Tennessee school district bans Alex Haley’s Roots under 2022 state law

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.

The book and show each were cultural phenomena, transforming public understanding of slavery and African American identity – and inspiring thousands to trace their own lineage.

But KCS earlier in May pulled the novel from school shelves under Tennessee’s so-called Age-Appropriate Materials Act.

First passed in 2022, the law saw book-banning across the state soar to become third-highest in the country. It required Tennessee schools to have a public list of the materials in their libraries and to have a policy for reviewing them for appropriateness after feedback from parents, guardians, students or school employees.

The law also broadly prohibited titles if they were found to contain nudity, sexual abuse, sexual content or “excessive violence”.

A KCS spokesperson, Carly Harrington, confirmed the district’s decision to remove Roots from school library shelves under that law.

“As a district, we recognize the immense cultural and historical significance of Alex Haley’s Roots to our nation, to Tennessee,” and particularly to the county seat of Knoxville, Harrington said in a statement. “The decision made to remove Roots from school libraries is in no way a commentary on the literary or cultural value of the novel, but the result of adherence to state law.”

She said Roots had recently been elevated to the district’s review committee for consideration over a passage in the novel’s 84th chapter, which it determined was not “age appropriate” under Tennessee law. “Broader themes or historical significance of a work as a whole is not a consideration under the law,” Harrington added.