On This Day in History: January 23

The Roots Miniseries

Subscribers can listen to the audio of today’s post here.

Star Trek’s Geordi La Forge may be your LeVar Burton. But my LeVar Burton was Kunta Kinte. He was the star of a 1977 TV miniseries called Roots about the American slavery trade. The show was a big fucking deal.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: January 23, 1977--

We didn’t have anything to record it with; almost no one had a VCR yet. Young people: That stands for “videocassette recorder.” There was no DVR or streaming services I walked ten miles through the snow uphill to school each day get off my lawn. Continues below …

Get off my lawn and onto my mailing list. Subscribe, free or paid, and never miss a post:

The first episode was on January 23, 1977; the series ran for eight straight nights. Some episodes were ninety minutes, others forty-five. That meant either thirty or fifteen minutes of commercials, respectively, that you couldn’t skip. Better make it a quick trip to the bathroom. The total run time was nine hours, and 140 million people were glued to their sets each night. I was eight years old and got an early education on just how shitty humans could be.

The story begins in West Africa in what is now Gambia. Kunta Kinte is a fifteen-year-old who recently went through his rite of passage into manhood as a member of the Mandinka people. He is captured by slavers and taken on an arduous three-month journey via slavery ship to America, landing in Maryland in 1767. He is sold to a plantation owner and his name is changed to Toby.

I remember this part clearly, despite having only seen the show once and many decades having passed. Kunta makes several attempts to escape and also refuses to go by his enslaved name. He is strung up and another Black enslaved man is made to whip him. All the other enslaved on the plantation are made to watch. There is a white man overseeing the whipping. The white overseer keeps saying, “What’s your name?” “Kunta. Kunta Kinte,” he replies. The white man gives the order, and the whip cracks another time. Kunta howls in pain. “What’s your name?” the question is repeated. “Kunta,” he gasps. Again the whip, again cries of pain. Eventually, he is cowed into saying his name is Toby. Fucking hell I am just seething with that memory. Imagine living through it as so many were forced to.

Another thing I remember is when the story advances a few decades and Kunta is played by an older actor, John Amos. He tries to escape, is caught, and as punishment has half his foot chopped off by a hatchet. Again: fucking hell. The story continues on through to the post-Civil War period. It ends with a series of photographs on the screen narrated by Alex Haley, a Black man who authored the Pulitzer Prize winning 1976 novel Roots, tying a character from the end of the series, Kunta Kinte’s great-great-granddaughter, to being Haley’s ancestor. The tale’s authenticity later came into a question, and it was revealed that portions were plagiarized from the 1967 novel The African.

Airing on ABC, the series won nine Emmys and spawned sequels and a 2016 remake.

Get the book ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY SH!T WENT DOWN. And don’t forget to