Word: haleys
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...Chicago, they were talking about "Haley's comet." To Atlanta TV Executive Neil Kuvin, it was "Super Bowl every night." In New York, Executive Director Vernon Jordan of the National Urban League called it "the single most spectacular educational experience in race relations in America...
What they were talking about was ABC's epic dramatization of Alex Haley's book Roots. For eight consecutive nights, tens of millions of Americans were riveted by Haley's story of his family's passage from an ancestral home in Africa to slavery in America and, finally, to freedom. Along the way, Americans of both races discovered that they share a common heritage, however brutal; that the ties that link them to their ancestors also bind them to each other. Thus, with the final episode, Roots was no longer just a bestselling book and a boffo TV production...
Without doubt, the medium had much to do with the impact of the message. Haley learned about his earliest ancestors from an elderly Gambian griot (storyteller), a living repository of oral history who sat him down in the tiny village of Juffure and recited for him the centuries-old saga of his West African clan dating back seven generations to the warrior Kunta Kinte. Modern Americans learned about Haley's lineage in much the same way?huddled in a semicircle in their living rooms around that electronic-age griot, the television...
...suburban Los Angeles department store one day last week, some 3,000 people lined up with copies for Haley to autograph. To his astonishment, he said, he "encountered only five persons who didn't have more than one copy of the book. Some came with as many as eight. One woman gave me two copies and said the second was for the baby in her stomach...
...Haley has made well over $1 million in royalties, and the money seems bound to flow in even faster. To promote the book, he is making a three-month lecture tour. In addition, a two-record album telling of his hunt for roots will soon be on the market; a more detailed version will be forthcoming as a book, titled Search. Finally, he says, there are plans for further TV series, perhaps concentrating on young Kunta Kinte in Africa or his descendants' story just after the Civil...