Videos: Roots

Alex Haley (EVANS) joins the Coast Guard after leaving college. He meets and marries Nan Branch (ALLEN) before being sent to the South Pacific during WWII. In the service he also discovers a passion for writing inspired by a lucrative business writing love letters for his shipmates. After the war he reenlists and moves to New York with Nan and their two children. His marriage crumbles as he spends all of his time writing.

12-year-old Alex Haley (JOHN) learns his family history from grandfather Will Palmer (SHAW). Simon Haley (HAREWOOD) lands a professorship at an Alabama college where he works with the local rural sharecroppers, helping them increase production, in addition to his classroom work. Bertha (CARA) learns she has an illness.

Seventeen years later: Will Palmer (SHAW) prospers as the owner of the lumber company. His daughter Bertha (CARA) goes to college where she falls in love with Simon Haley (HAREWOOD), a poor sharecropper's son. Bertha picks up Simon's diploma as he leaves school a week early to join the Army and World War I.

Tom Harvey's daughter, Cynthia (BANFIELD) falls in love with Will Palmer (SHAW) a railroad worker who soon lands a job at the lumber company. Tensions meanwhile mount in Henning as the white community seeks to strip the blacks of their rights. Will's friend Lee Garnet (MOSLEY) is lynched after accompanying Tom (BROWN) when he fails in his attempt to register to vote.

Could there be a worthy follow-up to the most-watched miniseries ever? But Alex Haley began carrying around a tape recorder, dictating more of his family's tales as they came to his memory. Those remembrances filled a 1,000-page transcript: raw material for Roots: The Next Generations. Thirty years later, it has lost none of its dramatic and emotional power to make us confront history and examine ourselves.

The Civil War is over but night riders terrorize ex-slaves. By marking his clients' horseshoes, Tom identifies the raiders but endangers his own life.

Chicken George is sent to England as payment for his owner's gambling debt. Fourteen years later, he returns home a free man, a status that has a profound effect on the family begun by Kunta Kinte.

At age 16, Kizzy is sold and bears her new master's son, who grows up to become fun-loving Chicken George. Yearning to see her parents, Kizzy is comforted by Samuel Bennett, but they are ill-matched.

In 1776, a nation fights for freedom...but not for all. Kunta Kinte escapes again and is crippled by slave catchers. He marries, gains a daughter and loses his long-time friend Fiddler.

Despite a violent rebellion, the slave ship Lord Ligonier completes its voyage and Kunta Kinte endures the indiginity of an Annapolis slave auction.

His name was Kunta Kinte. Kidnapped from Africa and enslaved in America in 1767, he refused to accept his slave name of Toby. Heirs kept his heroic defiance alive, whispering the name of Kunta Kinte.

12-year-old Alex Haley (Christoff St. John) learns his family history from grandfather Will Palmer (Stan Shaw).