For long we have been fighting the fiction that we maintained nothing of what we brought over from Africa, that we created nothing of cultural value in the South; fighting the belief that because we were not accorded life by the image-makers, that we, in fact, did not exist. We have been fighting to establish that the lives of our fore-parents stood for something other than what was portrayed in the U.S. media.

Roots, because it is based on the result of painstaking scholarship and is therefore accurate in most of its details, will give Afro-Americans, especially the young, a second starting point from which to look at their past. (p. 50)

Haley wants the story of the Kinte family to be seen as "The Saga of an American Family." Will Afro-Americans reading the book think of themselves as more American or less?…

Tom the Blacksmith, a Kinte...