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

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Source: The Guardian

Fri 15 May 2026 17.01 EDT
Last modified on Fri 15 May 2026 17.51 EDT


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.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/15/tennessee-book-ban-alex-haley-roots