lecture circuit he turned his search for his family’s history into a detective story. He described traveling across continents and racing from archive to archive in search of clues. In Haley’s detective story all of the pieces remarkably fell into place so that the stories he heard from his family elders matched up perfectly with legal deeds, shipping records, and Gambian oral histories. Much of what Haley told audiences was true; other parts were exaggerated, embellished, or fabricated. More importantly, Haley’s story of his search for roots captivated audiences. As Haley crisscrossed the country in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he told the story of his search for roots to hundreds of thousands of people, earning $500 to $1,000 per appearance.

  Haley was constantly selling Roots. His busy speaking schedule made it difficult for him to finish his epic book, but the lectures amounted to one of the longest advance promotion tours in the history of publishing or broadcasting. Haley used his storytelling skills, honed in front of lecture audiences, to successfully pitch Roots to Reader’s Digest, which published a condensation of the book in 1974; to producers David Wolper and Stan Margulies; and to ABC television executive Brandon Stoddard. Whether Haley was speaking to college students, church groups, or television professionals, he understood that audiences responded to Roots, first and foremost, as a good story. Telling and retelling his story taught Haley to focus less on the boundaries between fact and fiction, or between history and literature, and more on making a connection with his audience.

  The second theme of this book is how Roots pushed the boundaries of history. Historians have shied away from Roots because the story’s relationship to history is messy, but it is this messiness that makes Roots so interesting. Alex Haley mixed archival research, oral traditions, and fiction into a narrative he described as “faction.” The television version of Roots complicated matters further, insisting that the production was based on a true story while billing the series as an “ABC Novel for Television.” Critics have noted several examples of how Haley played fast and loose with historical evidence, and one need not search too long online before seeing Roots described as a “hoax,” “fraud,” or “lie.” At their worst, these criticisms of Roots reassure people who would like to deny or minimize the history of slavery. Even at their best, the critiques do not explain why so many people were eager to read, watch, and listen to the story Haley created. Making “Roots” carefully traces when, how, and why Haley made up parts of his story, but this book is not an exposé. Rather, I argue that we need to pay more attention to the emotional and economic investments that led Haley to believe the remarkable story of Kunta Kinte he heard in the Gambia and the similar investments that led publishers, television producers, and audiences to believe in Roots. Dividing Roots into discrete columns of fact and fiction does not explain why it was precisely the parts of Haley’s story that most strained credibility that most moved audiences.

  Americans choose to remember slavery at some moments and collectively forget it at others. Roots arrived in an era when academic and popular audiences were paying renewed attention to the history of slavery, including books such as John Blassingame’s The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (1972); Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (1974); Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (
1974); Herbert Gutman’s The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom (1976); Lawrence Levine’s Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (1977); Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom (1975); George Rawick’s From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community (1972); and The Black Book (1973), a scrapbook put together by collector Middleton Harris and Toni Morrison, who was then an editor at Random House. Roots benefited from and contributed to this interest in the history of slavery, but it reached millions more people and changed the way Americans viewed slavery in ways that a historical textbook or monograph never could. None of these historians, for example, were going to be interviewed by Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show, be featured in Reader’s Digest, or make the cover of Time magazine. Roots was unapologetically commercial history and was pitched to everyday American readers and viewers rather than to scholars. Popular and academic reviewers who dismissed the book and television series as too middlebrow or criticized its historical accuracy largely missed the point. Roots asked viewers, across racial lines and national borders, to see slavery as a story about black people and black families and to identify with the sorrow, pain, and joy of enslaved people in ways that were unusual in commercial literature and unprecedented in broadcast television. There was power in the level of popularity Roots achieved. “The mass catharsis of ‘Roots’ has at last formulated a weapon equal in power to Birth of a Nation,” Los Angeles Times critic Mary Beth Crain argued.2 Roots encouraged more people to engage seriously with the history of slavery than anything before or since. There are many valuable histories of slavery, but there is only one Roots.

  Representations of race have played an important role throughout the long campaign for African American freedom. In the nineteenth century, Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth made extensive use of photography and the circulation of their images to create public selves and make a case for the humanity of black people.3 Similarly, W.E.B. DuBois compiled several hundred photographs of affluent African American women and men and displayed them in the “American Negro exhibit” at the 1900 Paris Exposition.4 DuBois’s remarkable collection of images testified to the diversity of African American identity and challenged the dominant racial ideologies of black inferiority. At the outset of the twentieth-century civil rights movement, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) led protests against D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation when it opened in 1915 and again in later years when the film was rereleased.5 In the early years of television, the NAACP protested the caricatures of black people on Amos ’n’ Andy (1951–53 broadcast; 1954–66 syndication) and civil rights advocates and entertainers called for more and better representations of black people on the small screen.6 Still, American culture continued to be enamored with retrograde depictions of race. Most people do not realize that before Roots the most watched television program in American history was Gone with the Wind, the 1939 historical epic film that NBC broadcast over two nights in 1976.7 With Roots, Haley tried to marshal the power of history, at an epic and mythic scale, to advance black history in the mainstream of American culture. Over the course of the twentieth century many civil rights advocates and media critics lamented the power of racist fictions like Gone with the Wind and Birth of a Nation to “write history with lightning,” to quote the phrase President Woodrow Wilson is said to have used to praise Griffith’s epic. Few people have had the audacity, as Haley did with Roots, to create a larger lightning storm.