Roots Lesson Plan

Alex Haley was a successful journalist who had written for several major publications and authored The Autobiography of Malcolm X before turning attention to the issue of how African-Americans in the United States might trace their ancestry to Africa. This was particularly important because any record of their link to family and lineage in Africa had been erased by the experience of slavery, where blacks in the U.S. were treated as less than human and not given the respect of recording their history that whites took for granted. Haley used his own history as the template for this study, attempting through painstaking record-searching to find the history of his relatives in the United...