Roots (TV miniseries)

Roots is a television miniseries in the USA based on Alex Haleys 1976 novel, Roots The Saga of an American Family the series first aired, on ABCTV, in 1977. Roots receivedEmmy Award nominations and won nine. It won also a Golden Globe and a Peabody Award. It received unprecedented Nielsen ratings for the finale, which still holds a record as the third highest rated episode for any type of television series, and the second most watched overall series finale in U.S. television history. It was produced on a budget of 6.6 million. The series introduced LeVar Burton in the role of Kunta Kinte.

In The Gambia, West Africa, in 1750 Kunta Kinte is born to Omoro Kinte Thalmus Rasulala, a Mandinka warrior, and his wife, Binta Cicely Tyson. When Kunta LeVar Burton reaches the age of 15, he and a group of other adolescent boys take part in tribal manhood training, ending with a ceremony, after which they become recognized as men and Mandinka warriors. While trying to carry out a task to catch a bird and take it home unharmed, Kunta sees white men carrying firearms, along with their black collaborators. Later, while fetching wood outside his village to make a drum for his younger brother, Kunta is captured by black collaborators under the direction of white men. He is then sold to a slave trader and placed aboard a ship under the command of Capt. Thomas Davies Edward Asner for a threemonth journey to Colonial America. During the voyage a group of rebels among the human cargo try but fail to stage a mutiny and to take over the ship.The ship eventually arrives in Annapolis, Maryland, where the captured Africans are sold at auction as slaves. John Reynolds Lorne Greene, a plantation owner from Spotsylvania County, Virginia, near Fredericksburg, buys Kunta and gives him the name Toby. Reynolds assigns an older slave, Fiddler Louis Gossett Jr., to teach Kunta to speak English and to train him in the ways of living and working as a chattel slave. Kunta, in a persistent struggle to become free again, makes several unsuccessful attempts to escape. Additionally, to preserve his Mandinka heritage and maintain his Mandinka roots, he does not want to change his name. An overseer, Ames Vic Morrow gathers the slaves and directs one of them to whip Kunta after his latest attempt to escape and to continue whipping him until he finally acknowledges his new name. For events that occur in 1775, between the above period and the postRevolutionary War, where the next section begins, see Roots The Gift. ........

Source: Wikipedia