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PART I
Rethinking the Context
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CHAPTER ONE
Roots, the Legacy of Slavery, and Civil Rights Backlash in 1970s America
CLARE CORBOULD
It is well-known that tens of millions watched the mini-series Roots and that the broadcast reignited already impressive sales of the hardcover book. Another way to measure the impact of the series has been far less examined: an outpouring of letters, which viewers sent to executive producer David L. Wolper, author Alex Haley, ABC in New York, local television stations, and to newspapers nationwide. These responses are a treasure, because it is rare to find such a wide cross-section of American people responding to a cultural event, even in an era of mass literacy such as the 1970s. While letters to newspapers mostly came from the kinds of people who might often have put pen to paper on a topical issue, the letters to Wolper and Haley, by contrast, frequently began with a statement about how the author had never before written to respond to a television program. And while some were neatly typed on letterhead, many were handwritten, and a few came from people with halting script who apologized for their rudimentary literacy. These letters came from young and old, from white, black, and âethnicâ Americans, from men and women, city dwellers and farm folk, and from every corner of the United States, as well as from overseas.
The great variety among these letters offers an opportunity to reflect on how so-called ordinary Americans experienced the profound cultural changes of the postwar nation. Some historians in this new millennium see the 1970s as âthe pivotal decadeâ of the postâWorld War II era, in which conservative politics and a conservative culture found their feet.1 It marked the nexus between a bright two decades of postwar prosperity and, beginning in the mid-1970s, a long period of economic decline and increased wealth inequality. As Americans struggled with high unemployment and rising costs of living, they lost faith in the governmentâs capacity to assist them. A growing awareness of environmental degradation and overpopulation made individuals even more despondent that the federal government could provide solutions to such enormous, global problems. Losing wars in Southeast Asia shook Americansâ faith in U.S. military supremacy and undermined belief in the putative moral force that propelled the use of U.S. military power. Corruption at the highest executive office, the ignominious end to Nixonâs presidency, and the chaotic years with Ford and Carter at the helm only increased general skepticism about politicians. Such disarray at the federal and international levels was mirrored at the local level, too, with several cities nearly going broke.
From the 1973 oil crisis onward, then, most Americans shared a sense that the United States was in decline. Some historians have interpreted the period as one in which Americans came to recognize their nation was part of a global, connected world, and that the era of aloofness, isolation, and belief in American exceptionalism had to end. For other historians, the shock of the 1970s produced insularity and a U.S.-affirming culture that was steeped in nostalgia and tradition.2 Letters about Roots showed strains of both tendencies, but also reveal how differently white Americans and African Americans imagined the place of the United States in the world.
The letters also demonstrate that many white Americans thought the civil rights movement was at least partly to blame for what they perceived as a diminishing of U.S. power, and of their own happiness. In both the South and North, continued efforts to move the progress of desegregation along, for example in schools and workplaces, but also to secure jobs, housing, and environments safe from police brutality, meant that far from being over, the civil rights movement, with all its attendant tensions, was alive and well.3 Roots, for these viewers, was yet another affront. They took umbrage at the misuse of resources, which were needed to mount such an extensive costume drama, and by the very idea that the history of black Americans deserved such treatment. Other whites, however, remained hopeful about the nationâs future. They took great comfort and even pride in its ethnic diversity. For many of these Americans, pluralism was a new reason to celebrate the United States and yet more evidence that the country was exceptional.4
Above all else, the letters make clear that most white Americans, whether they liked Roots or not, as well as some black Americans, now understood the potential for change within the United States to lie within the racial attitudes of individuals. They either praised the television production for improving âunderstandingâ between the races, which would therefore improve race relations, or they criticized it for raising issues best left untouched and thereby damaging race relations. Of the white writers who predicted enriched race relations, most stopped their analysis there. They did not, in other words, suggest much about what this would actually mean for the material circumstances of African Americans, or for the nation in general. âRace relations,â as historian Michael Rudolph West has shown, came into its own as a category of social scientific and popular understanding about U.S. society around the mid-twentieth century. It was based on the trope that races should strive for better âunderstandingâ between one another, which was promoted by prominent southern educator Booker T. Washington at the turn of the twentieth century.5 The remedy to cure the nationâs ills, as Washington saw it, would come when black Americans proved to whites that the latterâs racism and prejudices were based on false assumptions. The onus was on African Americans, in other words, to prove themselves worthy of white respect.
Letters about Roots from sympathetic whites, which rarely called for any substantial change in the United States, bear out Westâs contention that ârace relationsâ was a rhetorical category that emptied out the radical potential of the civil rights movement. Homilies that dated back to the so-called pragmatism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries triumphed over black power. As letters about Roots demonstrate, by 1977 ârace relationsâ had resumed its place as the primary category through which white Americans imagined certain types of social organization nationwide. Once again, the onus for change had come to rest with individuals and their emotional connections to one another, rather than any more thoroughgoing imagining of radical transformation.6
African American letter writers appreciated the mammoth effort and financial risk it took to broadcast such a lengthy version of Roots, and although many criticized it, a majority who wrote to Wolper, Haley, and newspapers were glad to see the revision of black history. While some black letter writers hoped that new knowledge about the past would prompt a revision of white Americansâ behavior, most African Americans, contrary to the majority of white writers, recognized that simply depicting slavery on the television screen would change neither the present nor the future. They described racism, discrimination, and prejudiceâwords that almost all white letter writers avoided, which in itself says much about the way that most viewers of Roots apprehended questions about equality and justice. Even among African Americans, however, there were few calls for government intervention to assist in leveling inequalities in U.S. life. The tide had already shifted since the mid-1960s, and in the minds of these TV viewers, if change was going to come, it would, as almost always had been the case, have to begin with African Americans themselves.
Roots prompted many white Americans to write letters expressing their satisfaction at a job well done. Many of these were only a few lines, with statements such as that from Edward Glockner of Portsmouth, Ohio: âI am a white person but feel you are to be commended for the seriesâthe content and its value to understanding.â7 While that letter arrived with neat penmanship on thick notepaper with a printed personal letterhead, Joyce White in Memphis wrote her missive in pencil on lined paper torn from a notebook. After announcing she was white and that both her family and friends agreed with her assessment of Roots, she ended by saying âI wish I had finished school so I could name off a lot of fancy words telling you how much we enjoyed it. But I only have plain words and I hope this is enough. For I want you to know that everyone we know who saw it, agrees with us. From Kunta Kinte to Alex Haley, a family, few people will never forget. Thank-you for a beautiful, moving, heart warming and truthful movie.â8 A well-to-do Virginian housewife, originally from Oregon, was distressed by her neighborsâ insistence that Roots was âvery exaggeratedânot totally true,â and she confided, âI know better, deep in my heart I know it was so close to the truth it hurts.â When she shared morning coffees with three other housewives from out of state, they agreed with her, and so, she urged âABC, Alex Haley and whoever else is concernedâ to screen the series every five years so that all children would come to know their countryâs history.9 A group of seven twenty-year-old Tufts University students wrote simply âto thank you for the finest television show weâve seen in our lives. Please show Roots again and again.â10
Such letters came from all over the country, and indeed all over the world. (For example, a broadcast of Roots in the 1980s inspired school children and adults in Scandinavia, West Germany, and East Germany to write to Haley.)11 In the United States, people often addressed their mail to the local ABC affiliate that had broadcast Roots, and perhaps many of these letters are still in boxes in local archives, but sometimes the stations passed on the notes to network headquarters in New York, Wolper in California, or Haley in Tennessee. For example, a few weeks after the screening, the program/operations manager of KETV in Omaha, Nebraska, forwarded eighteen complimentary letters, including one signed by 114 people.12 Quite possibly, people who sent letters to their local stations were the kind of people who did not write letters often, or at all, or did not have the resources to find the addresses higher up the line.
Whether inspired, outraged, or something in-between, for many authors this was the first occasion they had written down their opinions of popular culture. Sylvia Kessler of Nebraska opened her letter with âI have never written a fan letter of any kind before, but I simply have to prais...
