KNOXVILLE — Knox County Schools has removed Alex Haley's novel Roots from its school library shelves under Tennessee's Age-Appropriate Materials Act. A district review committee determined that a passage in Chapter 84 was not age appropriate under state law, while the book remains permitted in classroom instruction.

Tennessee's Age-Appropriate Materials Act, first passed in 2022, requires schools to maintain a public list of library materials and to have a policy for reviewing them based on feedback from parents, guardians, students, or school employees. The law prohibits school library titles that contain nudity, sexual abuse, sexual content, or "excessive violence."

"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," Knox County Schools spokesperson Carly Harrington said. "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."

Roots, first published on August 17, 1976, tells the story of Kunta Kinte, an African man taken from the Gambia and sold into slavery in North America, and chronicles six generations of his descendants culminating with the author. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into a 1977 ABC miniseries watched by an estimated 130 million viewers. Haley spent part of his childhood in Henning, Tennessee, later lived in Knoxville and on a farm in Clinton, and is buried on the grounds of his childhood home in Henning, which is now a museum. A statue of him stands in Haley Heritage Square in Morningside Park in Knoxville.

Bill Haley, co-founder of the Inherited Roots Project and grandson of Alex Haley, called the ban "incredibly short-sighted and without merit." He 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." Bill Haley also cited his grandfather's words: "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.'"

"Banning books such as Roots robs students of a critical connection point as they learn about the world and America's past," Tasslyn Magnusson, a senior adviser at PEN America, said. "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."

As of May 2026, the district's list of banned books included 124 titles, among them The Handmaid's Tale, Water for Elephants, and The Kite Runner. Knox County Schools has reviewed more than 100 titles under the act over the past two years. According to an October 2025 report, Tennessee ranked third in the U.S. for the number of books banned, with more than 1,600 over the previous year, behind Texas and Florida.