WHY 'ROOTS' HIT HOME

In Chicago, they were talking about "Haley's comet." To Atlanta TV Executive Neil Kuvin, it was "Super Bowl every night." In New York, Executive Director Vernon Jordan of the National Urban League called it "the single most spectacular educational experience in race relations in America."

What they were talking about was ABC's epic dramatization of Alex Haley's book Roots. For eight consecutive nights, tens of millions of Americans were riveted by Haley's story of his family's passage from an ancestral home in Africa to slavery in America and, finally, to freedom. Along the way, Americans of both races discovered that they share a common heritage, however brutal; that the ties that link them to their ancestors also bind them to each other. Thus, with the final episode, Roots was no longer just a bestselling book and a boffo TV production but a social phenomenon, a potentially important bench mark in U.S. race relations.

Harvard Sociologist Thomas Pettigrew compared Roots to the aftermath of John Kennedy's assassination as a major television event. Some black leaders viewed Roots as the most important civil rights event since the 1965 march on Selma, an overstatement perhaps, but an indication of the depths of their feelings.

What were the reasons for Roots' huge success? Wrote Washington Post Columnist William Raspberry: "The only question remaining on the subject of Roots is: Why? Why did this work become an instant classic, a literary-television phenomenon?" Raspberry finally concluded: "As Louis Armstrong supposedly said when someone asked him 'What is jazz?'. If you have to ask, I can't tell you.' "

Without doubt, the medium had much to do with the impact of the message. Haley learned about his earliest ancestors from an elderly Gambian griot (storyteller), a living repository of oral history who sat him down in the tiny village of Juffure and recited for him the centuries-old saga of his West African clan dating back seven generations to the warrior Kunta Kinte. Modern Americans learned about Haley's lineage in much the same way--huddled in a semicircle in their living rooms around that electronic-age griot, the television set.

The sheer number of people who were exposed to Roots is staggering. Across the country, theaters and restaurants lost business as customers stayed home to watch the serialization. Hostesses arranged party plans so that guests could watch installments. Bartenders kept their patrons from leaving only by switching their TV sets from hockey and basketball games to Roots. In all, some 130 million Americans watched at least part of the series. Seven of the eight episodes ranked among the Top Ten in all-time TV ratings (the other three: this year's Super Bowl, Parts 1 and 2 of Gone With the Wind). The last episode drew an audience of 80 million, smashing the record set last November by the first half of GWTW, which told much the same story but from the other side and smothered in magnolia blossoms.

The ABC dramatization spurred a rush for the 688-page book, which has gone into 14 printings since it was published in October. Sales hit a one-day peak of 67,000 on the third day of the TV series; so far, about 750,000 copies have been sold (list price: $12.50). To keep up with the soaring demand, Doubleday, the publisher, will have 1 million copies in print by March 1. In many cities, it became common for copies of Roots to be stolen from stores. In New York City, thieves broke a display window in a Doubleday bookstore on Fifth Avenue and stole all the copies of Roots. Peddlers are hawking stolen copies for $5 and up in New York and on Washington's buses, subways and street corners.

At a suburban Los Angeles department store one day last week, some 3,000 people lined up with copies for Haley to autograph. To his astonishment, he said, he "encountered only five persons who didn't have more than one copy of the book. Some came with as many as eight. One woman gave me two copies and said the second was for the baby in her stomach."

So far, Haley has made well over $1 million in royalties, and the money seems bound to flow in even faster. To promote the book, he is making a three-month lecture tour. In addition, a two-record album telling of his hunt for roots will soon be on the market; a more detailed version will be forthcoming as a book, titled Search. Finally, he says, there are plans for further TV series, perhaps concentrating on young Kunta Kinte in Africa or his descendants' story just after the Civil War.

According to Haley, Roots is used in courses at 276 colleges and universities, and many high schools are also setting up courses around the book. In addition, publishers in 13 countries have bought translation rights. Thus, with a paperback edition scheduled in the U.S. in October.* Roots is well on the way to becoming one of the bestselling books in years, though it has far to go to catch up with Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, which has sold 21 million copies, in hardback and paperback, since 1936.

It was the TV dramatization that set off this vast craving for the book and that reached so deeply into Americans' minds. Part of its success may have come from the use of familiar techniques of TV melodrama--with a twist: the heroes and heroines were black. Said black Historian Benjamin Quarles of Morgan State College in Maryland: "There was the threat of violence, the appeal of sex, all building up to a wonderful climax--all the things that make for good television."

Whatever the reason for the TV version's popularity, it did not necessarily have much to do with artistic merit. Leading TV critics had, at best, serious reservations about the series, and many panned it outright. The Chicago Sun-Times' William Granger, complaining of "puerile" writing and "caricatures," described Roots as "so transparently bad at times that I was filled with embarrassment." TIME'S own critic, Richard Schickel, labeled the TV production as "Mandingo for middlebrows." He wrote that Roots offered "almost no new insights, factual or emotional," about slavery; instead, there was "a handy compendium of stale melodramatic conventions."

Many critics and other viewers, while readily conceding that the TV series was not a precisely accurate recounting of history (few dramatizations are),nonetheless praised the production for what one of them called its mythic veracity. They had a point. For millions of Americans, Roots was real--if not necessarily literally true (see ESSAY).

For all its artistic shortcomings, Roots had a raw, visceral impact on many viewers. A handful of people, mostly teenagers, reacted violently. In Greenville, Miss., some white junior high school students taunted blacks: "You ol' slave, my granddaddy owned you once upon a time." Chanting "Roots, roots, roots," a gang of black toughs roughed up four white youths at Detroit's Ford High School. A well-to-do white woman in Atlanta voiced one fear: "I thought Roots was awful. The blacks were just getting settled down, and this will make them angry again." African History Professor John Henrik Clarke of New York's Hunter College was also concerned that Roots would worsen race relations in the short run.

Despite the scattered acts of violence, most observers thought that in the long term, Roots would improve race relations, particularly because of the televised version's profound impact on whites. Said John Callahan, professor of American literature at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Ore.: "We now know our roots are inextricably bound with the roots of blacks and cannot be separated." Many observers also feel that the TV series left whites with a more sympathetic view of blacks by giving them a greater appreciation of black history.

This, in fact, seemed to have been the case in many white households. Admitted Beti Gunter, the wife of a lawyer in Little Rock, Ark.: "Something inside me tried to say that slavery wasn't that bad, but now I know that it really was a lot worse." Said Barbara Ash, a vice president of Hart, Schaffner & Marx in Chicago: "I just hurt for them. Guilt is not a good word to describe my feelings--I felt agony." Said Lydia Levin, a law student at the University of California at Los Angeles: "I don't think I ever sat down and thought about what slavery really meant. Whites knew that this happened. We just didn't have to look at it on such a personal level."

There seemed to be scarcely any black Americans, even ones who thought they were well versed in their race's history, who did not come away from their TVs shaken to the core by Roots. Said Aurora Jackson, a social worker in Chicago: "It's one thing to read about this, and another thing to see it. My concept of slavery was always intellectual. For the first time, I really felt I had a picture of how horrible life was."

Like some other blacks, Parren Mitchell, the Maryland Representative who heads the congressional Black Caucus, was so deeply disturbed by the TV series that he had to stop watching after two episodes. Said he: "I couldn't watch the rest. I was too angry. If I had met any of my white friends, I would have lashed out at them from a vortex of primeval anger." And yet, Mitchell went on, he realized that the story "is as much a part of our legacy as Andrew Young being sworn in as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations by Thurgood Marshall at the White House."

Howard Sociologist Clifton Jones thought that Roots had a psychological impact second only to the black-is-beautiful movement of the '60s. Said he: "To see the spirit with which their much-maligned ancestors survived slavery is a great corrective to any lingering inferiority that blacks feel." This memory was shared with whites. Said Allen Counter, a black biologist at Harvard: "It sounded like us, it looked like us, it was us. We've always wanted whites to understand how our backgrounds are different from theirs. Now they should understand a little better where we are coming from."

Among many blacks, Roots has kindled an intense desire to search out their genealogies. Actually, American blacks' interest in their African heritage began years ago; among the most vivid manifestations were the dashikis and African names that became popular in the 1960s. Hence Roots and the reaction to it are in a sense as much effect as cause.

Reflecting the new interest in genealogy, letters to the National Archives in Washington requesting information have tripled, to 2,300 a week; applications for permits to use the research facilities have jumped by 40%, to 560 a week. Most blacks, however, may not be able to trace their family trees before the Civil War. One reason: until 1870 the federal census listed most blacks by age and sex but not by name. Free blacks were an exception, but they were not very numerous. Some won their freedom through service in the Revolutionary War; nobody knows the precise number, but there were at least 5,000 who fought with the patriots.

Because of the scanty records for most blacks, however, many despair of ever uncovering their roots. Said Mary Gaines, 20, a black secretary at Northeastern University's African-American Institute in Boston: "I know about my great-grandmother, but beyond that it's a dead end. All the old people in my family are gone. I probably won't ever know."

Executives at all three commercial TV networks immediately began looking for ways to cash in on the new interest in black history. Paul Monash, a CBS vice president, began dickering with Author William Styron for the TV rights to his 1967-68 bestseller, The Confessions of Nat Turner. Said Monash: "Part of Roots' brilliance was in the programming. ABC caused an explosion by compressing the presentation so that the drama had built-in impact. I never liked the format of one hour a week, as in Rich Man, Poor Man. Waiting a week dispels interest; waiting a day heightens interest."

Because of Roots, Frank Price, president of Universal Television, expects to have an easier time selling a series called All God's Children, which is based on the struggles of a black Southern sharecropper. Roots also gave fresh impetus to another Universal production, The New Americans, a dramatic series with separate installments on blacks, Irish, Italians, Jews and Puerto Ricans.

As soon as the last episode of Roots ended, widespread debate began on its long-term effects. Would Roots turn out to be chiefly a stimulant for TV executives and black genealogists? Or did its huge audience mean that the series might be every bit as significant in its own way as the civil rights marches of the '60s? A few people insisted that Roots' impact would be transitory. Said black New York Representative Charles Rangel: "It helps people identify and gets conversations started, but I can't see any lasting effect." Black Literature Professor Leon Forrest at Northwestern University believes that if the show had been televised during the ferment of the '60s, it might have served as a catalyst. "But we are now in a period of some apathy and inwardness."

Yet there are those who argue that the supercharged atmosphere of the '60s would have been precisely the wrong moment for Roots. Says Texas Congresswoman Barbara Jordan: "Everything converged--the right time, the right story and the right form. The country, I feel, was ready for it. At some other time I don't feel it would have had that kind of widespread acceptance and attention--specifically in the '60s. Then it might have spawned resentments and apprehensions the country couldn't have taken. But with things quiet, and with race relations moving along at a rate that's acceptable to most Americans, we were ready to take in the full story of who we are and how we got that way."

Abroad consensus seemed to be emerging that Roots would spur black identity, and hence black pride, and eventually pay important dividends. Said Columbia Sociologist Francis lanni: "The civil rights movement seemed to be stopping for a breather. This may be a significant turning point." Said Anthony Browne, an assistant vice chancellor at the University of California at Berkeley: "Roots sensitized a lot of people to the black situation."

There can be little doubt of that. But some difficult questions arise: Sensitized in what way? How long do white Americans need to feel guilty about the evils committed by their ancestors? Is there a statute of limitations on guilt? There can be no precise answer to those questions, but it may be well to remember that it was after all whites who ended slavery --belatedly--in a terrible war. Besides, the millions of Americans descended from post-Civil War immigrants can scarcely be charged with the sins of other people's fathers. There is some danger that breast-beating about the past may turn into a kind of escapism, distracting attention from the evils of the present. Only if Roots turns the anger at yesterday's slavery into anger at today's ghettos will it really matter.

In Washington, members of the congressional Black Caucus seem to have no idea, yet, how to make use of this anger, of the energy unleashed by Roots. "We've been given a piece of literature that takes the civil rights struggle to a higher level," said black Congressman John Conyers. "It doesn't cure unemployment or take people out of the ghetto. But it's a democratic statement as eloquent as any that's ever been devised, and we've been talking about what can be done with it."

For Conyers and other blacks, however, the chief contribution of Roots--one that also provides its great potential for lasting effects--was crystallized in the sixth episode, when Kizzy explained to her son Chicken George why she could not marry her lover, Sam. "Sam wasn't like us," she says. "Nobody ever told him where he come from. So he didn't have a dream of where he ought to be goin'." Because of Alex Haley's search, countless American blacks now know, or are trying to find out. Michigan Congressman Charles Diggs told Conyers that "now he understands who he is; now he understands what his father used to talk about." Added Conyers: "You can't begin to do anything in life until you cai. own up to your blackness and accept yourself in your blackness and others as they are."

Like black Americans elsewhere, these Congressmen have a sense that because of Roots, something good has happened to race relations--even if they cannot quite define what. Perhaps it is simply that the gulf between black and white has been narrowed a bit and the level of mutual understanding has been raised a notch.

* Haley, strapped for cash, sold the paperback rights to Dell in 1967 for only $5,000--a deal that he would like to renegotiate.

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