SOURCE: Rattley, Sandra. “The Impact of Roots: Real or Imagined?” Africa Report 22, no. 3 (May/June 1977): 12-6.

In the following essay, Rattley questions the premise that Haley's book and widely-acclaimed mini-series will have a significant impact on civil rights and issues of equality in the United States.

Time magazine of February 14, 1977 said, and we quote:

In Chicago, they were talking about “Haley's comet.” … In New York, Executive Director Vernon Jordan of the National Urban League called it “the single most spectacular educational experience in race relations in America.”

Again in the words of Time:

What they were talking about was ABC's epic dramatization of Alex Haley's book Roots. For eight consecutive nights, tens of millions of Americans were riveted by Haley's story of his family's passage from an ancestral home in Africa to slavery in America, and, finally to freedom. Along the way, Americans of both races discovered that...