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Thirty years ago this year, the mini series based on Alex Haley’s ground breaking book, “Roots: The Saga of an American Family,” aired on television in the US, casting a spell across the country. Alex Haley traced his ancestry back to a proud African tribesman named Kunta Kinte who was forced into slavery. His novel won a Pulitzer prize and the National Book Critics Award. The miniseries, which won more than 30 Emmys, attracted over 80 million viewers per episode, with more than a 100 million viewing the finale. Despite these successes, the book had a troubled history. Even though Haley described the book as a blend of fact and fiction, critics questioned the extent of its factual basis. Additionally a copyright infringement lawsuit was settled with Harold Courtlander, who claimed that a passage was lifted from a novel he wrote. The book has been republished this year by Vanguard who say that “none of the controversy affects the basic issues. Roots fostered a remarkable dialogue about not just the past but the then present day 1970s and how America had fared since the days portrayed in Roots.” Michael Eric Dyson writes in the introduction, “Long before demands for history from the bottom up became a rallying cry of progressive historians, Haley’s book practiced what it preached.” <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" | the entire program GUEST: Bill Haley, Alex Haley’s son Thirty years ago this year, the mini series based on Alex Haley’s ground breaking book, “Roots: The Saga of an American Family,” aired on television in the US, casting a spell across the country. Alex Haley traced his ancestry back to a proud African tribesman […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-program"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1570"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1570\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}GUEST: Bill Haley, Alex Haley’s son<\/em><\/p>\n