Roots: The Next Generations

It's now April 1882, 12 years later. Chicken George returns to live with Tom Harvey and his wife Irene. Tom travels to Memphis to attend a Republican convention but soon learns that his first class ticket for the train has little meaning to the conductor who refuses to let him on and tells him to ride in the baggage car. Colonel Frederick Warner is also traveling to Memphis and intercedes on Tom's behalf. At the home of Beeman Jones, Tom is pressed to support the Democratic party in return for a guarantee to protect civil rights. Carrie Barden is a black teacher who borrows books from the Warner's library and meets the Colonel's son, Jim. Carrie is a college graduate and the two have much in common, including poetry and literature. They are soon spending a good deal of time together and Jim quickly falls in love with her. When he asks her to marry him, she runs away. Col. Warner won't hear of it however and approaches Tom Warner to have her removed from her teaching position. It all becomes moot when Jim and Carrie run off to be married but when the newlyweds return to town, it generates a harsh reaction from the townsfolk and from the Colonel who disowns Jim. Elizabeth Harvey is seeing John Dolan and her mother tells her that if she wants to keep company with a boy, she needs to ask her father's permission. He refuses after meeting the boy and deciding his father was most likely a white man. She decides she wants to become a teacher. One generation comes to an end when Chicken George dies after an accident.

Will and Cynthia Palmer's daughter Bertha is off to Lane College, the first in the family to do so. There she meets Simon Haley, a fellow student who is working his way through school. She asks him out to the school picnic, more as a joke than anything else, but they soon become close. At the end of the year, she describes him to her parents as a particular dear friend, which worries her father. When Simon gets home he learns that his father needs him to help out of the farm and that there's no money for his tuition. His mother has her own ideas. Intent on returning to school, he gets a job as a Pullman porter where he meets someone who changes his life. Congressman Andy Warner is off to Washington and there is also a new President, Woodrow Wilson. Andy's not pleased when Earl Crowther starts a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan and they burn a cross without his permission. The Klan burns out Mr. Goldstein, the Jewish tailor. Simon misses his graduation when he enlists in the army.