SOURCE: Skaggs, Merrill Maguire. “Roots: A New Black Myth.” Southern Quarterly 17, no. 1 (fall 1978): 42-50.

In the following essay, Skaggs compares Roots with Richard Wright's Native Son.

The extreme popularity of Alex Haley's Roots, a book which seemed to reshape the literary image of blacks, suggests that the public was ready to reverse a whole cluster of attitudes toward black Americans, and to view blacks exactly as the book demanded. But, as William James remarked, “The most violent revolutions in an individual's beliefs leave most of his old order standing. … New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. … The point … to observe particularly is the part played by older truths. … Their influence is absolutely controlling.”¹

Probably no truths illustrate James's observation better than literary ones. But no recent, and apparently revolutionary, new view of a literary subject provides an apter single illustration of James's principle than does...