Alexander Murray Palmer Haley was an American writer and the author of the 1976 book Roots: The Saga of an American Family. ABC adapted the book as a television miniseries of the same name and aired it in 1977 to a record-breaking audience of 130 million viewers. In the United States, the book and miniseries raised the public awareness of black American history and inspired a broad interest in genealogy and family history.
"Children of the plantation" is a euphemism used that refers to ancestry tracing back to the time of slavery in the United States in which the offspring was born to black African female slaves in the context of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and European men, usually the slave's owner, one of the owner's relatives, or the plantation overseer. These children were often considered to be the property of the slave owner and were often subjected to the same treatment as other slaves on the plantation. Many of these children were born into slavery and had no legal rights, as they were not recognized as the legitimate children of their fathers. This practice was a form of sexual abuse and exploitation, as the European men who fathered these children often used their power and authority to dominantly force themselves upon the black women who were under their control. The trauma and suffering that these children and their mothers experienced as a result of this practice continue to have a lasting impact on the African American community.
Alex Haley's Queen is a 1993 American television miniseries that aired in three installments on February 14, 16, and 18 on CBS. The miniseries is an adaptation of the 1993 novel Queen: The Story of an American Family, by Alex Haley and David Stevens. The novel is based on the life of Queen Jackson Haley, Haley's paternal grandmother. Alex Haley died in February 1992 before completing the novel. It was later finished by David Stevens and published in 1993. Stevens also wrote the screenplay for the miniseries.
Roots is an American television miniseries based on Alex Haley's 1976 novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family. The series first aired on ABC in January 1977. Roots received 37 Primetime Emmy Award nominations and won nine. It also won a Golden Globe and a Peabody Award. It received unprecedented Nielsen ratings for the finale, which holds the record as the third-highest-rated episode for any type of television series, and the second-most-watched overall series finale in U.S. television history. It was produced on a budget of $6.6 million.
Kunta Kinte is a character in the 1976 novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family by American author Alex Haley. Kunta Kinte was based on one of Haley's ancestors, a Gambian man who was born around 1750, enslaved, and taken to America where he died around 1822. Haley said that his account of Kunta's life in Roots is a mixture of fact and fiction.
Roots: The Saga of an American Family is a 1976 novel written by Alex Haley. It tells the story of Kunta Kinte, an 18th-century African, captured as an adolescent, sold into slavery in Africa, and transported to North America; it follows his life and the lives of his descendants in the United States down to Haley. The release of the novel, combined with its hugely popular television adaptation, Roots (1977), led to a cultural sensation in the United States. The novel spent forty-six weeks on The New York Times Best Seller List, including twenty-two weeks at number one. The last seven chapters of the novel were later adapted in the form of a second miniseries, Roots: The Next Generations (1979). It stimulated interest in African American genealogy and an appreciation for African-American history.
Margaret Garner, called "Peggy", was an enslaved African-American woman in pre-Civil War America who killed her own daughter rather than allow the child to be returned to slavery. Garner and her family had escaped enslavement in January 1856 by traveling across the frozen Ohio River to Cincinnati, but they were apprehended by U.S. Marshals acting under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Garner's defense attorney, John Jolliffe, moved to have her tried for murder in Ohio, to be able to get a trial in a free state and to challenge the Fugitive Slave Law. Garner's story was the inspiration for the novel Beloved (1987) by Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison and its subsequent adaptation into a film of the same name starring Oprah Winfrey (1998).
Jubilee (1966) is a historical novel written by Margaret Walker, which focuses on the story of a biracial slave during the American Civil War. It is set in Georgia and later in various parts of Alabama in the mid-19th century before, during, and after the Civil War.
Roots: The Next Generations is an American television miniseries based on the last seven chapters of Alex Haley's 1976 novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family. First aired on ABC in February 1979, it is a sequel to the 1977 Roots miniseries, tracing the lives of Kunta Kinte's descendants in Henning, Tennessee from 1882 to 1967.
Faunsdale Plantation is a historic forced-labor plantation near the town of Faunsdale, Alabama, United States. This plantation is in the Black Belt, a section of the state developed for cotton plantations. Until the U.S. Civil War, planters held as many as 186 enslaved African Americans as laborers to raise cotton as a commodity crop.
Noni Carter is an American author from Fayetteville, Georgia, whose first book, Good Fortune, was released by Simon & Schuster in January 2010. The young-adult novel is about the life of a slave girl who was snatched from her homeland in Africa in the early 19th century and brought to the United States, where she eventually escaped from a plantation and fled to freedom. Carter, who started attending Harvard University as a freshman in the fall of 2009, is one of the youngest writers signed by Simon & Schuster. Noni is currently completing a PhD at Columbia University.
A plantation complex in the Southern United States is the built environment that was common on agricultural plantations in the American South from the 17th into the 20th century. The complex included everything from the main residence down to the pens for livestock. Until the abolition of slavery, such plantations were generally self-sufficient settlements that relied on the forced labor of enslaved people.
Simon Alexander Haley was a professor of agriculture, and father of writer Alex Haley. He was born in Savannah, Tennessee, to farmer Alexander "Alec" Haley and his wife Queen (Davy) Haley. Both his parents were born as slaves, and both were apparently fathered by caucasian slave owners. Simon attended Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee, at age 15.
Igbo Landing is a historic site at Dunbar Creek on St. Simons Island, Glynn County, Georgia. It was the setting of a mass suicide in 1803 by captive Igbo people who had taken control of their slave ship and refused to submit to slavery in the United States. The event's moral value as a story of resistance towards slavery has symbolic importance in African American folklore as the flying Africans legend, and in literary history.
Roots is a 2016 American miniseries and a remake of the 1977 miniseries with the same name, based on Alex Haley's 1976 novel, Roots: The Saga of an American Family, which follows an African man who is shipped to North America as a slave and his descendents. It first aired on May 30, 2016 and stars Malachi Kirby, Forest Whitaker, Anna Paquin, Laurence Fishburne, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Anika Noni Rose, T.I. and South African actress Nokuthula Ledwaba. It was produced on a budget of $50 million.
Winney Grimshaw was an enslaved African-American woman at Mount Airy Plantation in Richmond County, Virginia. The Grimshaws are one of the most well-documented enslaved families who lived at Mount Airy. Though the Grimshaws were a well-regarded slave family at Mount Airy, it wasn't enough to keep their master from dissolving her family ties.
Sam Houston was a slaveholder who had a complicated history with the institution of slavery. He was the president of the independent Republic of Texas, which was founded as a slave-holding nation, and governor of Texas after its 1845 annexation to the union as a slave-holding state. He voted various times against the extension of slavery into the Western United States and he did not swear an oath to the Confederate States of America, which marked the end of his political career.
Nancy Moffette Lea (1780–1864) was the mother of Margaret Lea Houston and mother-in-law of Sam Houston. She was an integral member of the Houston family, running the household when Margaret was ill or pregnant. She is believed to have helped her son-in-law convert and be baptized in 1854. In appreciation, she donated a bell to the Independence Baptist Church in honor of him. The wife of Temple Lea, she inherited an estate from her family that she managed. She purchased a cotton plantation which was operated by 50 enslaved people.
