ROOTS : ALEX HALEY

**  ROOTS  :  THE SAGA OF AN AMERICAN FAMILY  :

**  ABC adapted the book as a television mini-series of the same name an aired it 1977 to record breaking audience of 130 million.  In the United States, the book and the mini-series raised the public awareness of Black history and inspired a broad interest in genealogy and family history.

**  Quotes  :

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**  Kunta Kinte - a Mandingo tribesman who was abducted by Spanish slave-traders and brought

                             to America to be sold as slave. Alex Haley traced his roots from 5 generation

                             and found his roots in Gambia, West Africa.

**  Griot   --  A tribal oral historian who was trained from childhood to memorize the history

                       of  the tribe.

**  "  The white man gives you nothing.  They just grab at the chance to get their money back."

**  "  You've got to let them go.  The truth is that  they don't always come back.  There'll come

          a time when the only thing they are left to remember is the sweet-bitter good-bye. "

**  "  I'm going back to my red-neck, nigger-hating country. "

**  "  You can grow up, you can grow old and still don't know who you are. "

**  "  I saw a nigger in a funny monkey suit ! "  -  Alex Haley

**  "  I've been called "nigger" so many times I thought it was my name. "

**  "  If you're white, you're all right,

          if you're brown, you can hang around,

          but if you're black ... stand back.  "

Insights :
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All along I thought the white Americans were the good guys, watching all those "Cowboy-Indian movies" where the Indians has to be killed to keep them from raiding, raping and killing white settlers who wanted to civilize the wild, wild west.  And then, the "Tarzan, king of the jungle" movies where the white Tarzan have to save the usually white settlers against the black savages and cannibals.

Roots - the series, revealed something I never knew the whites were capable of doing - treating the Negroes worse than animals. It started my curiosity to look into the history of the Black people and then more into something we could relate too - our own Philippine history, our enslavement from our colonial masters, their abuses, the massacres, and more ...