Word: impacted
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Despite the scattered acts of violence, most observers thought that in the long term, Roots would improve race relations, particularly because of the televised version's profound impact on whites. Said John Callahan, professor of American literature at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Ore.: "We now know our roots are inextricably bound with the roots of blacks and cannot be separated." Many observers also feel that the TV series left whites with a more sympathetic view of blacks by giving them a greater appreciation of black history...
Howard Sociologist Clifton Jones thought that Roots had a psychological impact second only to the black-is-beautiful movement of the '60s. Said he: "To see the spirit with which their much-maligned ancestors survived slavery is a great corrective to any lingering inferiority that blacks feel." This memory was shared with whites. Said Allen Counter, a black biologist at Harvard: "It sounded like us, it looked like us, it was us. We've always wanted whites to understand how our backgrounds are different from theirs. Now they should understand a little better where we are coming from...
...vice president, began dickering with Author William Styron for the TV rights to his 1967-68 bestseller, The Confessions of Nat Turner. Said Monash: "Part of Roots' brilliance was in the programming. ABC caused an explosion by compressing the presentation so that the drama had built-in impact. I never liked the format of one hour a week, as in Rich Man, Poor Man. Waiting a week dispels interest; waiting a day heightens interest...
...effects. Would Roots turn out to be chiefly a stimulant for TV executives and black genealogists? Or did its huge audience mean that the series might be every bit as significant in its own way as the civil rights marches of the '60s? A few people insisted that Roots' impact would be transitory. Said black New York Representative Charles Rangel: "It helps people identify and gets conversations started, but I can't see any lasting effect." Black Literature Professor Leon Forrest at Northwestern University believes that if the show had been televised during the ferment of the '60s, it might...
...been taking hashish, I could not have dreamed of this." In the fashionable Los Angeles community of Cheviot Hills, every mail brings bulging sacks of letters to Alex Haley?all of it evidence of the astonishing impact produced by his saga of a black family's tortuous trail to freedom. Haley thinks he knows why Roots touched all America. In an interview last week with TIME Correspondent William Marmon, he explained his own theory of the Roots phenomenon and told how he came to write the book...