01x05 - Roots: A History Revealed

Episode transcripts for the 2016 TV miniseries "Roots". Aired May 30 - June 2, 2016.*
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"Roots" chronicles the history of an African sl*ve sold to America and his descendants. A remake of the 1977 miniseries and based on the novel "Roots: The Saga of an American Family".
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01x05 - Roots: A History Revealed

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(horse whinnies)

narrator: Over 12 million people ripped from their homeland.

Shackled, and taken to a new world.

New scholarship reveals a history of resistance and survival.

Kizzy!

(screaming)

It's a testament to the resilience of African-Americans who have endured one of the most horrible, oppressive systems that one could imagine.

woman: We've learned so much more in the last 40 years or so about the scope and the scale of the sl*ve trade.

Not my Mama! You can't!

So we can tell a much deeper, detailed story.

narrator: From the ships engineered for human cargo...

Most ships don't have a*tillery that faces inward.

But they would have those on a sl*ve ship.

woman: And they had instruments to force-feed them.

narrator: ...to life on a Southern plantation.

woman: sl*very justified all manner of horrible behavior.

narrator: A new understanding of a history and legacy that remains with us to this day.

(whip cracks)

This is the history of sl*very behind Alex Haley's "Roots."

Alex Haley's Kunta Kinte would have come from the Mandinka-speaking kingdom of Niumi, an economic and cultural crossroads in West Africa.

man: Niumi had about 20 villages and maybe five towns.

It was an extremely multi-lingual, multi-national, busy, lively place.

It had imports from all over the world and exported lots of things.

And there were people constantly coming and going.

(laughter)

If you'd ask the Mandinka for a self-definition, it would have been that they were scholars of Islam.

If they were particularly well-versed in Islamic Law, they might ultimately study at the University of Timbuktu, which was, if you pardon the expression, the Harvard of West Africa.

woman: The Mandinka were known for dug-out canoes that carried upwards of 36 people.

And because of their location, they were able to, pretty much, have total control of the mouth of the Gambia.

(crowd singing)

narrator: Europeans were no strangers to Africans.

Before the start of the sl*ve trade, they lived and traded together for centuries.

♪♪

woman: Before the international sl*ve trade, the Europeans' feelings about Africans was that Africans looked different.

They were black.

But they were equal.

Equal but different.

But it is that era of the Atlantic sl*ve trade where feelings change.

man: The European sl*ve trade from Africa begins in the 1400s as Portuguese and later Spanish voyagers start to move down the Western Coast of Africa.

They're developing sugar plantations in the New World.

And they're looking for laborers.

woman: And you needed to control that labor force.

Couldn't pay them because then you wouldn't get as much money.

It's about wanting to extract the most wealth as possible.

Edward Baptist: Initially, some of the enslaved Africans are simply kidnapped by raiding parties that go ashore.

Over time, European sl*ve traders enter into alliances with local leaders to secure a steady supply of slaves.

Nwando Achebe: There are those-- a specialized group of men called "Middlemen," whose job it was to go in and procure Africans.

John Thornton: In West Africa, there were kingdoms and wars between them.

Wars over commercial dominance.

Wars of revenge.

Struggles between brothers and between rival kingdoms.

Nwando Achebe: The average African would have been captured as a prisoner of w*r.

Once they are captured, they would be bought and sold.

Baptist: One of the trade goods that is used to buy enslaved Africans is g*ns.

A myth develops that says that gunpowder is the crushed bones of enslaved Africans who've been sent across the ocean.

Achebe: You cannot think of the people that you are enslaving and will be treating the way you plan on treating them as human beings.

So that is where you have a switch from this belief that Africans were equal, but different to "Oh, they're Cannibals. They're Barbarians. And we need to save their souls."

It was the sl*ve trade that brought that about.

Next, they would have gone onto the ship.

Before they actually got onto the ship, Africans were branded.

(cries out)

The branding had to do with the company that bought them...

(man screams)

...so that they know where they were going.

Stephanie Smallwood: The Middle Passage is the term that was used to describe the ocean voyage from the coast of Africa to the Americas.

The sl*ve ship was a place that was very crowded.

Enslaved people were brought onboard in chains.

Achebe: When Africans got on the ship-- a lot of times they were given spoons, wooden spoons.

Sometimes one spoon to ten people.

Those were the spoons that they were supposed to use to eat.

narrator: Captives could become so distressed by the sight of Africa vanishing over the horizon that many attempted to jump overboard.

In an effort to stop them, captains learned to leave at night.

Smallwood: Men and women were separated.

Men typically were held in the belly of the ship.

They were shackled together.

Packed so closely together-- almost in a spoon-like position.

You could basically do nothing but roll over on one side or the other or barely kind of sit up.

It was pretty impossible oftentimes to actually get to the "necessary tubs," as they called them, to relieve yourself.

Achebe: And they would stay like that for pretty much the entire journey.

That journey could take anywhere from two to three months.

Morgan: sl*ve traders were involved in maximizing profit.

That's the only thing that they cared about.

Smallwood: They had practices to ensure that the number of people who were delivered alive in the Americas would generate a sum that was greater than the amount of money that had to be invested to make the voyage happen in the first place.

(men singing native language)

Morgan: We know that every once in awhile, captives are brought out from the hold to dance, to move around.

They needed to make sure that they had enough food to feed people to last the entire voyage.

Achebe: Starvation. Refusing to eat.

Africans employed this enough times for the captain and his crew to force feed them.

They had instruments to pry open the jaws of, you know, Africans, to force feed them so that they wouldn't die.

(man grunting)

Smallwood: The conditions were so unsanitary that dysentery, smallpox, and influenza, and all these infectious diseases usually were running rampant.

Baptist: About 20% of enslaved Africans die on a typical voyage.

Because of disease, but sometimes it's hard to tell where disease starts and depression ends, right?

su1c1de is a common thing that people attempt.

Morgan: Women are oftentimes not chained as completely or as constantly as men are.

One reason why women were not chained was so that sailors and ship captains could r*pe them.

r*pe is one of the distinguishing factors of being a woman who survives the Middle Passage.

It's quite likely that you were sexually abused during that passage.

Ship captains sometimes presume that women are less dangerous.

But it's often the case that women who were able to move around the ship became conduits of information.

Able to alert the captives to a moment of opportunity.

We know now that about 10% of all of the sl*ve trading vessels experienced major revolts.

(men shouting)

Morgan: Africans didn't take their condition lying down.

We've recorded over 500 insurrections.

Most of them were not successful.

Thornton: sl*ve ships were obviously designed to be different from other types of merchant ships.

Most ships don't have a*tillery that faces inward.

That's not an usual thing to do.

But they would have those on the sl*ve ship.

Morgan: There are a couple of people who survived the Middle Passage and who talked about their fear that they were going to be eaten.

Their fear that the Passage would never end.

Scholars have done a lot of work to quantify the sl*ve trade and to quantify the Middle Passage.

But I don't think we can map it in terms of what it felt like to be on board that ship.

(thunder rumbles)

narrator: This is the history of sl*very behind "Roots."

(singing in native language)

Baptist: Before 1820, the most common experience of someone who migrates to the New World is under the deck of a sl*ve ship.

Morgan: Why did Europeans enslave so many people in the New World for so long?

You know why is-- it has to do with money.

They need a very large labor force... to extract the gold or the sugar or the cotton or the rice.

It's about getting rich fast.

Over the course of time-- about 12 million people are landed alive on the shores of the Americas and are sold.

narrator: Of the 12 million Africans taken across the Atlantic, as many as 15% d*ed en route.

Approximately 400,000 were brought to North America.

The remaining millions were sold in the Caribbean or in South America.

Thornton: People in the Americas knew when a ship arrived because they could smell it.

If the wind was blowing from off shore, people would know that for sure.

Um, maybe a day before it came.

It would be sort of like a septic t*nk coming towards you.

That's what it would smell like.

Smallwood: The sale itself would happen either on board the ship or a warehouse nearby.

Let the scramble commence!

Smallwood: Slaves would be inspected by prospective buyers who would poke and prod and open their mouths.

And all these things to try to assess the physical capacity of the sl*ve.

Once you get into the era of print, there were always advertisements in the newspapers.

Morgan: The colonial newspaper is a small thing.

It's four pages, maybe.

And, on that last page, property is being advertised-- land, horses, wagons, and human beings.

Smallwood: And they would use adjectives to sort of entice buyers.

"Lusty Slaves."

You know, a fresh cargo of prime Africans from such and such a region.

Baptist: So how much wealth does one person represent?

For men, price rose with age up until around 25 or 30, and then it started to decline.

(grunts)

Morgan: Once we get to the 19th century, the cost of an enslaved person would approximate the cost of an automobile in today's dollars.

To own 50 or 100 enslaved people is-- is to be a very wealthy person indeed.

Baptist: For women, it's a little bit different.

Prices correlated with perceived years of remaining fertility, or is linked to perceived sexual attractiveness.

One of the attractions of sl*very for enslavers, particularly men, is the sexual access that they believe it gives them.

The role of violent, forced-sexuality in the trade, we know that it was quite extensive.

I think we have to come to grips with the fact that that was really in the minds of enslavers and other whites and was really in the practices of sl*very.

narrator: Once sold, the majority of the enslaved Africans were taken to work on farms and plantations.

By the 1860s, up to one in three Southern families owned slaves.

woman: There was a small number of very large plantations in which hundreds of enslaved people lived and labored.

But the vast majority of sl*ve owners owned a few number of slaves on smaller farms.

(baby crying)

woman: sl*ve owners are breeding their slaves to create a larger workforce for themselves.

These are slaves that they don't have to pay for.

Maybe the person who owns you needs some money.

That baby counts for money.

And you know that you could lose that child at any time.

Your reproductive life is being valued because of what it will bring to somebody else and it commodifies your children.

Smallwood: It would not be uncommon for, maybe, a plantation mistress to know.

Because there are visually biracial children in her midst.

May well be the offspring of her husband.

These things inevitably led to a real complex of feelings in the household.

Jealousies. Anxieties.

And always it was the enslaved who could be the target of the kind of rage, um, that that could generate.

Jackson: Slaves are carpenters and they're blacksmiths.

They're being used for every single position that requires skill and labor.

And wherever they are, there's the thr*at of v*olence and the thr*at of terror.

Clumsy devil!

Smallwood: The labor in the field was physically the most demanding because it was backbreaking labor under a hot sun.

But house labor was hardly easy because you had such close proximity to and interaction with white people.

Morgan: One of the most important misreadings of the American South is the idea that the plantation house was a place of gentility.

It's an important image because it was an image that was used to hide the perpetration of v*olence that was happening in the kitchen, and in the dining room, and in the parlor.

Master, please. Master, don't.

Don't. Don't!

Smallwood: It was not uncommon for slaves to be punished with every kind of t*rture imaginable.

Whether it was, "Well, if a sl*ve runs away let's cut off one of his toes. He runs away again, let's cut off his whole foot."

Not my Mama! You can't!

Not me, Master. Please!

This one.

Smallwood: If you rebel, if you do anything to challenge the authority of your master, you know, you might be sold.

Morgan: Suddenly, the life that you've built is just destroyed capriciously.

Jackson: You never knew when your mother or brother or sister was going to be sold away from you.

The thr*at of separation, that never-- that never leaves.

Smallwood: The callousness with which owners would, at the drop of a hat, completely disrupt a family unit by selling a child away from his or her parents.

That an enslaved person could come home from a day in the fields to see that their loved one was just gone.

You know, just like that.

These were people whose purpose was to be purchased as a unit of labor.

Imagine what it's like to live like that.

This is why the few hours that slaves had to themselves, you know that period from sundown to sunup, was so important.

(chuckling)

That was where they did all those basic things that humans have to do...

(laughing)

...to know that they're human.

(all singing)

To play.

To laugh. To sing.

To dance.

To celebrate.

So enslaved people created their own rituals.

Their own ways of giving their families recognition and sanctity for themselves.
narrator: This is the history. In 1770, Africans and African-Americans made up nearly half of the population in the Southern colonies.

man: Let's see less talk and more work.

narrator: By 1861, the number of slaves in the U.S. increased five times over.

Baptist: Over time, slaveholding in the U.S. South gradually becomes more concentrated.

In the early eighteen-teens and '20s, something like 30% of all whites are part of slaveholding families.

man: Reverend, lovely service.

woman: This is lovely.

Isn't it? My favorite holiday.

woman: There was a huge amount of wealth concentrated in the South.

Thank you, darling.

At a certain moment, before the Civil w*r, the richest people in the United States were Southern planters.

With wealth comes the attributes of sophistication and cosmopolitanism.

Your potatoes, sir.

So when travelers went south, to view or write about the, you know, "Exotic South"--

Benjamin.

Yes, sir?

Stephanie McCurry: On the one hand, they were horrified by the v*olence that surrounded them.

You know, the casual v*olence--

You know I like heaps more honey on my sweet-taters, boy.

McCurry: But at the same time, they would write those descriptions about these people as incredibly sophisticated and "I've never met a more cultured man or a more cultured woman."

And it's seductive, as wealth always is.

Wealth has that ability to speak.

Baptist: We think about the white South before the Civil w*r as an honor culture.

And when we say that, we imagine duels.

High card will decide who fires first.

Baptist: One guy against another guy at 20 paces.

And they're pointing pistols at each other and f*ring on command.

man: You're first sh*t, Mr. Lea.

Baptist: Southern whites were used to interpersonal v*olence 'cause they inflicted it on enslaved people.

(exhales deeply)

It's not surprising they turned it on each other.

If you look at the statistics, the white South is dramatically more violent than the white North.

When you look at letters and reports and memoirs from white people who live in the cotton South via 1820s, '30s and '40s, I mean, it's insane.

70 and 80 murders among whites per hundred thousand.

It would put the U.S. South among the most violent societies in the world today.

(cries out)

(screaming)

You take me for a fool, boy?

man: One of the things that scholars have been particularly interested in is understanding the ways in which enslaved Africans resisted.

People say, "Well, if sl*very was so brutal, why were there not more sl*ve rebellions?"

In fact, scholars have now documented literally hundreds of rebellions that previously we didn't know about.

(dog barking)

Baptist: sl*ve revolts happened multiple times in U.S. history.

The most famous is Nat Turner's revolt in 1831.

What are you n*gg*r*s doing on my farm?

(g*nsh*t)

Baptist: He leads a series of att*cks on white people throughout southeastern Virginia.

Dirty bastards!

In one case, they storm into a school and k*lled a teacher and about a dozen children.

Jackson: He basically says, "Who do you think these children will grow up to be?"

These children are groomed from a young age to be masters, to be sl*ve owners.

narrator: Nat Turner's followers k*lled 60 men, woman, and children spreading terror among whites throughout the South.

Even some Northerners opposed to sl*very were shocked by Turner's uprising.

Get that loaded on the wagon.

Baptist: We have to understand also why there aren't things like Nat Turner happening every month of every year across the South.

Quickly. C'mon, move!

Baptist: Enslaved people understand the balance of power.

Move!

The deck is stacked against them.

Hurry up.

Jackson: Even when you look at rebellions that were really just rumors, the response was so violent.

Hundreds of people would be imprisoned or lynched as a result of the suspicion of a rebellion.

Baptist: And they understand that even if they don't mind losing their life, they don't have the right to make that choice for their brother, their sister, their child, their parents.

You know I like heaps more honey on my sweet-taters, boy.

Williams: But rebellion wasn't the only way that enslaved Africans could resist.

Smallwood: More common was what we've come to call, "Day-to-day resistance," which was the seemingly small gestures to push back against the system.

You think that's good?

Yes, ma'am.

Smallwood: Against the way the system demanded everything of the enslaved person's life.

For instance, deliberately working a little slower.

Morgan: Burning food or poisoning food.

Mutilating oneself so that one would not be able to do work.

Jackson: To learn how to read and to write.

Williams: To sometimes, just finding the power within that system to survive.

Morgan: Sometimes enslaved people ran away from the plantation, into free territory and rebuild their lives.

I think much more common are people who run either temporarily or to nearby locations.

And you might ask yourself, "Why would somebody risk staying in such close proximity to the sl*ve owner?"

And I think the answer is that that people have ties of love, and obligation, and connection to other enslaved people on the plantation.

Kendra Field: It's a very stark choice between family and freedom.

So people would run away and return and suffer the consequences of having left, at the hands of sl*ve owners.

(whip cracks)

Smallwood: They had to make, really, impossible choices.

(whip cracks)

They were trying to take back their lives without losing their lives in the process.

(whip cracks)

narrator: This is the history of sl*very behind...

Baptist: Historians have been debating the cause of the Civil w*r basically since 1861-- and I don't really know why.

Because it's pretty clearly, sl*very.

The secessionists made that very clear in the documents that they create.

They say, "We are seceding to protect the institution of sl*very."

Smallwood: I think it's safe to say that it was the slaves who made the Civil w*r ultimately a w*r about ending sl*very.

It was the enslaved who took every opportunity to leave the plantation and to take up arms to fight for their freedom.

Baptist: Wherever the Union Army has the slightest toehold on Southern Territory, enslaved people show up.

Literally, knocking on the doors of northern forts, saying, "Look, you could let me in or I can go back and I can dig trenches and carry amm*nit*on and bring supplies for the Southern Army 'cause that's what they're making me do."

(chuckling)

Smallwood: They escaped to Union lines in mass numbers.

And that's what pressured Union generals and Abraham Lincoln to use sl*ve people and to turn that to their advantage, and ultimately enslaved people joined the fight.

200,000 African-American men end up, in some capacity, in the Union Army or Navy, and most of them were enslaved.

Jackson: And they believe that this w*r is a w*r about sl*very.

There's no question about that.

Fire!

So they're fighting for the end of sl*very and really to bring about equality for all African-Americans.

Baptist: The Confederacy, as soon as they hear that black soldiers are enlisting with the Union, they say they're going to treat any black soldier as a sl*ve rebel.

Of course the penalty for sl*ve rebellion is death.

(all cheering)

McCurry: The Lincoln Administration attempted to insist that, "These soldiers were soldiers in our army," and regardless of race they had to be extended the protections of soldiers according to the International Rules of w*r.

But they couldn't control the behavior of Confederates, and that's what happened at Fort Pillow.

(g*nf*re)

narrator: On April 12th, 1864, at Fort Pillow in Tennessee, more than 300 African-American soldiers were massacred while attempting to surrender to Southern forces commanded by Major General Nathan Bedford Forest.

Baptist: Fort Pillow is part of this bigger phenomenon, trying to dampen the potential explosiveness of having black soldiers fighting against white sl*ve owners, soldiers and white soldiers who are defending sl*very.

narrator: On April 9th, 1865, the South officially surrenders, ending the Civil w*r.

By December 1865, approximately 4 million enslaved people have been freed.

Jackson: When you look at the years that come after the Civil w*r, the very first thing people are trying to do is find their loved ones.

To rekindle the relationships that were lost, because one in three families were separated at the auction block.

Morgan: We know that the reunification of family is a way in which people mark themselves as free.

narrator: This is the hist--

Smallwood: In the years after the Civil w*r, formerly enslaved people were deeply aware of what it meant to finally have the freedom that they'd always known they should have.

Freedom!

For the first time they had an opportunity to make that real.

Baptist: Unfortunately, the end of sl*very is not the end of exploitation and v*olence and discrimination in the South.

Jackson: People are still living in this quasi-enslaved existence in which they're never able to accrue financial stability.

Almost never able to leave the land in which they were enslaved on.

narrator: President Lincoln's administration took actions to give land to former slaves.

After his assassination, those actions were reversed.

Baptist: Despite the occasional promises that formerly enslaved people would get 40 acres and a mule, the Federal Government doesn't follow through with that.

The U.S. government, cotton merchants, Southern politicians, they want formerly enslaved people to be making cotton.

Cotton is the world's most in demand crop and the U.S. is the biggest supplier of cotton to the World Market.

To understand the role of cotton, you have to think about parallel dynamic in our own society.

And that would be oil in today's economy.

So the cotton states are politically very powerful.

The government, and the powers that be in the U.S. economy, as well as former sl*ve owners believe that they desperately need formerly enslaved people to do that kind of work.

♪ Do you want to see Jesus? ♪
♪ Certainly Lord ♪
♪ Do you want to see Jesus? ♪

Jackson: So people's ability to escape the plantation, to make a better life for themselves, is really, really tough.

It's extremely common to still be working for your former master.

Smallwood: Life for freed people did not change enough.

And you get a real return to virtual enslavement.

(dogs barking)

Williams: All types of violent confrontations are taking place between African-Americans and whites who want to reassert white supremacy.

Extreme acts of v*olence, such as lynching.

Jackson: People who are being lynched pose an economic thr*at.

They are landowners, they are entrepreneurs, they are educated people.

Your ability to make a dollar made you competition to those around you.

Poor whites, middle-class whites, it made you a direct target of the Klan.

It made you a direct target of the mob.

Baptist: We also have to implicate the white North in this.

Particularly, the Republican Party in the North, which becomes convinced that it's just too costly and maybe a bad idea to support the free people in their struggle against the attempts of white Southerners to keep them in a status that is as far away from actual freedom as possible.

narrator: This is the history of sl*very beh--

Achebe: When I talk to my students about the history of sl*very, you know, I say, it's not necessarily a "feel-good" history.

But we must tell the history as it is without whitewashing history in any way.

And I think that's what Alex Haley was trying to do with "Roots."

Smallwood: One of the things that we've learned is that sl*very and the labor and the lives of enslaved people was absolutely essential to the making of the Americas.

You take that out of the equation and the United States in the mid-19th century is not the economic powerhouse that it was.

One, two, three.

Count in your head!

Smallwood: That was the start-up cost...

Yes, Mama.

Smallwood: ...those people's lives.

McCurry: We need to be putting up things that mark this history on the landscape so that people can learn it.

Put up markers where slaves were sold in this country.

And at the sites of lynchings of African-Americans.

We have to find a way to make history, um, concrete.

You pick up those reins and tend to my horse.

Why isn't he doing what I ask?

McCurry: And I think it's actually quite shocking how little accountability, and especially official accountability, there has been for sl*very in the United States.

Obey my wife immediately.

Morgan: sl*very imposed a very particular experience of trauma on generations of African and Afro-American people.

And it made everyone involved in this system comfortable with that level of trauma, right?

With living in that space.

You need to learn!

woman: What-- what did he do, Master?

Morgan: Sometimes it reached right into your cabin and wrenched you out of it.

You be on your best behavior or I'll sell ya.

Morgan: Sometimes it was simply the possibility that that would happen.

Get your clothes on, boy.

Morgan: As we struggle now for ways to imagine a route out of the afterlife of sl*very, we're profoundly challenged.

You're pretty in this light, Kizzy.

Please, he watching us.

Because the legacy of sl*very is so deep.

Sometimes even the most obvious legacies we don't talk about.

The inequities in terms of wealth between black and white households.

The origin of that difference is obviously, clearly, sl*very.

The w*r's over for good!

Overseer can blow is his work horn all he wants, but we ain't slaves no more.

Baptist: Families came out of sl*very with nothing.

And the federal government, state governments, white society ensured that they would come out of it with nothing.

sl*very didn't have to end that way.

Reconstruction didn't have to begin without any sort of reparative justice, but it did.

That set us on a course that we're still on today where we have this tremendous difference in wealth.

Williams: I think as Americans, we're conditioned to look for and to celebrate progress.

Americans really like a tragedy with a happy ending.

A simple, progress narrative that says we're at this point and now we're at this point and look how far we've come.

I think the problem with sl*very and inequality in this country is that it's a messy story.

It's complicated.

Despite the fact that you've had tremendous progress in the African-American community, the chains that we associate with sl*very still exist in very tangible ways.

Just understanding the ways in which things haven't changed allow us to come back and to say not just how far we've come, but how far do we have to go.
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