New TV Drama Recounts Heroic Escapes On The Underground Railroad

The article says that Roots is being remade. It is hard to imagine how they could improve on the 1970s Roots with its all star cast!!!! I could never watch Star Trek's Levar Burton playing Chief Engineer Geordi LaForge without thinking about his roots character Kunta Kinte, Louis Gossett, Jr.(as Fidler), Ben Vereen (as Chicken George), they were all amazing in Roots. "Roots received 37 Emmy Award nominations and won nine. It won also a Golden Globe and a Peabody Award. It received unprecedented Nielsen ratings for the finale, which still holds a record as the third highest rated episode for any type of television series, and the second most watched overall series finale in U.S. television history. It was produced on a budget of $6.6 million. The series introduced LeVar Burton in the role of Kunta Kinte."

I think "Roots" did more than any other movie or TV show to destroy the Southern Revisionist History about the Civil War and slavery, that picked up steam with Gone With the Wind, and was at its height in the 1950s and sixties, before the Civil Rights Era restored African-Americans to their Full Civil Rights and ended Jim Crow. The Southern Revisionist Movement (Also sometimes called "The Lost Cause" movement) tried to portray the Southern Cause as something glorious and Honorable. History judges otherwise, and many Southerners today, black and white, are pulling down the Stars and Bars (like South Carolina recently did), the Battle Flag of the Confederacy, and are saying, we need to put the Pro-Confederacy South Statutes, and Symbols in a museum where they belong.

SP5 Mark Kuzinski - Yes!

Capt Lance Gallardo - Well...

SPC Andrew Griffin My Dad told me recently what it was like to be a US Sailor from LA, California, stationed in the Jim Crow South (near Pensacola, Fl. Naval Airfield Whiting Field) and seeing with his own eyes the way Blacks had segregated bathrooms, drinking fountains, and had to sit in segregated areas in Movie Houses. It was America circa 1956-57, and it was ugly. He didn't have a car as a young enlisted man, and like many enlisted men do then and now, he hitch-hiked off base sometimes to get into town. He told me he accepted a ride with some African-American girls, who picked him up, and told him, "they never partied with a white man before" (my dad is a lighter skinned Mexican American who basically looked "white" and although he spoke Spanish fluently , he did not have a Spanish Accent). When they proceeded to light up a joint and offer him a puff, he told me he asked the girls to let him out. Later when he told his experience to some of his white Navy buddies who grew up in the South under segregation, they told him he should never do that again (get in a car with African-Americans I guess), and that it could be "trouble." As much as my dad enjoyed his time in the Navy as a Mechanic at Whiting Field in Florida, I am pretty sure he was happy to leave and get his orders assigning him to the "Boat" (The Aircraft Carrier USS Kearsarge).