A Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir exploring the history of enslavement, Alex Haley’s Roots, has been banned by a Tennessee School District under 2022 state law. A landmark work in African-American literature, Haley’s writing traces his ancestry back six generations from lawyers and architects to farmers, to freedmen, to enslaved people, where it all starts with a sixteen-year-old youth named Kunta Kinte.
Knox County Schools (KCS) has now banned the book from the school district under Tennessee’s ‘Age-Appropriate Materials Act’, which requires Tennessee schools to have a publicly available list of materials in their libraries, and to have a policy for reviewing them for appropriateness, after feedback from parents, guardians, students or school employees. The act also prohibits titles containing nudity, sexual abuse, sexual content, or “excessive violence”; the latter of which is a difficult topic to avoid completely when delving into the history of slavery.
Since first being passed in 2022, this book banning act has seen censorship soar across the state, with Tennessee becoming the third-highest state for book banning in the United States of America.
First published in 1976, Roots: The Saga of an American Family was dramatised in 1977, bringing from page to screen the journey of Kunta Kinte; torn from his homeland and brought to the slave markets of the ‘New World’.
Image of Alex Haley speaker at University of Texas at Arlington’s Texas Hall. University of Texas at Arlington Photograph Collection
A KCS spokesperson, Carly Harrington, confirmed the district’s decision to remove Roots from school library shelves under the 2022 law.
“As a district, we recognize the immense cultural and historical significance of Alex Haley’s Roots to our nation, to Tennessee, and particularly to the county seat of Knoxville.
“The decision made to remove Roots from school libraries is in no way a commentary on the literary or cultural value of the novel, but the result of adherence to state law.”
She also added that: “Broader themes or historical significance of a work as a whole is not a consideration under the law.”
This decision reportedly means the material can still be taught in classes but will not be available on library shelves.
Alex Haley’s grandson, Bill Haley, a co-founder of an organization named the Inherited Roots Project, said the decision was “incredibly short-sighted and without merit”.
“My grandfather famously said: ‘I think one of the most fascinating things you can do after you learn about your own people is to study something about the history and culture of other people’.”
“If a book like Roots depicting my family’s multigenerational journey through our nation’s uncomfortable history of slavery may be offensive to some readers, then why not ban another American classic, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which some readers may find offensive.”
