Alex Haley (20 page)

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The question remained whether
Roots
would have a significant impact on Americans. Would the mass of Americans really entertain a whole new interpretation of their history? To be sure, the civil rights movement had brought
Gone with the Wind
and its racial interpretations into question for many people. But a new cultural exemplar was needed to override that work's influence on the American cultural understanding.
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Fred Silverman, head of entertainment programming at ABC, decided to run the show on consecutive nights rather than once a week for eight weeks. He said that to run the series over eight or ten weeks would have dissipated its emotional impact. That way, if the series was a failure, its effects on ABC's ratings would be minimized. Wolper Productions and ABC had done something no one in television had ever done before, he said, so, “Let's show it in a way that no one has ever shown television before!” ABC hoped that over those eight nights,
Roots
would garner fifty million viewers in total, not a big overall audience, and the network was not confident that it would do even that. It sold advertising on the promise of a 30 “share,” or percentage of television viewers watching the show. The network decided not to broadcast the series during the “sweeps” period, when network ratings were recorded and then used to set subsequent advertising charges. Advertisers paid $120,000 per minute for a spot during
Roots,
whereas the rates for a broadcast like the Super Bowl, which had the biggest audience of any program, pulled in $150,000 per minute of commercial time. This miscalculation would cost the network millions of dollars.
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Roots
was broadcast from January 23 to January 30, 1977, in the midst of one of the hardest and most prolonged cold spells in American history, which, some commentators speculated, may have accounted for the huge viewership it earned from the first night. At least fifty million viewers, the audience that ABC hoped the entire series would generate, tuned in the first night. Nielsen Ratings service reported that the show received between a 62 and 68 share of those Americans watching television each night. Eighty million Americans, “the largest television audience in the history of the medium,” Nielsen reported, watched the final episode of
Roots.
That figure represented 51.1 percent of all television sets in homes across the country, or 36,380,000 homes, and exceeded by 2.4 million the audience reached by the first half of the television release of
Gone with the Wind
the previous fall. ABC estimated that 130 million viewers, about 85 percent of all homes with televisions in the United States, saw some part of the series.
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“For eight days and nights, the most talked-about men in the country were a middle-aged writer named Alex Haley and his great-great-great-great-grandfather, Kunta Kinte,”
Newsweek
reported. Regular patrons of a Harlem bar watched every episode together and became angry after one show when someone tried to play the jukebox. “They just wanted to talk it out,” the barkeeper reported. “It wasn't until they had talked for a very long time that they finally remembered they were in a bar.” An ABC executive said the phenomenon was “like millions of people reading the same book simultaneously, instead of privately, making it a shared experience.” Vernon Jordan, executive director of the National Urban League, called
Roots
“the single most spectacular educational experience in race relations in America.” All over the United States,
Roots
dominated chats among friends and colleagues, preachers' sermons, radio call-in shows, bull sessions in bars, and classroom discussions. During the time that
Roots
was running on television, the
New York Times
reported that a black man in business attire stepped on to an elevator and was greeted by a white colleague, “Good morning, Kunta Kinte.” The black fellow lowered his head and said, “Toby.”
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Almost nine of ten blacks watched some portion of the series, and more than seven in ten whites did. Blacks watched an average of six episodes, whites more than five. Eighty-three percent of the watchers thought
Roots
was one of the best television programs they had ever seen. Black and white viewers both thought the show was accurate in its portrayal of both blacks and whites, although blacks rated it a little higher for accuracy. The overwhelming feeling prompted by the show was the same for blacks and whites—sadness. White viewership tended to be a more liberal segment of the white population. Polls found that whites who did not watch the show were hostile to laws against housing discrimination and believed blacks were inferior to whites in intelligence and trustworthiness. A third of white viewers thought blacks' historical experience was no worse than the struggles of European immigrants.
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Roots,
both the book and the miniseries, was used as the syllabus for new college courses. By February 1977, 250 colleges were offering credit courses based on
Roots.
Random House sold 150 institutions a
Roots
curriculum. Black Studies departments were seeing a sudden upsurge of interest in their curricula.
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Travel agencies around the country reported a surge of interest in “heritage” tours to Africa, and some offered the special destination of Juffure.
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“[
Roots
] has produced a virtual explosion of American interest in travel to Africa,” said the marketing manager for Air Afrique. In New York City in the days after
Roots
aired, twenty black newborn babies were named Kunta Kinte or Kizzy; so were fifteen in Los Angeles, ten in Detroit, and eight in Atlanta. In Cleveland a pair of twins, male and female, were so named.
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A phenomenon so pervasive naturally drew some dissenters.
Time
magazine's critic, Richard Schickel, was the most noted naysayer, calling the production a “Mandingo for middlebrows.” A well-to-do white woman in Atlanta thought
Roots
was awful: “The blacks were just getting settled down, and this will make them angry again.” David Duke, national director of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, charged ABC with airing a “vicious malignment of the white majority in America and a serious distortion of the truth.” A white woman in Queens complained, erroneously, that
Roots
did not have any good white characters. Her husband answered, “The good whites had their day with
Gone with the Wind.
” He added, “How good could any whites look to a slave? And that's whose eyes we're seeing it through.” The black journalist Chuck Stone called
Roots
“an electronic orgy in white guilt successfully hustled by white TV literary minstrels.” Haley knew Stone and had told him in 1974 that “the book aspires to be the symbol saga [
sic
] of all of us of African ancestry.” Perhaps so, but Stone thought the television drama “was aimed at a white market” and produced “to sell advertising for the enrichment of white TV executives.”
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A poll of one thousand Americans, half of them black and half white, taken a month after
Roots
aired, found that 42 percent of those who had watched at least two episodes thought the series would be “inflammatory.” But also important, 60 percent of blacks and whites thought they had an increased understanding of the psychology of black people. Respondents thought the most memorable scenes were those of violence—the capture of Kunta, the cutting off of his foot, the rape of Kizzy. Ninety-five percent of viewers believed
Roots
was realistic, and 77 percent thought it was relevant for contemporary race relations.
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The rape of Kizzy was cited for prompting a fight between black and white teenagers in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and disturbances occurred at schools in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Mississippi. Chanting “Roots, roots, roots,” a gang of black boys attacked whites at Detroit's Ford High School. William “Fella” Haley, who was now an army sergeant specializing in race relations counseling in the military, had gauged the responses to
Roots
and found that it “gave some black people feelings that they just couldn't handle all at once. They had to vent their feelings in words to ‘debrief' themselves and their kids.”
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* * *

All along, Doubleday executives expected the television series to boost sales of the book, but they did not imagine the scale of television's impact. On the third day of the broadcast,
Roots
sold sixty-seven thousand copies. Doubleday had originally planned to print fifty thousand books. Stoddard responded, “Fifty thousand? That's what I plan to buy. How many are you going to print for everybody else?” Afterward, Doubleday raised the print run to two hundred thousand. The television executives were sure that Doubleday was still underestimating the results of what was, in effect, twelve hours of prime-time advertising for the book. In fact,
Roots
sold one million hardback copies in 1977.
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During the airing of
Roots,
Haley was traveling every day from appearance to appearance, coast-to-coast, signing books. Wolper called him every morning to report on what the previous night's audience count had been, and they shouted their joy to each other. Haley saw the last episode, after which he spoke on camera to eighty million viewers. At 3:30 the next morning, Haley was asleep in his hotel room when his door buzzer sounded. When he opened the door, a young white bellboy stood before him and said, “Sir, I want to thank you for what you've done for America.” At airports and on streets, Haley was mobbed by well-wishers and celebrity hounds.
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Amid the brouhaha, Haley was a likeable and adept celebrity. On February 2, 1977, just as the broadcast of the miniseries ended, Haley appeared on
The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson,
whom he had interviewed for
Playboy
in 1968. He presented Carson with a bound book of Carson's family's genealogy. Carson was visibly moved by the gesture. At five bookstores in Los Angeles during the week after
Roots
aired, thousands of people stood in line to get Haley to autograph their copies of the book. He sat for hour after hour in each place, greeting people: “How you doing, (sister, babe, honey)?” he asked each one. “Thank you for the book,” the typically awed person said quietly. “Thank you very much,” Haley said. He started out by writing personal inscriptions, but the Doubleday sales staff stopped him because it was taking too long. A pregnant woman bought a book for her unborn child. “Bless your heart,” Haley said to many who expressed their admiration. “Haley seemed as overwhelmed by his near deification as were his admirers,” a reporter observed.
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The celebration of
Roots
continued for the remainder of 1977. In May a New York department store held “Roots Week” during which it offered consumers tips on researching their genealogy and learning about their heritage. “Heritage tours” to the Gambia and other points in Africa became popular. The number of letters of genealogical inquiry shot up at the National Archives. Haley received a stream of honorary degrees during commencement seasons in 1977 and 1978. He was named the third most admired black man among black American youth, behind only Muhammad Ali and Stevie Wonder. Fifty cities declared a “Roots Week.” Governor Ray Blanton of Tennessee declared “Alex Haley Days” in May 1977, and Haley led his family and friends on a triumphal return to Henning.

Roots
was viewed as a driving force for a broad cultural movement toward Americans' greater appreciation of their past.
Newsweek
reported on July 4, 1977 that “the quest for personal origins has turned phenomenal in the past six months,” prompted in part by Haley's work. “Roots” travel had become big business, with Continental Trailways now offering a $75 fare to any United States destination and Pan American World Airways promoting international travel with the ad campaign slogan: “All of us came from some place.” The elitist British agency DeBrett's Peerage had even opened a United States office to serve “the masses” in their quest for information regarding genealogy. Haley said that “very, very few people in their own lifetimes have the blessing to play a major role in something that is [as] patently affirmative for society,” as the new quest to find origins. “I work now with a sense of meant-to-be-ness, a sense of mission to tell people how much we have in common.”
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For the next year after the publication of the book and the airing of the miniseries, Haley took part in a continuous stream of talk shows, press conferences, autograph sessions, and events held in his honor. He received keys to cities, honorary degrees, and citations from Congress. He had lunch with former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, President Jimmy Carter, and the queen of Iran. The famous actors Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando sought to meet him. But he also got pleas for money, requests for help in getting others' work published, and still more invitations for public appearances. For one six-month period, Haley had 802 lecture invitations. He still liked to lecture, but he declined far more invitations than he accepted. His fee was now at least $4,000.
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In February 1977 Haley, now fifty-six, was the biggest celebrity in the United States. “There ain't no hashish powerful enough to make you dream up something like this,” he told Hans J. Massaquo, a reporter for
Ebony
magazine, long the primary publication for the celebration of black celebrity. “It's bewildering when—literally over night—you become a person whom people recognize wherever you go.” Massaquo asked him about his new wealth. The money was rolling in. A publisher in Germany had paid $260,000 for the rights to publish
Roots
in that country, reportedly the highest figure ever paid for European rights to an American book. Haley told Massaquo, “It's like that question, ‘How many slaves were brought from Africa?' Who knows? My accountants tell me that I'm now a bona fide millionaire, maybe twice a millionaire.” He discounted the money's importance to him. “I was broke so long that I got used to being without money. . . . All I'm concerned with is just being comfortable, being able to pay my debts, and having a little margin to buy something or make a gift to somebody.” He told of giving a Los Angeles waitress a fifty-dollar tip on a six-dollar tab. “She didn't know me from Adam,” he said, but he admired her friendly way and her eagerness to please her customers. He was in the process of signing over all royalties to
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
to Betty Shabazz. He was funding the American education of students from Juffure and the building of a mosque in the village.
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