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.