Alex Haley is best known as the author of the novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family, from which two television miniseries, Roots and Roots: The Next Generation, were adapted. The novels, loosely based on Haley's own family, presented an interpretation of the journey of African Americans from their homeland to the United States and their subsequent search for freedom and dignity. The novel was published in 1976, when the United States was celebrating its bicentennial. 

During the last week of January 1977, the first Roots miniseries was aired by the American Broadcasting Company (ABC). Its phenomenal success surprised everyone, including Haley and the network executives who had "dumped" the program into one week, fearing the subject matter would not attract an audience. In­ stead, Roots garnered one of the largest audiences for dramatic television in the U.S. history of the medium, averaging a 44.9 rating and a 66 share.

The success of Roots went far beyond attracting a large audience, however. The miniseries, and Alex Ha­ ley, became a cause celebre. In a cover story, Time magazine reported that restaurant and shop owners saw profits decline when the series was on the air. The report noted that bartenders were able to keep customers only by turning the channel selector away from basketball and hockey and tuning instead to those stations carrying Roots. Parents named their children after characters in the series, especially the lead character, Kunta Kinte.

The airing of Roots raised issues about the effects of television. There were debates about whether the television miniseries would ease U.S. race relations or ex­ acerbate them. A Time magazine article explained that "many observers feel that the TV series left whites with a more sympathetic view of blacks by giving them a greater appreciation of black history." The same article, however, reported that white junior-high­ school students were harassing African Americans and that black youths assaulted four white youths in Detroit, Michigan, while chanting, "Roots, roots, roots."

Haley began his writing career through assignments from Reader's Digest and Playboy magazine, for which he conducted interviews. During this time he met Malcolm X, then one of the followers of Elijah Muhammad, leader of the African-American Muslim organization the Nation of Islam. Later Haley was asked by Malcolm X to write his life's story. The result of that collaboration, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, was published in 1965 and sold 6 million copies.

Roots, Haley's next best-seller, was a fictionalized version of his own search for his ancestral past, which led him to the African village of Juffure, in Gambia. Haley described Roots as "faction," a combination of fact and fiction. Although criticized by some for taking too many liberties in the telling of his journey into his ancestral past, Haley maintained that "Roots is intended to convey a symbolic history of a people."

In the 1980s, Leslie Fishbein reviewed previous studies concerned with the inaccuracies found in both the book and television series and noted that Haley glossed over the complicity of Africans in the slave trade. Fishbein also analyzed an inherent contradiction in Haley's work-it centers on the family as an independent unit that isolates itself from the rest of the community and is thus unable to effectively fight the forces of slavery and racism.

Debates about Roots continued into the 1990s. Researchers Tucker and Shah have argued that the production of Roots by a predominantly white group led to decisions that resulted in an interpretation of race in the United States reflecting an Anglo-American, rather than an African-American, perspective. They also criticized the television version of Roots for transforming the African-American experience in the United States into an "immigrant" story, a narrative model in which slavery becomes a hardship, much like the hardships of other immigrant groups, which a people must experience before taking their place alongside full-fledged citizens. When slavery is simplified in this fashion and stripped of its context as a creation of social, economic, and political forces, they contended, those who experienced slavery are also stripped of their humanity.

The tremendous success of Roots can only be appre­ciated within its social context. The United States was moving away from what have come to be known as the "turbulent 60s" into an era when threats from outside forces, both real and imagined, such as the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC, blamed for the mid-l 970s oil crisis), and instability in Central America, especially Nicaragua, contributed to the need for a closing of ranks.

On one level, then, the program served as a symbolic ritual that helped bring African Americans into the national community. At another, more practical level, it represents the recognition on the part of television executives that the African-American community had become a significant and integral part of the larger mass audience. As Wilson and Gutierrez have written, "In the 1970s, mass-audience advertising in the United States became more racially integrated than in any time in the nation's history." These writers point out that during this time blacks could be seen much more frequently in U.S. television commercials.

The importance of Alex Haley and the impact of his work on television history should not be underestimated. To fully appreciate the contribution he made to the medium, the African-American community, and the United States, his work must be examined within a context of changing demographics, historical events in the United States and elsewhere, and most importantly, the centuries-long struggle of a people to be recognized as full-fledged members of their national community.