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.

The Knoxville News Sentinel reported that the KCS book-banning committee had previously reviewed an excerpt from Roots and did not recommend banning it. KCS did not answer a question from the Guardian on what new concerns had been raised.

The decision means the material can still be taught in classes; it just cannot be available on library shelves.

Alex Haley’s grandson Bill Haley, a co-founder of an organization named the Inherited Roots Project, said the decision was “incredibly short-sighted and without merit”.

“My grandfather famously said: ‘I think one of the most fascinating things you can do after you learn about your own people is to study something about the history and culture of other people,’” Haley said. “If a book like Roots depicting my family’s multigenerational journey through our nation’s uncomfortable history of slavery may be offensive to some readers, then why not ban another American classic, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which some readers may find offensive.”

Tasslyn Magnusson, a senior adviser at PEN America, the free expression non-profit, said banning books such as Roots “robs students of a critical connection point as they learn about the world and America’s past”.

“Roots provides a powerful entry point into what the slave trade meant, what it was like to be a slave and what it was like to be part of a culture that had slavery and the impact of that. It transformed our culture in a way that made people understand the inhumanity of slavery. And it did it without being exploitative or demeaning, but in a holistic and real fashion.”

Other titles banned by KCS under the act – of which there are now 124 – since early 2025 include The Handmaid’s Tale, Water for Elephants and The Kite Runner.

According to a report from October 2025, Tennessee ranks third in the country with more than 1,600 books banned over the previous year, surpassed only by Texas and Florida.

Alex Haley spent some of his younger years in Tennessee and later returned to live in Knoxville. There is a statue of him in East Knoxville, and he is buried on the grounds of his childhood home in Henning, which is now a museum.

Magnusson said it was harmful to students to take book excerpts out of context to justify banning books under laws such as the one that KCS used.

“We’re closing off places for students to understand stories on a new level and evaluate the world on their own,” she said.