Roots: The Next Generations

- Season 1

(1979)

It's now April 1882, 12 years later. Chicken George returns to live with Tom Harvey and his wife Irene. Tom travels to Memphis to attend a Republican convention but soon learns that his first class ticket for the train has little meaning to the conductor who refuses to let him on and tells him to ride in the baggage car. Colonel Frederick Warner is also traveling to Memphis and intercedes on Tom's behalf. At the home of Beeman Jones, Tom is pressed to support the Democratic party in return for a guarantee to protect civil rights. Carrie Barden is a black teacher who ...

It's now 1896 and Elizabeth Harvey returns home. Her father still bears a grudge over their dispute all those years ago. Cynthia Harvey makes the acquaintance of Will Palmer and he asks permission to call on her. Will plans on making something with his life and is too proud to ask her father for permission until he's something better than a railroad worker. He gets work in Bob Campbell's lumber yard and with the new job, approaches Tom who isn't going to make the same mistake he made with Lizzie. Their courting leads to marriage, though Will is late for his own ...

Will and Cynthia Palmer's daughter Bertha is off to Lane College, the first in the family to do so. There she meets Simon Haley, a fellow student who is working his way through school. She asks him out to the school picnic, more as a joke than anything else, but they soon become close. At the end of the year, she describes him to her parents as a particular dear friend, which worries her father. When Simon gets home he learns that his father needs him to help out of the farm and that there's no money for his tuition. His mother has her own ideas. Intent on returning ...

With 8 soldiers hanged for staging a mutiny in the 24th Infantry, Bertha is worried about Simon. Criticizing the army during wartime isn't necessarily a safe practice however. Will Palmer finds that the local draft board isn't applying the rules fairly to blacks. The army is commanded by white officers only and black men get little respect. One of Simon's fellow black soldier, Heywood, is badly beaten by a State Trooper and some in the platoon want to take revenge, but its Heywood who talks sense into them. They're soon sent overseas and in France face the Germans in ...

It's now 1932 and these are hard times during the Depression. A young Alex Haley is living with his parents Bertha and Simon and his grandparents. Simon is frustrated working at the lumberyard but with a Master's degree in agriculture, dreams of breaking free and teaching. Will has little interest in modernizing the operation but good news for Simon comes with a job offer as a college professor at Alabama A & M. He's embarrassed at the things that the school's president, Dr. Horace Huguley, has to do to please possible donors. In addition to his teaching duties, Simon...

It's now 1939 and 17 year-old Alex returns to home to Elizabeth City from college. He's also there to tell his father that he's not on leave to conduct a research paper but has in fact quit school. Simon has re-married since Bertha died and Alex has some difficulty with that, all the more so when he realizes that his step-mother is pregnant. Simon has high hopes for his son and firmly believes in education as they to improve your lot in life. Deciding to compromise, Simon decides he should join the army but Alex agrees to join the US Coast Guard. Like many other ...

In October 1960, Alex attends his great-aunt Liz's funeral but he and his father Simon still don't get along. Alex is now making a decent living as a writer, mainly for magazines, but his father is still disappointed in him. He interviews Malcolm X for an article he's writing for "Reader's Digest" on the Nation of Islam which leads to an article in Playboy about the black leader. "Playboy" then arranges an interview with George Lincoln Rockwell, the leader of the American Nazi Party. His successful articles lead to his first book, "The Autobiography of Malcolm X", ...