One thing that I think is sad is that in this day and age of TiVos, DVDs and YouTube kids will never again experience the power of the entire country coming together for a week, sharing the experience as a family and learning about our history the way we did when Roots aired. It is still one of the most watched television events ever and a powerful childhood memory for me.

I am shocked and disturbed to read that there are those who would claim that Roots (and even the institution of slavery itself) was fradulant.

Regarding Alex Haley - my Aunt, Mary Ellen Butler, a journalist and
"believed to be the first black woman to head an editorial page of a major daily in the United States" traveled with Alex Haley to Ghana on one of his research trips so he certainly did do some original research.

Also, a few bits of my family history provide a bit of evidence that slavery was very real and family histories can be proven through historical record.

First, my Great-Great-Great Grandparents William and Ellen Craft escaped from slavery and documented their escape. Academics such as Dr. Barbara McCaskill still research their history today.

Also, my Great-Great Uncle William Monroe Trotter is a descendant of slaves at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello. The descendents of families enslaved at Monticello (including Sally Hemmings) have in recent years been recognized and my family has been invited to a "family reunion" there this summer.

I am certain there will always be those who seek to deny the shameful aspects of history (like the Holocaust) but written and oral records and now DNA prove them wrong.

WOAH!

William and Ellen Craft?

Monroe Trotter?

I teach a courses on Du Bois as well as on journalism history, so you know that I have spent many hours studying these people. WOW. I would love to know what the conversations were about these people within the family circles.

Now, about Roots. I remember Haley talking about the project in television before it hit the air. I was a junior in college when it ran. I watched it with my father and my brother, who is 11 years younger than I am. It was an intense experience for each of us. It was my brother's first confrontation with slavery. I recall him looking at me wide-eyed and saying, "Will they ever do that to us again?"

But the most powerful moment for me was when my father quietly said, "My grandfather used to talk about that," after one particularly brutal scene. It was then that I learned for the first time that my father had known his maternal grandparents, and they were former slaves. I immediately pumped him for any information he could give me about them.

When I returned to Princeton, I went to the microfilm library one night and found the slave census records for the plantation on which my great-grandfather lived. In the 1860 census, under the name of his owner, John Mitchell. my great-grandfather, Jordan Mitchell, is listed as 1 M[ale] B[lack] [Age] two. I can't relate shock I felt. It was real. My family went through this. I was in a daze for most of the rest of the evening.

A few years ago, I wrote about what my family knows about my foreparents' experience with slavery in a review of Edward Jones' novel, The Known World. One thing I can tell you from my family's recollections is that you can believe that business about runaways getting their foot chopped off. My uncle told me that my great-grandfather saw that happen.

ROOTS ignited a curiosity about family history and memory that played an important role in who I became and what I value.

Thanks, Nordette, for the reminder.

BlogHer Contributing Editor|Professor Kim|Contributing Writer, Online Journalism Review

Nordette - your post caught my eye. Like Maria had mentioned "the power of the entire country coming together for a week, sharing the experience as a family and learning about our history the way we did when Roots aired. It is still one of the most watched television events ever and a powerful childhood memory for me." I was a kid in Australia and we went though the same experience - of course we were observers only yet had our own shameful history which was the country's best kept secret - the genocide of our own Aborigine's. I also wanted to mention after reading "Uncle Tom's Cabin" years and years ago it was like I had been winded. The detail of events rocked me to the core.

and college.

In the fall of 1976, I happened to be taking a course in African American history. It was my last semester of school, the class was with my favourite educator, and it was a subject that I, a resident of what was then and still is in many ways a very white state, so wished to take.

There are two things in particular that stand strong in my memory from that class... the first was Roots, which like Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee sucked me in and did not like (to digress, apparently HBO is about to air a very very watered down version of that book. Sigh.)

Anyway, it does not matter to me what Alex' research methodology was, whether it was flawed, etc. His was an idea larger than life, that represented a great great great injustice and tragedy of life.

When you think about rights in a certain context, say... our efforts to achieve lgbt rights, and then think about living birth to death trapped in a hellhole of no rights, none, of generation after generation living and dying without rights, it makes me crazy. I sometimes think on this about 19th century feminists, who struggled for the right to vote and never quite made it. It is so hard to imagine this lifetime - generational - trap with no hope, no escape, never experiencing.

Alex showed this. Graphically and vividly. It was no longer abstract, here were people the reader identified with and rooted for, and watched them fade into a new generation to repeat the cycle anew.

This is what Alex gave America, at least those willing to listen and see.

BTW, that second memory from that class... Dr. Charles Drew. He invented the process of separating blood into it's components, which then enabled field transfusions, etc saving millions.

Dr Drew died in the early 1950's after a car accident. A whites only hospital refused him admittance, and he died from loss of blood.

As we learned of him, I thought of me 15 years earlier. That me who had tonsils removed, and who bled excessively. The me at 6 years of age who finally came to around 3 am, lines running into my arm. And the me who received the blood of another. Dr. Drew, 11 years after his death, saved my life.

nelle