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Summary Of Alex Haley's Roots

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Roots is a television miniseries that first aired in 1977. It was based on the very popular book written and released by Alex Haley in 1976. It’s the story about his family tree going all the way down to his African roots. The story begins with a young boy named Kunta Kinte who was born in Gambia in west Africa. As a teenager Kunta gets captured and thus begins his long journey into the depth of slavery in the US for many generations of Haley’s family. This miniseries has been one of the most popular and watched shows of all time. The visual representation of slavery shown is both eye-opening and disturbing. The three most important lessons I’ve learned about slavery from Roots are, slaves had really tough lives, white people used to refer …show more content…

This is still used as a racist term for black people from some. Take the Ku Klux Klan for an example, they are people who claim to hate every race except for white. In Roots, there's a scene of the KKK being formed by Evan Brent. Him and a bunch of other people go to Kunta’s descendants plantation and terrorized his grandchildren. The “n” word should stop being used because it is an ugly, mean and hurtful word towards African Americans. Lastly, African Americans were considered as savages to the whites. The way that the Africans lived before they were slaves was very different than how the whites would act. When the whites would see how the African Americans acted they considered them as savages because of different they did things. Like their teachings and beliefs were very different from the whites. In conclusion, slavery was one of the worst things to ever happen in America. It is a topic that we choose not to talk about because what we put African Americans through was so terrible. I feel that it is good to know about it because we do not want something like this to ever happen again. Alex Haley’s story is empowering and teaches us what slavery was really like. It is a huge part of American history and how America was formed, but it should never happen

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Martin Luther King once said: “We are not makers of history, we are made of history.” We all can connect with this quote to a certain degree. A lot has happened in our history and as a result of that we are who we are today, even though sometimes history is not in our own hands to chose. The book, Soul by Soul by Walter Johnson tells the readers story of slavery that's took place on nineteenth-century, before the civil war on America by going away from the cotton plantations into the slave market itself which was the heart of the domestic slave trade. The story takes place on New Orleans.

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(Yetman 32). This shows how some slaves were viewed as family because after being freed their former owners came looking for them telling them to come back home and live with them and some were very happy to go back. This also gives insight on how whites treated their slaves and how African Americans viewed their owners. Though this shows a more or less “bright” outcome there are many dark outcomes as to be expected from slavery. Overall VOICES FROM SLAVERY shows how not all African Americans hated slavery but they greatly depended on the owner.

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The study of slavery in the southern half of the United States prior to the Civil War examines the institution in a capitalistic sense, choosing to see the punishment of slaves as unlikely due to the paternalistic relationship that allegedly existed between slaves and their masters. Recently, historiographical texts, such as River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom by Walter Johnson, have taken up the mantle of disproving this. In his introduction, Johnson describes the institution of slavery as such: "The Cotton Kingdom was built out of sun, water, and soil; animal energy, human labor, and mother wit; grain, flesh, and cotton; pain, hunger, and fatigue; blood, milk, semen, and shit." In regards to the title of his book, Johnson asserts that the importance of slavery in terms of economic history did not lie with Massachusetts, but along the Mississippi River, additionally dismantling prior historiography surrounding slavery. Serving as the major thesis of his book, Johnson convincingly and ambitiously argues that slaves labored, resisted, and reproduced in the Mississippi Valley Region, and it was the response by southerners to material limitations, such as land degradation, in this region that slaveholders increasingly projected their power onto

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