A Letter From The Publisher, Feb. 14, 1977

"His message struck a special chord in me," said Los Angeles Correspondent William Marmon, whose long interview with Alex Haley, the author of Roots, accompanies our cover story. Marmon, whose own roots were in the South, finds that he too has "rattling around in my head some near-biblical family stories told and retold by my grandmother." Like many white Southerners, Marmon chafed against the "distorting experience" of segregation and, to help counteract it, wrote his senior thesis at Princeton on the Harlem renaissance of the 1920s. Correspondent Edward Boyer, who sat in on...

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