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Roots 11 begins in 1882, twelve years after the close of Roots I, and ends in 1967, the year Alex Haley went to Africa to search for traces of his ancestor Kunta Kinte. In the hours be tween, the show charts the lives of four generations of the author's family. The first segment ends with the death of Kun ta Kinte's grandson, Chicken George (Avon Long); by the final episode the viewer has briefly seen Haley's own chil dren. As before, public events are dramatized in terms of their effect on one black family. But the post-Civil War his tory covered by Roots 11 is less melodramatic than the slavery era chronicled in Roots 1. As Producer Stan Margulies, 58, explained to TIME Correspondent Robert Goldstein: "If the first series was about the struggle for freedom, this Roots is about the struggle for equality. There is a big but subtle difference. None of us lived 200 years ago: you could watch the first Roots and say 'I wouldn't act like that.' In the new group of shows, you have to look at yourself in the mirror."
Even for a 14-hour miniseries, Roots 11 covers a huge amount of ground. Ha ley's family members witness the rise of the Jim Crow South and the Ku Klux Klan, both World Wars, the race riots of the Wilson era and the hard times of the Depression. They endure the outright segregation of the Old South and the de facto segregation of the modern North. They contend with racist military officers, hypocritical white liberals, and Uncle Tom blacks. They wrestle with the political and sociological imperatives of such thinkers as Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois and Malcolm X. Yet intimate matters of life, love and death always come ahead of civics lessons or historical fine points.
For all the success of Roots 1, the show's creators have resisted the urge to become pompous and preachy in Roots 11.
Instead, they offer a parade of fine actors in a series of theatrically powerful scenes. Georg Stanford Brown, returning as Chicken George's proud son, Tom Har vey, has a wrenching moment when he undergoes an insulting literacy test before a hostile audience of rednecks.
Henry Fonda, as a relatively benign Southern aristocrat, breaks down and calls his son (Richard Thomas) a nigger when the boy marries a black (Fay Hauser). Paul Winfield, as a black college president, puts on a humiliating minstrel act to raise money from a socialite philanthropist (Dina Merrill). Ossie Davis and Brock Pe ters turn up as, respectively, a Pull man porter and a sharecropper, who risk their jobs to fight for economic equality. In his first TV performance, Marlon Brando appears in the final episode as American Nazi Party Leader George Lincoln Rockwell.
When Haley (James Earl Jones) interviews him for Playboy, Brando devilishly sprays his office with disinfectant and sings racist jingles.
All these characters are woven into a plot that courts coincidence and irony with Dickensian abandon.