Roots: The Next Generations

It has now been 12 years since Chicken George and his family left their plantation in Virginia and arrived in Henning, Tennessee. The year is 1882 and the era of Reconstruction of the south and substantial progress for the newly-freed slaves, is coming to an end with the implementation of Jim Crow laws throughout the state. Georges son Tom Harvey has been asked to travel to Memphis to meet with members of the Colored Republican Party Club, a group of local black politicians who are trying to come up with a new election strategy in light of the changing times. Meanwhile Toms oldest daughter takes a liking for and wants to marry a young mulatto man, much to Toms disapproval. The white son of a local attorney and adviser to the railroad eschews his fathers profession in favor of poetry and falls in love with a local college-educated black school teacher brought to the town by Tom to open a colored school. However when they marry, he is expelled from his family and their presence in town raises the ire of the townspeople.

The year is 1914 and Will and Cynthia Palmers daughter Bertha heads off to college, eventually meeting and falling in love with a poor but hard-working fellow student named Simon Haley. Meanwhile Jim and Carrie Warners son has become a doctor but because he is black, he is prevented from treating his own dying white grandfather, Colonel Warner. Bertha returns home from college for break to find the Ku Klux Klan has come to town and Simon returns to his home in Georgia to learn that his share-cropping family cant afford his tuition anymore and his father is ready to put him back to work in the fields. Simon manages to find work as a Pullman porter on the railroads to earn money during the summer, but also attracts a benefactor - a kind journalist who he served on a train route. In 1918, rather than attend graduation, Simon enlists in the army and heads off for war, heeding the words of Dr. W.E.B. Dubois, but leaving behind a stunned and grief-stricken Bertha.

Eleven years after the Haleys return home with baby Alex, the story opens in 1932 in Henning, Tennessee during the Great Depression, with Simon still unable to find a job as a professor. In the interim, the family continues to live with Berthas parents and Simon works for his father-in-law hauling lumber. Simon finally receives and accepts a job offer as Director of Agriculture at A&M Institute in Normal, Alabama, and moves his family there. He meets and eventually works with a white Federal County Extension agent while visiting black farmers in the area. Simon shadows the agent, offering growing advice in an attempt to alter the old destructive farming practices, and notifying the farmers of new farm subsidies recently set up by President Roosevelt. However both men face resistance from the countys largest landowner, who not only refuses the advice, but wants to keep the subsidies for himself. When both men push too far, Simons house is trashed and the agent is assaulted as a warning. Meanwhile, Bertha slowly takes ill, trying to hide it, but eventually succumbing.

In the exciting conclusion, it is now 1960 in Henning, Tennessee, 10 years after Alexs wife Nan left him, and Alex attends the funeral for his great Aunt Elizabeth. He has finally succeeded in a writing career by publishing free-lance articles including interviews with Minister Malcolm X of the Nation of Islam and George Lincoln Rockwell, head of the American Nazi Party. Alex lands a contract to ghost-write the autobiography of Malcolm X, although Malcolm is assassinated before the book is published. Alex then realizes that he should write a book about his own family and he obsessively researches his origins, alienating his new girlfriend in the process. After identifying the language of the words passed down to him, he manages to get an advance that will allow him to travel to Gambia, West Africa. Once there, he is taken by boat to the Griot for the Kinte clan. After the Griot retells centuries of history, Alex finally hears the name of Kunta Kinte and the story of the drum that lead to his capture into slavery, marking the end of his search for his familys roots.