“Roots” also feeds the gross misconception that slavery was about white people enslaving black people. But they hardly let Europeans go running around in their territory, catching people willy-nilly.īecause of the false picture of history presented by “Roots” and by other sources, last year we had the farce of the president of Nigeria making demands on the United States because of the enslavement of people whom his own countrymen had enslaved, and on behalf of a country where slavery still persists, more than a century after emancipation has occurred throughout the Western world. In reality, West Africa was a center of slave trading before the first white man arrived there - and slavery continues in parts of it to this very moment.Īfricans sold vast numbers of other Africans to Europeans. The village elders were likewise bewildered as to what these white men were doing, carrying their people away. “Roots” has a white man leading a slave raid in West Africa, where the hero Kunta Kinte was captured, looking bewildered at the chains put on him as he was led away in bondage. It presented some crucially false pictures of what had actually happened - false pictures that continue to dominate thinking today.

It was not that “Roots” merely got some details wrong. He said that he had tried to give his people some myths to live by. When challenged by professional historians, Alex Haley called his work “faction” - part fact and part fiction. Moreover, the past that people are looking back at in “Roots” is not a wholly real past. There are some very big jobs at hand for black America - and looking back at centuries past is a costly distraction from the work that needs to be done here and now. Why a tragedy? The short answer is what Winston Churchill said during World War II: “If the past sits in judgment on the present, the future will be lost.” Some disastrous policies had been followed in the years leading up to World War II, and Churchill had sharply criticized those policies at the time but, now that the war was on, looking back could only interfere with the life-and-death job at hand. That is why it is especially painful to have to recognize, now that the television series based on “Roots” is going to be re-run on its 25th anniversary, that its enormous success a quarter of a century ago was a tragedy for blacks and for American society in general.

Both then and in his television appearances, Alex Haley seemed like a very decent man.

He was thrilled to receive a copy autographed by Alex Haley, courtesy of George Haley, his brother, whom I had met.Īlex Haley himself I never really met, though I saw him in person once because we went to the same barber in Los Angeles. “Roots” was the only book I knew my teenage son to read, aside from assigned school books, computer manuals and chess books.

Alex haley's roots movie