Viewing page 222 of 356

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

[[image - still from Roots: The Next Generations]]
[[image - still from Good Times]]
[[caption]]"Roots: The Next Generations (with, above, Lynne Moody and Georg Stanford Brown), only occasionally counteract the black stereotypes perpetuated by such sit-coms as "Good Times" (with, right, Esther Rolle and Jimmie Walker).[[/caption]]

Let's Uproot TV's Image Of Blacks

By ROSCOE C. BROWN JR.

NEW YORK TIMES
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 1979

During an eight-day period in January 1977, 130 million Americans tuned their television sets to ABC and, in so doing, contributed to a media phenomenon: "Rootsmania." A record-breaking 85 percent of the viewing public watched at least one episode of this dramatization of Alex Haley's best-seller "Roots." Consistent with the television programming reflex of building on past successes, "Roots: The Next Generations" will have its premiere tonight at 8 on ABC-TV. The seven-episode series

____________________
[[italic]]Roscoe C. Brown Jr., the former director of the Institute of Afro-American Affairs at New York University, is the president of Bronx Community College.[[/italic]]

-which will be telecast on successive evenings through this week, with the final installment to be shown next Sunday evening - begins in Henning, Tenn., and picks up the odyssey of the descendants of Kunte Kinte, Mr. Haley's distant ancestor, a dozen years hence from when they were last seen at the end of the first series. The ensuing episodes span the lives of four generations of the Haley family from that depressing period in American history when full citizenship for blacks was actively fought by both white Southerners and Northerners to the modern civil rights activity of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, about whom Mr. Haley wrote his first successful work, "The Autobiography of Malcolm X." The series culminates with Mr. Haley's 1967 visit to Juffure, in the Gambia, where he uncovers the tap root of his African heritage through the local [[italic]]griot[[/italic]], the tribal "historian."

ABC confidently expects the number of viewers for the "Roots" sequel will top that for the original series. Viewer interest is understandable; "Roots" is an unusual story of a black family - poignant and thought-provoking because of its concern with the worst of the black experience: slavery and segregation. Yet, the commercial and artistic merits of these TV mini-series aside, the question arises as to whether television's "Roots" made a significant difference in racial attitudes in this country and, more particularly, in the way in which blacks are commonly portrayed on the medium.

.

A recent United States Civil Rights Commission study reported that blacks as portrayed on television continue to be seen in a "disproportionately high number of immature, demeaning and comical roles." It further stated that minorities, especially black men, were most often portrayed as teen-agers, service workers or students, particularly during prime time when TV viewing is heaviest. Certainly the portrayal of blacks in such situation-comedies as "Good Times," "What's Happening" and "The Jeffersons" is evidence of this. The comical buffoon "J.J." on "Good Times," the bossy sister on "What's Happening" and the boastful nouveau-riche husband on the "Jeffersons" all reinforce widely held stereotypical beliefs about black people. Each of these characters is a prototype of what some whites would like blacks to be like: "J.J." is the all-knowing

220