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 Mandinka, captured as an adolescent, sold into slavery in Africa, and transported to North America. It explores his life and those of his descendants in the United States, down to Haley. The novel was quickly adapted as a hugely popular television miniseries, Roots (1977). Together, the novel and series were 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.
Although Roots was originally described as fiction, it was sold in the non-fiction section of bookstores. Haley spent the last chapter of the book describing his research in archives and libraries to support his family's oral tradition with written records.
Plot
Roots tells the story of Kunta Kinte—a young man taken from The Gambia when he was 17 and sold as a slave—and seven generations of his descendants in the United States. Kunta, a Mandinka living by the River Gambia, has a difficult but free childhood in his village, Jufureh. His village subsists on farming, and sometimes they lack enough food, as the climate is harsh. Kunta is surrounded by love and traditions. The village has heard of the recent arrival of toubob, men with white skins who smell like wet chickens.
Kunta is excited to see the world. At one point, he sees men in hoods taking away some of the children. This confuses Kunta, but he is excited when he learns that his father, Omoro, will take him on a trip away from Juffure. Omoro and Kunta set off, learning much more about their surroundings. When they return, Kunta brags to all his friends about the journey but does not pay attention to his family's goats, which fall prey to a panther.
Later on, Kunta is taken off for manhood training, with other children of his kafo (division or grade). Kunta learns even more about The Gambia, but he fears the slave trade, which he learns is closer to home than he thought. Kunta passes his training and learns more about Juffure's court system. One day, he witnesses the case of a young girl who was kidnapped by the toubob and came back pregnant. She gives birth to a mixed-race child, and the case is unresolved.
One morning when Kunta is cutting wood to make a drum, he is ambushed by slatees (Black slave traders), is knocked unconscious and taken prisoner. He awakens to find himself gagged and blindfolded. The toubob humiliate Kunta and the other captives by stripping them naked, examining them in every orifice and burning them with hot irons. Kunta is then placed in the brig of a ship, naked and chained. After a nightmarish journey across the Atlantic on board the slave shipLord Ligonier, he is landed in Annapolis, Maryland. John Waller of Spotsylvania County, Virginia, purchases Kunta at an auction and gives him the name Toby. However, Kunta is headstrong and tries to run away four times. When he is captured for the last time, slave hunters cut off part of his right foot to cripple him.
Kunta is then bought by his master's brother, Dr. William Waller. He becomes a gardener and eventually his master's buggy driver. Kunta also befriends a musician slave named Fiddler. In the aftermath of the American Revolutionary War, Kunta marries Bell, Waller's cook, and together they have a daughter, Kizzy. Kizzy's childhood as a slave is as happy as her parents can make it. She is close friends with John Waller's daughter "Missy" Anne, and she rarely experiences cruelty. Her life changes when she forges a traveling pass for her beau Noah, a field hand. When he is caught and confesses, she is sold away from her family at the age of 16.
Kizzy is bought by Tom Lea, a farmer and chicken fighter who rose from poor beginnings. He rapes and impregnates her, and she gives birth to George, who later becomes known as "Chicken George" when he becomes his father's cockfighting trainer. Chicken George is a philanderer known for expensive taste and alcohol, as much as for his iconic bowler hat and green scarf. He marries Matilda and they have six sons and two daughters, including Tom, who becomes a very good blacksmith. Tom marries Irene, a woman originally owned by the Holt family.
When Tom Lea loses all his money in a cockfight, he sends George to England for several years to pay off the debt, and he sells most of the rest of the family to a slave trader. The trader moves the family to Alamance County, where they become the property of Andrew Murray. The Murrays have no previous experience with farming and are generally kind masters who treat the family well. When the American Civil War ends, however, the Murray slaves decide that, rather than sharecrop for their former masters, they will move from North Carolina to Henning, Tennessee, which is looking for new settlers.
They eventually become a prosperous family. Tom's daughter Cynthia marries Will Palmer, a successful lumber businessman, and their daughter Bertha is the first in the family to go to college. There she meets Simon Haley, who becomes a professor of agriculture. Their son is Alex Haley, the author of the book.
Search for his roots
Alex Haley also recounts his journey of family discovery and efforts to document his grandmother's stories. He had learned of an ancestor named Kunta Kinte, who was taken as a captive to "'Naplis" and given the slave name Toby. The old African called a guitar a ko, and a river the Kamby Bolongo. While on a reporting trip to London, Haley sees the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum and thinks of his own family's oral traditions. Could he trace his own family lineage back to its origins in Africa?[2][3]
In the United States census for Alamance County, North Carolina, he finds evidence of his ancestor Tom Murray, the blacksmith. He attempts to locate the likeliest origin of the African words passed down by Kunta Kinte. Dr. Jan Vansina explains that in the Mandinka tongue, kora is a type of stringed instrument, and bolongo is the word for river. Kamby Bolongo could then refer to the Gambia River.[2][3]
Alex Haley travels to The Gambia and learns of the existence of griots, oral historians who are trained from childhood to memorize and recite the history of a particular village. A good griot could speak for three days without repeating himself. He asks to hear the history of the Kinte clan, which lives in Juffure, and is taken to a griot named Kebba Kanji Fofana. The Kinte clan had originated in Old Mali, moved to Mauritania, and then settled in The Gambia. After about two hours of "so-and-so took as a wife so-and-so, and begat...", Fofana reached Kunta Kinte:[2][3]
About the time the King's soldiers came, the eldest of these four sons, Kunta, when he had about 16 rains, went away from his village to chop wood to make a drum ... and he was never seen again.[2]
After searching records of British troop movements in the 1760s, Haley finds "Colonel O'Hare's forces" were dispatched to Fort James on the Gambia River in 1767. In Lloyd's of London, he discovers a merchantman named the Lord Ligonier had sailed from The Gambia on July 5, 1767, bound for Annapolis. The Lord Ligonier had cleared customs in Annapolis on September 29, 1767, and the slaves were advertised for auction in the Maryland Gazette on October 1, 1767. He concludes his research by examining the deed books of Spotsylvania County after September 1767, locating a deed dated September 5, 1768, transferring 240 acres and a slave named Toby from John and Ann Waller to William Waller.[2][3]
Characters in Roots
Kunta Kinte – original protagonist: a young man of the Mandinka people, grows up in The Gambia in a small village called Juffure; he was raised as a Muslim before being captured and enslaved. Renamed Toby.
Dr. William Waller – physician and John's brother: buys Kunta from him
Bell Waller – cook to the doctor and wife of Kunta
Kizzy Waller (later Kizzy Lea) – daughter of Kunta and Bell
Missy Anne – Dr. Waller's niece, who lives away from the plantation, but visits her uncle regularly. She befriends Kizzy and teaches her reading and writing by playing "school".
Tom Lea – slave owner in North Carolina to whom Kizzy is sold
George Lea – son to Kizzy and Tom Lea, he is called "Chicken George"
Matilda – George's wife as an adult
Tom Murray – son of Chicken George and Matilda
Cynthia – the youngest of Tom's and Irene's eight children (granddaughter of Chicken George)
Bertha – one of Cynthia's children; the mother of Alex Haley
Simon Alexander Haley – professor and husband of Bertha; father of Alex Haley
Alex Haley – author of the book and central character for last 30 pages; the great-great-great-great-grandson of Kunta Kinte.
Historical marker in front of Alex Haley's boyhood home in Henning, Tennessee (2007)
Published in October 1976 amid significant advance expectations,[4]Roots was immediately successful, garnering a slew of positive reviews[5][6] and debuting at number five of The New York Times Best Seller list. (The Times classified it as non-fiction).[7] By mid-November, it rose to number one.[8]
The television adaptation of the book aired in January 1977, which stimulated book sales. Within seven months of its release, Roots had sold more than 15 million hard cover copies.[9]
In total, Roots spent 22 weeks at the number one spot on The Times' list, including the first 18 weeks of 1977, before falling to number three on May 8.[10] It did not fall off of the list until August 7.[11] By then, the list had featured it for 46 weeks.[12] Together, the success of the novel and its 1977 television adaptation sparked an explosion of interest in the fields of genealogy and researching family histories.[13][14][15]
Haley earned a Pulitzer Prize special award in 1977 for Roots.[16] The television miniseries garnered many awards, including nine Emmys and a Peabody.
In spring 1977, Haley was sued for plagiarism in separate lawsuits by Harold Courlander and Margaret Walker Alexander. Courlander, an anthropologist, claimed that Roots was copied from his novel The African (1967). Walker claimed Haley had plagiarized from her Civil War-era novel Jubilee (1966). Legal proceedings in each case were concluded late in 1978.
Courlander's suit was settled out of court for $650,000 (equivalent to $3 million in 2023) and an acknowledgment from Haley that certain passages within Roots were copied from The African.[17]
The court dismissed Walker's case. In comparing the content of Roots with that of Jubilee, it found "no actionable similarities exist between the works".[18][19]
Haley called his novel "faction" and acknowledged that most of the dialogue and incidents were fictional.[3] But, he claimed to have traced his family lineage back to Kunta Kinte, a West African taken from the village of Juffure in what is now The Gambia. Haley also suggested his portrayal of life and figures among the slaves and masters in Virginia and North Carolina were based on facts which he had confirmed through historical documents.
In the concluding chapter of Roots, Alex Haley wrote:
To the best of my knowledge and of my effort, every lineage statement within Roots is from either my African or American families' carefully preserved oral history, much of which I have been able conventionally to corroborate with documents. Those documents, along with the myriad textural details of what were contemporary indigenous lifestyles, cultural history, and such that give Roots flesh have come from years of intensive research in fifty-odd libraries, archives, and other repositories on three continents.[3]:884–885
Some historians and genealogists suggested Haley did not rely on factual evidence as closely as he represented.[20] They said that there are serious errors with Haley's family history and historical descriptions of the period preceding the Civil War.
Africa
In April 1977, The Sunday Times of London published an article titled "Tangled Roots" by Mark Ottaway. It challenged the book's account of Kunta Kinte and Haley's African ancestry. Ottaway found that the only African confirmation of Haley's family history came from Kebba Kanga Fofana, a griot in Juffure. But Fofana was not considered a genuine griot. The head of The Gambian National Archives wrote a letter to Haley expressing doubts about Fofana's reliability. On repeated retellings of the story, Fofana changed key details that Haley had relied on for his identification.[21][22]
In 1981, Donald R. Wright, a historian of the West African slave trade, reported that elders and griots in The Gambia could not provide detailed information on people living before the mid-19th century, but everyone had heard of Kunta Kinte. Haley had told his story to so many people while visiting The Gambia that his version of his family history had been assimilated into the oral traditions of the country.[22] Haley had created a case of circular reporting, in which people repeated his words back to him.[23][24]
Roots depicted Juffure as a village where people had heard rumors about white men by 1767, but had never met any. In reality, Juffure was two miles from James Island, a major trading outpost established by the British Royal Africa Company in 1661. The King of Barra allowed the company to establish a fort on the island, on the condition that none of his subjects could be purchased without his permission. Haley admitted that he had picked the year 1767 as "the time the King's soldiers came" in order to match his American research.[21]
Virginia and North Carolina
Historian Gary B. Mills and genealogist Elizabeth Shown Mills, who specialize in Black American and southern history, followed Haley's trail in census records, deed books, and wills.
They concluded:
Those same plantation records, wills, and censuses cited by Mr. Haley not only fail to document his story, but they contradict each and every pre-Civil War statement of Afro-American lineage in Roots!"[25] (emphasis in the original)
They documented that the Waller family already owned the slave Toby in 1762, five years before the Lord Ligonier ship supposedly landed at Annapolis bearing Kunta Kinte. Haley had searched for references to Toby only after 1767, succumbing to confirmation bias. Dr. Waller had neither a cook named Bell nor his own plantation, as he was disabled and lived with his brother John. Toby appears to have died before 1782, eight years before his daughter Kizzy was supposedly born. "Missy" Anne could not have been Kizzy's childhood playmate, as Ann Murray was a grown woman and already married in the relevant timeframe. The Millses said that there was no record of a Kizzy being owned by any of the Wallers.[25]
After the deed reference to Toby Waller, Haley said that the next piece of documentary evidence he uncovered was the 1870 census listing for Tom Murray's household. The Millses noted that this constituted a gap of more than ninety years of relying only on the Haley family's oral history. They investigated the facts of the oral history but found no corroborating evidence in the historical record.[25]
Tom Lea was not born into a poor family; he came from a well-to-do planter family. The record does not show a Kizzy or her son George among Lea's slaves. There are no records of a mulatto George Lea married to a Matilda. Haley described George Lea as a skilled chicken trainer who was sent to England when Tom Lea ran into financial difficulty in the 1850s. But Tom Lea died during the winter of 1844–45.[25][26][27] Further, because the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 abolished slavery within Britain and most of its overseas territories, the Millses noted that it was unlikely that an American slave taken to England in the 1850s, and gaining freedom there, would have agreed to return to the US.
(The case of Somerset v Stewart, (K.B. 1772),[28][non-primary source needed] held that there was no positive law authorizing slavery in England, and that a slave brought to England from elsewhere was free upon his arrival. Despite this ruling, slaves were held in England by custom after this date[citation needed].)
Response
Haley initially conceded that he may have been led astray by his African research. He said that he had thought of calling Roots a "historical novel". But, he stated that Ottaway's article was "unwarranted, unfair and unjust", and added that he had no reason to think that Fofana was unreliable.[29]
Haley criticized his detractors' reliance on written records in their evaluations of his work, contending that such records were "sporadic" and frequently inaccurate with regard to such data as slave births and ownership transactions. Haley asserted that for Black genealogy, "well-kept oral history is without question the best source".[30]
The Millses discovered a better fit to the oral history in the written record than Haley himself had found. Dr. William Waller's father was Colonel William Waller, who owned a slave named Hopping George, a description consistent with a foot injury. Colonel Waller also owned a slave named Isbell, who may be the Bell in Haley family legend. Tom Lea's father lived in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, and he may have purchased some of Haley's ancestors from the Wallers. When the Lea family moved to North Carolina, they presumably took their slaves with them. The Leas lived in close proximity to the Murrays and Holts. The Millses documented three women named Kizzie associated with the Lea and Murray families in the post-Civil War records.[26]
Historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. was a friend of Haley's. Years after Haley's death, Gates acknowledged his own doubts about the author's claims:
Most of us feel it's highly unlikely that Alex found the village whence his ancestors sprang. Roots is a work of the imagination rather than strict historical scholarship. It was an important event because it captured everyone's imagination.[31]
Gates later hosted the TV series African American Lives and Finding Your Roots. His researchers have used DNA testing and a wide range of records in efforts to corroborate family histories and genealogies.
Haley wrote another novel, about his paternal grandmother Queen [Jackson] Haley, but died before he could finish it. It was published posthumously as Queen: The Story of an American Family.
Subsequent DNA testing of Alex Haley's nephew Chris Haley revealed that Alec Haley, Alex's paternal grandfather and Queen Haley's husband, was most likely descended from Scottish ancestors via William Harwell Baugh, an overseer of an Alabama slave plantation.[32][33]
Related scholarship
Gerber, David A. "Haley's Roots and Our Own: An Inquiry Into the Nature of a Popular Phenomenon", Journal of Ethnic Studies 5.3 (Fall 1977): 87–111.
Hudson, Michelle. "The Effect of 'Roots' and the Bicentennial on Genealogical Interest among Patrons of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History," Journal of Mississippi History 1991 53(4): 321–336
Mills, Gary B. and Elizabeth Shown Mills. "Roots and the New 'Faction': A Legitimate Tool for CLIO?", Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 89 (January 1981): 3–26. PDF at Historic Pathways.
Ryan, Tim A. Calls and Responses: The American Novel of Slavery since Gone with the Wind. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2008.
Skaggs, Merrill Maguire. "Roots: A New Black Myth", Southern Quarterly 17. 1 (Fall 1978): 42–50.
Taylor, Helen. "'The Griot from Tennessee': The Saga of Alex Haley's Roots", Critical Quarterly 37.2 (Summer 1995): 46–62.
Wright, Donald R. "Uprooting Kunta Kinte: On the Perils of Relying on Encyclopedic Informants," History of Africa 8 (1981): 205–217.
Roots was a television miniseries airing over eight consecutive nights in January 1977. ABC network television executives chose to "dump" the series into a string of airings rather than space out the broadcasts because they were uncertain how the public would respond to the controversial, racially charged themes of the show. The series received enormous ratings and became an overnight sensation. Approximately 130 million Americans tuned in at some time during the eight broadcasts. The concluding episode on January 30, 1977, has been ranked as the third most watched telecast of all time by the Nielsen corporation.
In December 1988, ABC aired a two-hour made-for-TV movie: Roots: The Gift. Based on characters from the book, it starred LeVar Burton as Kunta Kinte, Avery Brooks as Cletus Moyer, Kate Mulgrew as Hattie Carraway, and Tim Russ as house slave Marcellus (all four actors later became prominent as leading actors in the Star Trek franchise).
In May 2007, BBC America released Roots as an audiobook narrated by Avery Brooks. The release coincided with Vanguard Press's publication of a new paperback edition of the book, which had gone out of print in 2004, and with Warner Home Video's release of a 30th-anniversary DVD-boxed set of the mini-series.[34]
A Blu-ray edition of the original mini-series debuted on May 30, 2016, to coordinate with the release of the remake of the television series.
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.
The Mandinka or Malinke are a West African ethnic group primarily found in southern Mali, The Gambia, southern Senegal and eastern Guinea. Numbering about 11 million, they are the largest subgroup of the Mandé peoples and one of the largest ethnolinguistic groups in Africa. They speak the Manding languages in the Mande language family, which are a lingua franca in much of West Africa. Virtually all of Mandinka people are adherent to Islam, mostly based on the Maliki jurisprudence. They are predominantly subsistence farmers and live in rural villages. Their largest urban center is Bamako, the capital of Mali.
Kunta Kinteh Island, formerly called James Island and St Andrew's Island, is an island in the Gambia River, 30 km (19 mi) from the river mouth and near Juffureh in the Republic of the Gambia. Fort James is located on the island. It is less than 3.2 km from Albreda on the river's northern bank. As an important historical site in the West African slave trade, it is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, together with related sites including a ruined Portuguese chapel and a colonial warehouse in Albreda, the Maurel Frères Building in Juffureh, and Fort Bullen and Six-Gun Battery, which are located at the mouth of the Gambia River.
Roots is a 1977 American television miniseries based on Alex Haley's 1976 novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family, set during and after the era of enslavement in the United States. The series first aired on ABC in January 1977 over eight consecutive nights.
Kunta Kinte is a fictional 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.
Albreda is a historic settlement in the Gambia on the north bank of the Gambia River, variously described as a 'trading post' or a 'slave fort'. It is located near Jufureh in the North Bank Division and an arch stands on the beach connecting the two places. As of 2008, it has an estimated population of 1,776.
Harold Courlander was an American novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist and an expert in the study of Haitian life. The author of 35 books and plays and numerous scholarly articles, Courlander specialized in the study of African, Caribbean, Afro-American, and Native American cultures. He took a special interest in oral literature, cults, and Afro-American cultural connections with Africa.
Jufureh is a town in the Gambia, 30 kilometres inland on the north bank of the River Gambia in the North Bank Division near Kunta Kinteh Island. The town is home to a museum and Fort Jillifree.
Georg Stanford Brown is an American actor and director, perhaps best known as one of the stars of the ABC police television series The Rookies from 1972 to 1976. On the show, Brown played the character of Officer Terry Webster.
Islam is the major religion in the Gambia, representing 97% of the 2 million population, with the first Muslim communities in the country arriving in 11th century. Islam has therefore had an influence on the Gambia throughout history, and continues to impact its culture, society and politics. The majority of The Gambia's Muslims are Sunni belonging to the Maliki school of jurisprudence, influenced with Sufism. There is a smaller Shiite community, largely stemming from Lebanese and Arab migration. The Ahmadiyya movement is also present. Other religious societies exist in the country, including Catholics, Protestants, Hindus and Traditional African religions.
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.
Lifeline Expedition is a non-profit organization founded in 1997 by Briton David Pott. The group believes white people must apologize for the Atlantic slave trade, and that forgiveness can be granted by black people from areas that were involved in it.
The tourism industry today in the Gambia started when a party of 300 Swedish tourists arrived in 1965. That pioneering trip was organised by a Swede named Bertil Harding together with the tour operators Vingresor. It was seen as an ideal place to escape the harsh winter months of Scandinavia where Europeans would enjoy not only sun, sand and beaches but also experience the excitement of a real African holiday. It also offered a new opening for an affordable holiday to increasing numbers of traveling Europeans.
Roots: The Gift is a 1988 American historical drama television film directed by Kevin Hooks and written by D.M. Eyre Jr. It is the third installment of the Roots miniseries. The film premiered on ABC on December 11, 1988, with AT&T as the sole national sponsor for the broadcast, and was crafted as a Christmas film. LeVar Burton and Louis Gossett Jr. reprise their respective roles of Kunta Kinte and Fiddler. The film takes place between the second and third episodes of the original Roots series. It was watched by 23.3 million viewers.
Circular reporting, or false confirmation, is a situation in source criticism where a piece of information appears to come from multiple independent sources, but in reality comes from only one source. In many cases, the problem happens mistakenly through sloppy reporting or intelligence-gathering. However, the situation can also be intentionally contrived by the source or reporter as a way of reinforcing the widespread belief in its information.
Lord Ligonier was an 18th-century British slave ship built in New England that unloaded enslaved Africans in Annapolis, Maryland in 1767. The ship was made famous by Alex Haley's novel, Roots: The Saga of an American Family, in which it brought his ancestor, Kunta Kinte, from The Gambia to the colonial United States.
Chaz Guest is an American artist who works in the mediums of painting and sculpting. He is described by the Huffington Post as "an American artist of profound inventiveness."
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 descendants. 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.
John Waller was a planter, military officer and politician in the Colony of Virginia who was the effective progenitor of one of the First Families of Virginia, and who represented King William County in the House of Burgesses, and helped secure creation of Spotsylvania County, then served as its first clerk for two decades. Complicating matters, the name was common in the family and not only did this man serve as Spotsylvania's clerk, so did his sons Edmund and William and two grandsons named John, so that family members served as Spotsylvania's clerk for 64 years. Moreover, two descendants named John Waller also would serve in the Virginia House of Delegates: one from Bourbon County before creation of the state of Kentucky, and the other represented York County in the assembly of 1800 while his cousin Benjamin C. Waller represented Williamsburg, which had become the colony's capital city during this man's lifetime, and was split between York and James City Counties, but during the American Revolutionary War, Richmond had become the capital of the new Commonwealth of Virginia.
Gambian Americans are an ethnic group of Americans of Gambian descent. There are about 8000 Gambians living in the United States, involving themselves in activities ranging from business and entrepreneurship to college education. Additionally, during the Atlantic slave trade, many Africans from what is now The Gambia were traded and were subsequently sold by Europeans and Americans into forced labor in the United States. Gambian immigrants arriving in the United States include members of ethnic groups such as the Mandinka, Wolof, Fula, Jola, and Serahule.
↑ Hudson, Michelle (1991). "The Effect of Roots and the Bicentennial on Genealogical Interest among Patrons of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History". Journal of Mississippi History. 53 (4): 321–336. ISSN0022-2771.
1 2 Mills, Elizabeth Shown; Mills, Gary B. (March 1984). "The Genealogist's Assessment of Alex Haley's Roots". National Genealogical Society Quarterly. 72 (1).
↑ Although some family trees name Thomas Jarnigan Lea as the father of Kizzy's son "Chicken George" Lea, this is impossible because Thomas Lea was born in 1799 and George Lea was born in 1806!
↑ Kloer, Phil (May 25, 2007). "30 years later, Haleys re-establish 'Roots'". The News & Observer. Archived from the original on February 6, 2009. Retrieved February 23, 2010. Quote: "Historians also have cast a great deal of doubt as to whether Haley truly tracked down his ancestral village or was merely being told what he wanted to hear by the people who lived there."
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