How much of roots is true

The final night finds George returning from England a free man, to confront fractured family relations. It also explores the role of African-Americans in the Civil War, including the massacre at Fort Pillow, not included in the original miniseries, where Confederates took white soldiers captive and slaughtered hundreds of black soldiers. So much history — including media history. There are echoes of the first miniseries in the current production.

The remake aims at a new, younger audience and succeeds in making it newly relevant for the Black Lives Matter era. Since the miniseries is an adaptation, the question of Roots' accuracy falls to its source material, and as explained by the New York Post, Haley's book has been at the center of controversy over its historical claims for years. Though the book was presented as a factual account of Haley's own family history with some "fictional embellishments," experts soon found inconsistencies between some of its claims and historical documents.

As the story of Roots goes , Haley was the great, great, great, great-grandson of Kunta Kinte, the book's protagonist and patriarch. Kinte was a slave captured in Gambia and brought to the United States where he refused to accept his new name, "Toby," or having his freedom taken from him.

The New York Post also reports that many of the dates in Roots seem to be wrong, and that the BBC found a tape of Haley interviewing the historian of his ancestors' African home, which depicts Gambian officials and Haley correcting the man's story to better fit the author's. In an interview transcribed by the Alex Haley Roots Foundation, writer Lawrence Grobel asked Haley if he prefers to describe Roots with a different word than "novel," to which Haley replied, "Faction.

I saw that word in a book in London. There may have been an African named Kunta Kinte who was taken from Gambia, for instance, and there definitely was an American slave called Toby owned by the Waller family of Virginia. But they are almost certainly not the same person. So Haley found himself in a categorical trap and then continued to defend the indefensible, even as his problems multiplied. Needless to say, there is no conceivable logic to arguing that if Haley invented certain details about the lives of his ancestors, that invalidates his portrayal of the lived reality of slavery, or proves that he was out to defame white people and make them look like vicious historical villains.

But almost nothing about the dynamic of race and culture in American society is dictated by logic. Those are almost entirely about storytelling, not about history. Slave rebellions and other overt acts of resistance were not infrequent, and a great deal of the inhuman brutality practiced by slave-owners was driven by terror and shame.