But Tom knows education can help break the chains of second-class citizenship. Tom Harvey, now the family head, has opened a school and is pressed by ex-Confederate Colonel Warner to close it when Warner’s son falls in love with the schoolmarm (woman schoolteacher). Henning, TN, 1882: Kunta Kinte’s progeny live free, although the family isn’t treated equally.

It was in this mini-series where James Earl Jones launched his acting career playing Alex Haley with nuance and heart, but with a humanizing set of his own demons. (Brando won an Emmy for this performance.) Haley is also challenged by his fractious interview with Malcolm X, portrayed by a gripping Al Freeman Jr. One of the most unsettling scenes takes place then, when Haley interviews the head of the American Nazi Party, George Lincoln Rockwell, played with chilling diffidence by Marlon Brando. Henry Fonda and Olivia de Havilland are respectable in their period-piece roles, but the real power of this sequel is in the more immediate concerns of Alex Haley and his own experience of prejudice while building a stellar reputation as a writer and journalist in the 1960s and 1970s. While nothing can rival the power of the original Roots’ unflinching look at the slave trade and slave life in the early years of this country, the sequel is still full of rich African American history, from Reconstruction, to Jim Crow, through the Great Depression, to the Civil Rights movement and the early rumblings of black power. With stars like Olivia de Havilland, Henry Fonda, Marlon Brando, Georg Stanford Brown, and James Earl Jones eager to partake in the tale, the sequel follows the rest of the saga of the family of author Alex Haley, from where Roots ended shortly after the end of the American Civil War, up to the 1970s when Alex Haley was researching and writing his earth-shattering and ground-breaking family story. That wave opened the door for its sequel, Roots: The Next Generations, even more of a star-studded event than the original. Roots rocked the cultural landscape in the late 1970s, creating a new wave of awareness of African American history. Roots: The Next Generations TV Mini-Series (1979)

Alex haley roots the next generation