A Tennessee school district has banned Roots, the author Alex Haley’s groundbreaking novel and one of the most renowned and influential works about the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade.
Knox county schools (KCS) took that step under a state law that has disappeared hundreds of titles from school libraries and alarmed advocates of free expression.
First published in 1976, Roots: The Saga of an American Family tells the story of Kunta Kinte, who was brutally stolen from his home in the Gambia and taken to North America to be sold into the nightmare of slavery.
The novel chronicles six generations of Kinte’s descendants in the US to Haley himself; won the Pulitzer prize; and was later adapted into a mini-series.