Roots: The Saga of an American Family

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If you don’t know your history, you might have an incomplete and incorrect image of who you are, where you come from and where you are heading. So if you have are black or have a black child in the USA, then you must definitely watch the miniseries, Alex Haley’s Roots: The Saga of an American Family & Roots: The Next Generation….Below are the plot summaries culled from Wikipedia.

In the Gambia, West Africa in 1750, Kunta Kinte (LeVar Burton) is born to Muslim Mandinka warrior Omoro Kinte (Thalmus Rasulala) and his wife Binta (Cicely Tyson). When their son reaches the age of 15, he and a group of other adolescent males take part in a tribal "coming of manhood" ceremony, after which they officially become Mandinka warriors. When given a task to find a goose, Kunta spots a white man, carrying a firearm. Later, trying to find wood outside his village to make a drum for his brother, Kunta is captured by contentious tribe members and sold to slave traders of the infamous Atlantic Slave Trade and put on a slave ship commanded by Captain Davies (Edward Asner) for a three-month journey to Colonial America. During the course of their forced journey, a group of African rebels try, but fail to take over the ship.

The ship lands months later in Annapolis, Maryland, where the captured Africans are sold at auction as slaves. Kunta Kinte is sold to plantation owner John Reynolds (Lorne Greene) and is given the slave name of "Toby." An older slave named Fiddler (Louis Gossett Jr) is charged with teaching Kunta the ways of being a chattel slave, including learning English. In a desperate struggle to be free and to preserve his Mandinka heritage, he makes several unsuccessful attempts to escape. Kunta doesn't want to give up his Mandinka roots and is reluctant to change his name to "Toby" and give up his Muslim faith. An overseer named Ames (Vic Morrow) has Kunta Kinte severely whipped, until he submits to his slave name.

The adult Kunta Kinte (John Amos) eventually learns what it means to be a chattel slave but is haunted by his Mandinka roots and his memories of being free. He submits to the harsh life, but only after having half of his (right) foot severed to keep him from attempting further escapes. He is sold to John Reynolds' brother Dr. William (Robert Reed), eventually marrying another slave named Belle (Madge Sinclair), who treats his severed foot. Kunta and Belle have a daughter named Kizzy (Leslie Uggams). Kizzy is secretly taught to read and write by Missy Anne (Sandy Duncan), the product of an adulterous affair between John Reynold's wife and Dr. Reynolds. When Kizzy is in her late teens, she is caught writing a fake travel pass for a boy she is in love with, Noah (Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs). Missy Anne turns her back on Kizzy when Kizzy needs her the most, which makes Kizzy think white people aren't to be trusted. She is then sold away to Tom Moore (Chuck Connors) in North Carolina. Kizzy is raped by Moore when she arrives at his plantation and, as a result, gives birth to a son named George.

The adult George (Ben Vereen) becomes an expert in cockfighting, earning him the moniker "Chicken George", which eventually gives him the opportunity in the 1840s to be sent into servitude in England. He returns to America a free man 14 years later in 1861. George's son Tom Harvey (Georg Stanford Brown) becomes a blacksmith—and a slave for George Harvey - whose slave labor is used by the Confederate Army during the American Civil War. After the war, white men led by Evan Brent (Lloyd Bridges) give birth to an early form of the Ku Klux Klan, and begin to frequently harass Tom, his family and other blacks — exploiting them economically by day and terrorizing them by night wearing the infamous white hoods. The problem escalates when Tom reports the issues to authorities and Brent finds out about it. However, Chicken George returns after the news of blacks being freed, and tells his family of land he bought that they may live in. Afraid of the Ku Klux Klan, especially after receiving a whipping from one of them, Tom and his family move to George's land in Tennessee to begin a new life. And as the series ends in 1870, Chicken George tells his grandson about his grandfather, the African who went to find some wood for a drum, and was captured by the slave traders in 1767.

Alex Haley narrates the last few minutes of the miniseries: a montage of photos of family members connecting Tom's daughter Cynthia, the great-great-granddaughter of Kunta Kinte, to Haley himself.

Roots: The Next Generation
The story resumes in 1882 where Tom Harvey (Georg Stanford Brown), the great-grandson of Kunta Kinte, has become a prominent leader of the black community in Henning, Tennessee. Although he has established a working relationship with the town's white leader, Colonel Warner (Henry Fonda), race relations in the community are still strained. Jim Crow laws, literacy tests, and later the Ku Klux Klan increase the tensions.

A sub plot involves Colonel Warner's youngest son, Jim (Richard Thomas) falling in love with African American school teacher, Carrie Barden (Fay Hauser). Colonel Warner disapproves of this and gets Tom to let her go or close down the school. After having an argument with Tom's oldest daughter, Elizabeth (Debbi Morgan), who had not accepted a boy that she fell in love with, based on the fact that he was half white, Tom decides to let her stay. Jim and Carrie get married in Memphis, and Col. Warner disowns his son by cutting him out of his will, but will ensure that no harm comes to them.

Tom's youngest daughter Cynthia (Bever-Leigh Banfield) falls in love and marries hard-working Will Palmer (Stan Shaw). Despite the racial oppression, Will wins the trust of the local business leaders and is allowed to take over the local lumberyard after its previous owner Bob Campbell (Harry Morgan) ran it into the ground.

As both the town and the lumber business grows, Will and Cynthia are able to send their daughter Bertha (Irene Cara) to Lane College in September 1914, by which time both Tom and his wife Irene (Lynne Moody) have died. There, Bertha meets and falls in love with classmate Simon Haley (Dorian Harewood), the son of a sharecropper. With an insufficient amount of money to attend A&T College, Simon gets a summer job as a porter for the Pullman Company. He meets a passenger who later identifies himself as R. S. M. Boyce (James Daly), an executive of the Curtis Publishing Company, and offers to help pay Simon's tuition and board.

Soon after he graduates from A&T, Simon enlists in the military to fight in World War I and is deployed to France with a segregated, all-black unit. He returns to America after the war and, despite the problems associated with the 1918 flu pandemic and the Red Summer of 1919, reunites with and marries Bertha. Simon then gets a job as a professor of agriculture at the Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical Institute. Soon Simon and Bertha have their first child: Alex. During the New Deal era, Simon tries to organize the local farmers, much to the resistance of the local white cotton landowners. Some time later, Bertha dies from internal bleeding, and Alex (Kristoff St. John) and his younger brothers are reared in part by their grandmother Cynthia (now portrayed by Beah Richards) and great-aunt Elizabeth. Cynthia shows him a tree limb that Will had been working on before he died which shows historical dates and the names of their alleged ancestors dating back to Kunta Kinte.

As World War II approaches, Simon convinces his seventeen-year-old son Alex (now portrayed by Damon Evans) to enlist in the military. Alex joins the U.S. Coast Guard. During his service in the Pacific theater of operations, he teaches himself how to write stories, also gaining help from a officer (Andy Griffith). After the war, he successfully petitions the Coast Guard for permission to transfer into the field of journalism, but his career ambitions end up costing him his marriage to his first wife Nan (Debbie Allen).

Entering his 40s, Alex (now played by James Earl Jones) has become an established journalist in the 1960s, drawing high-profile interviews with such figures as George Lincoln Rockwell (Marlon Brando) and Malcolm X (Al Freeman, Jr.), and collaborating with the latter to write The Autobiography of Malcolm X. A visit to his relatives in Henning then sparks his desire to research the rest of his family history. Eventually, Alex travels to the African nation of Gambia and listens to a griot (tribal historian) in Jufureh.