Philadelphia Daily News from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Page 14

12 Tuea, Feb. 1.1977 Phila. DaUy News 'Roots' Opened Black White Eyes; Now Where Do We Go From Here? And sure enough, racial confrontations in As you watched that inspiring last scene from the televised adaptation of Alex Haley's epic, "Roots," you knew you had been exalted to a higher ground. Third-, fourth- and fifth-generation descendants of the African slave, Kunta Kinte, were shown trudging over a verdant Tennessee hill into a promise of black self-respect. At that moment, 80 million viewers over one-third of all Americans became oracles.

They knew what was in store. Alex Haley's sturdy family would survive as authentically American as any of the white immigrants to flood these shores dec But, as of Sunday, the national catharsis had ended. The television theater of history had darkened. A weeklong topic of conversation had run its course. "Impact in network programming and society itself remains to evolve," wrote Bob Williams of the New York Post.

WILL THERE BE substantive improvement within the next few years of the black condition of discquality? Will mistreatment within the criminal justice system cease? Will white Philadelphia policemen stop gunning down and beating up black citizens? Those are the tests. On Sunday, before we settled down to enjoy that last episode of "Roots," we briefly glimpsed on our sets, America's first black ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, being sworn in at the White House by the nation's first black U.S. Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall, a grandson of slaves. Another proud moment of history. Whether that ceremony remains another empty symbol or is translated into an abundant fulfillment of this country's democratic promise depends on all of us, black and white.

THE ROOTS OF A true interracial brotherhood surround us. Very few of us can live our lives today without some form of warmhearted contact with members of the other race. Love simply refuses to acknowledge color lines. From a common appreciation of our respective ancestral roots, we ought to be about the business of nurturing the tree of life. That's the real meaning of eight days in January when Kunta Kinte breathed new hope into America's tortured soul.

They're not like that now," he said with a smiling naivete endemic only to 10-year-olds. Krishna, 17, dismissed conjectures that the series would resurrect bad race relations. "It will cause some assertiveness among black kids. But it says to me, 'Krishna, we did what we had to do, now what are you going to do with your AH three have been made secure about their roots. My wife, Louise, traces her prominent family of Davises back six generations in Hampton where her father was a dean of that town's college.

Our kids know who they are. l-ater that evening, I dug out a letter Alex Haley had written me from Negril, Jamaica, on June 4, 1974. It seemed so fitting that this African-American would be completing a book in an African-Caribbean country about his African roots. -GOD, HOW THE YEARS fly!" he wrote. "I-ast time I saw you was in Cong.

Powell's office when I was doing interviews for Playboy You're doing something I've had a secret yen to: be a columnist (though I'd have a terrible time making successful deadlines). "Since Autobiography of Malcolm I've been lecturing hither-thither and primarily working on my coming, seemingly endless Roots I'm averaging 12-14 hours a day to finish by November. Projection is that it will be a book of around 1,500 pages; it spans 200-plus years and seven generations and aspires to be the symbol saga of all of us of African ancestry More than aspires, "Roots" succeeds gloriously. As Allegra predicted Haley will be catalogued as one of history's greatest historians, along with Thucydides, Condorcet, Ranke and Toynbee. Hot Springs, Detroit and Harrisburg were attributed to "the television movie, In the 1950's the scapegoats for racial disturbances were the Communists.

In the early 1960's they were what Frank L. Rizzo called "outside agitators." In the late 1960s, it was "black power." THANK GOD FOR "ROOTS." Otherwise whom would we accuse in 1977? In the last couple of weeks, Haley twice would respond to that canard with the same metaphor. "It is rather like opening up an old boil and letting the pus run out," he told two different interviewers. ABC-TV electronically lanced that boil, even though the network Hollywoodized and co-opted history with what black historian, John Henrik Clarke, called "cultural omissions." Still, the brilliantly sensitive depiction of Alex Palmer Haley's "Roots" may accomplish for America's conscience in 1977 what Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" achieved in 1851. And that's what "Roots" was, a electronic "Uncle Tom's Cabin," radicalizing minds through visual images in an era when people no longer read books' to nourish their moral judgments.

As soon as the program ended, I asked my three children for their reactions. "I loved it," immediately exulted Allegra, 14. "He will go down in history. He showed me how real it was back then. He made me feel like I was part of it." CHARLIE, 10, SAID he learned about slavery and "how white people acted in the 1700s.

Stone ades later. And waiting for Kinte's descendants on the other side of that Tennessee hill were 100 more years of the same white oppression and white meanness which had descriptively savaged black families in eight consecutive television episodes. NOW, THAT WASN'T a very nice thing to write, was it? I only reinforced a principal complaint voiced by many whites and even a few blacks. By televising a documented white dehuman-ization ot Diack staves, the ABC network had laid open old wounds believed to be scabbed with the medicine of time. "It's going to make blacks so angry, they'll start rioting again," groused a typical white Philadelphian.

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