Roots: The Next Generations is an American television miniseries based on the last seven chapters of Alex Haley's 1976 novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family. First aired on ABC in February 1979, it is a sequel to the 1977 Roots miniseries, tracing the lives of Kunta Kinte's descendants in Henning, Tennessee, from 1882 to 1967.
Roots: The Next Generations was produced with a budget of $16.6 million, nearly three times larger than that of the original. The screenplay was written by Ernest Kinoy.
Plot For the first part of the story, see Roots.
Chapter 1 – 1880s The story resumes in 1882, twelve years after the arrival of "Chicken George" Moore and his family in Henning in West Tennessee. George, elderly and showing his age, moves in with Tom Harvey, one of his sons, along with Tom’s wife, Irene, and their two daughters, Elizabeth and Cynthia. Tom, a great-grandson of Kunta Kinte, has become a leader of the Black community in Henning. Although he has established a working relationship with the town's white leader, Col. Frederick Warner, a former officer in the Confederate Army, race relations are strained, due in part to the new Jim Crow laws and similar influences.
Col. Warner's younger son, Jim, meets Carrie Barden, a young African American schoolteacher and a graduate of Fisk University, a Black school in Nashville (the capital of the state in Middle Tennessee). Tom has taken the lead in hiring Carrie for the local school for the Black children. Col. Warner disapproves of the relationship between Jim and Carrie, so he seeks to persuade Tom to fire Carrie or to close the school.
After an argument between Tom and his older daughter, Elizabeth, about his refusal to accept her suitor, John Dolan, because he is half white (although Irene reminds Tom that his father Chicken George is also half white, and Tom himself is a quarter white), Tom decides to allow Carrie to continue teaching. Jim and Carrie marry in Memphis. Col. Warner disinherits Jim, but he says that he will ensure that no harm comes to the couple from the hoodlum white element of the town. Jim, with his new bride, receives a warm welcome to the local Black church.
A year later in 1883, Chicken George dies at age 83 (note in Roots, George is said to have been born in 1806, which would make him 77), and the family bury his body beside that of his wife, Mathilda "Tildy", who died in 1875 at age 76.
Chapter 2 – Turn of the 20th Century Thirteen years later, in August 1896, Elizabeth, Tom's older daughter, arrives from Kansas City, Missouri, for an extended visit, amid tension between Tom and Elizabeth, due to Tom's rejection of her suitor years before. Cynthia "Cinthy", Tom's younger daughter, meets Will Palmer, a hard-working young man. After a properly supervised courtship, the couple marry in their church.
Andrew Warner, an unemployed playboy and the older son of Col. Warner, becomes interested in politics, and he eventually opposes his father in the public arena.
While Will works for Bob Campbell at his lumberyard, he does so in such an enthusiastic, industrious and effective way that he attracts the attention of both Col. Warner and T.J. Calloway, the local banker. Because of Campbell's increasing problems with alcohol and his decreasing attention to his business, and after Campbell's default on his loan from the bank, Calloway forecloses, takes over the lumberyard, sells it to Will and finances his purchase. Thus, the R. Campbell Lumber Company becomes the W.E. Palmer Lumber Company.
By this time, Jim and Carrie already have a son, named Frank "Frankie", and they live peacefully and happily in the Black community of Henning. However, in the atmosphere of the growing anti-Black attitudes in the South during the 1890s, racial tension increases in Henning too, as several incidents demonstrate. Tom is turned away when he again applies to register to vote, and he forcefully insists that every time since the Civil War, he has voted without interference, in both Alamance County, North Carolina, and in Lauderdale County, Tennessee.
Will and Cinthy rejoice over the birth of their daughter, Bertha George, named in part in honor of Chicken George, one of her great-grandfathers.
Chapter 3 – World War I By September 1914, after 17 more years, telephones, electricity and automobiles have arrived in Henning, both the town and Will Palmer's lumber company have grown, both Tom and Irene Harvey have died, as has Mrs. Warner, and Andrew Warner, the colonel's older son, now serves as a member of the US House of Representatives.
Dr. Frank Warner, the son of Jim and Carrie Warner, has completed undergraduate college, medical school, an internship and a residency, and he's about to start his medical practice. Cinthy calls him "the first colored doctor in the county".
Will and Cynthia send their daughter Bertha to Lane College, a Black school in Jackson, Tennessee.
Col. Warner, frail and confused, collapses on a street while Jim, Carrie and Frank are present nearby. They rush to him and Frank starts to treat him. However, Earl Crowther, the Warner chauffeur, and a gang of rednecks take charge, ignore both Jim and Frank and nudge them aside, and insult Frank, who predicts that the colonel will die before they get him to the white physician. He does indeed die.
At the college, Bertha meets and soon falls in love with Simon Alexander Haley, a waiter in the dining room and a son of a sharecropper, who lives and works near Savannah, in Hardin County, Tennessee, about 116 miles due east of Memphis. Simon, who greatly admires Booker T. Washington, quotes to Bertha from his writings, including these words: "The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges to come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than artificial forcing." Referring to Washington, Simon says, "I have formed my life in his image."
The Ku Klux Klan resurges in Henning. They burn a cross, hold a parade and burn down the clothing store of a Jewish merchant, Mr. Goldstein, who has moved to Henning from Chicago, Illinois, and who returns there.
Simon leaves Lane College, and he has made plans to continue his education at the Agricultural and Technical (A&T) College of North Carolina (which later becomes renamed as the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical (A&T) State University), in Greensboro, North Carolina. He has applied to enroll in the school and has arranged to work on the campus to pay for his room and board.
His father, Alec Haley, has promised to give him $50 to pay for his tuition, but now he tells him that he cannot keep his promise because of the recent poor crops due to floods and boll weevils. To avoid becoming an indebted sharecropper himself, Simon works the summer as a railway porter for the Pullman Company. He works with an older porter, Dad Jones, who becomes his fatherly friend and—in one instance with another porter—his protector.
During one trip, Simon meets and talks with a kindly and wealthy passenger, R.S.M. Boyce, an executive of the Curtis Publishing Company, the publisher of The Saturday Evening Post and several other well-known magazines. They discuss Simon's plans and difficulties. When Boyce steps off the train, he hands to Simon a generous tip and one of his business cards, inviting him to inform him of his progress. When Simon leaves his position to return to school, he learns that Dad was fired for discussing unionization of the porters with a labor spy. When Simon arrives at the college, he learns that Boyce has already paid for the coming year in full for his textbooks, tuition, and room and board.
Simon and Bertha continue to keep in touch with each other, and Bertha and her parents, Will and Cynthia, travel to Simon's graduation, where he will receive his bachelor's degree in agriculture. When the family arrives at the campus, Bertha receives a message that Simon and six of his classmates have just left and enlisted in the US Army for service in the World War. The young couple see each other briefly when Simon and his all-Black platoon of recruits board a train to go to the next stage in his life.
During May 1918, Simon receives his basic training in an all-Black company at Camp Grant, Illinois, near Rockford, about 85 miles west-northwest of Chicago, then he, in an all-Black outfit, goes to France and takes part in the fighting against the German Army of Kaiser Wilhelm II.
Before Simon goes overseas, Bertha meets Simon in Chicago for a weekend (after Elizabeth pleads Bertha's case with Will, who first has vigorously opposed such a trip but eventually allows it). While Simon is in the Army in France, Cousin Georgia Anderson, from Kansas City, visits Will and Cinthy, and she reveals that Chicken George fought with the Union Army during the Battle of Fort Pillow, due west of Henning, on the Chickasaw Bluff, overlooking the Mississippi River. (That point implies that he survived the infamous Massacre of Fort Pillow.)
In July 1918, Simon receives word in France that his father has died in a hospital in Memphis; in due time, after the end of the war, Simon returns to the United States.
Andy Warner raises his political sights even higher, and he becomes elected to the US Senate.
After the Army discharges Simon, on his way back home to Henning, he and his army associates stop at the home of one of them in Knoxville, in East Tennessee. While they are there, the Knoxville Riot of 1919 (a part of the Red Summer of 1919) takes place. Earl Crowther, now an aide to Sen. Andrew Warner, goes to Knoxville to take part in the mischief, and he dies there (at the hands of one of Simon's Army associates).
Simon arrives in Henning and receives a robust welcome, especially from Bertha, and the young couple move ahead with the plans for their wedding. Will builds an attractive bungalow for Bertha and Simon, assuming that they will settle in Henning, but without asking about their own plans.
On the first Sunday after the completion of the house, the wedding takes place in their church, then everyone adjourns to the front lawn of the new home for the reception, and a number of white neighbors join them. Among them are Sen. Andy Warner and his fancy new wife, from Washington, DC, and New York City, who arrive in a Rolls-Royce open touring car with a chauffeur.
Afterward, Mr. and Mrs. Simon Haley motor away in a Ford Model T to Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, where Simon will start working on his master's degree in agriculture.
Later, Will and Cinthy move into the bungalow. (The house still stands; it is now known as the Alex Haley House and Museum and, as a state-owned historic site, is open to the public.)
In November 1921, Simon and Bertha return to Henning to visit Will and Cinthy, and they surprise them with their three-month-old son, Alexander Murray Palmer Haley, who Will promptly carries outside, lifts up and ceremonially shows the Moon, in a tradition that was first portrayed in the first Roots series by Omoro Kinte and baby Kunta Kinte in The Gambia in West Africa in 1750 (although, in the first Roots, the tradition was a naming ritual, in which the father held the naked child to the stars, gave the child a name and said, "Behold the only thing greater than yourself.").
Chapter 4 – The Great Depression After eleven more years, late in the summer of 1932, during the Great Depression, Simon, Bertha and their children stay temporarily in the bungalow with Will and Cynthia. At age 10, Alex has two younger brothers: George, named for Chicken George, and Julius. While working at Will's lumberyard, Simon unsuccessfully tries to show Will better methods for bookkeeping and inventory control, but Will disregards and uses him as a manual laborer.