ROOTS: THE NEXT GENERATION
NO TELEVISION “event” today has a prayer of matching Roots, the eight-part 1977 miniseries based on Alex Haley’s autobiographical slavery saga. Those broadcasts attracted some 85 percent of American TV households.
Comedian W. Kamau Bell, whose latest project, a CNN docuseries called United Shades of America, launched in April, still remembers watching Roots when he was little. Who could forget that iconic scene in which Kunta Kinte, a Mandinka holy man’s grandson kidnapped from West Africa and sold into slavery, endures a brutal whipping for refusing to utter his slave name? “If you deconstruct the DNA of people my age and generation, Roots is in there,” Bell tells actor LeVar Burton, whose portrayal of Kinte launched his career. Burton, now 59, went on to play countless roles (including Geordi La Forge on
