(6 of 6)
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.