Over the weekend, determined to continue working on some crochet projects (dog sweaters!) I decided to watch a movie marathon. I decided to watch ROOTS - THE NEXT GENERATIONS a four disc set (eight programs) which was made for TV and boasted 53 stars and 235 speaking parts. This film brought the Roots saga, which inspired so many to record family histories and embark on genealogy quests, from after the Civil War, through World War I and II, to the author, Alex Haley's, own life as the son of a college professor who opted out of college.
Haley stayed in the U.S. Coast Guard for 20 years and his writing career was often failing until he failed his way to success. His big break came when Readers Digest hired him to interview the controversial Malcolm X. X's heart softened and his hatred for the White man, which he had preached until he himself went to Mecca, became a friend of Haley's and was assassinated as he had predicted. Haley went on to write the biography of Malcom X and then to write about his own family, which eventually became the books and films Roots.
Like the book I'm reading on First Lady Michelle Obama's heritage, THE NEXT GENERATIONS reveals the hatreds and the loves despite racism, Jim Crow laws, the KKK, and other challenges to relationships between the races. The 53 stars included Henry Fonda and Marlon Brando, as well as many Black actors and actresses, some who you've seen before on film, others who may have had their big break working on this one.
I enjoyed it, and I especially enjoyed the last episode when Haley, frustrated by the genealogy blocks decides to ask language experts and professors to help him locate the possible tribe of Africans from which "the Old African - Kinta Kunte - came from. There, he manages to meet up with an oral story teller who has memorized and can recite the history of the Kinte tribe.
Modern genealogy is dependent on proof from written records but in this case, as in many, the trail goes cold because things were not written down or recorded. Oral histories are important to record even if they are not backed up by proof (you never know when they might be) and DNA is proving to be an exceptional way of moving towards, if not the persons, then the tribe(s) of people you descend from.
