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A woman was kidnapped by an African American man who forced her to watch the entire drama series 'Roots' so "she could better understand her racism", it is reported.

Robert Lee Noye allegedly held the woman - who is white - captive at his home and forced her to sit with him and watch the entire nine-hour series, about slavery, originally aired in 1977.

The 52-year-old then threatened to "kill her and spread her body parts across Interstate 380 on the way to Chicago", when she tried to get away, the Gazette reports.

Noye, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, is being held by police for first-degree harassment and false imprisonment.

The police complaint says when the woman tried to move, Noye told her to "remain seated and watch the movie with him or he would kill her and spread her body parts across Interstate 380 on the way to Chicago".

(Image: Linn Co. Sheriff's Office)

He was arrested on Monday.

Roots was based on the 1976 book Roots: The Saga of an American Family by US author Alex Haley, which spent 22 weeks at the top of The New York Times bestseller list, and later won a Pulitzer Prize.

It chronicles the struggles of an African American family over multiple generations starting with slave Kunta Kinte.

Writing in The New York Times, ­historian Roger Wilkins said its importance was comparable to the Montgomery bus boycott and the Selma to Montgomery march led by Martin Luther King in 1965.

The TV series was commissioned after Haley’s book became a sensation.

The show led to discussions in schools and homes, sparking an interest in genealogy among African-Americans keen to find out about their own past.

Roots was shown in more than 50 countries between 1977 to 1980 after it received 37 Emmy nominations and won nine, along with a Golden Globe.

In Nigeria, the show fuelled government demands for reparations.

In West Germany, it provoked some of the first discussions about the Holocaust in German broadcasting.

Viewers were hooked not only with Kinte but also other characters including Fiddler and Chicken George, and Kizzy, whose separation from her family became one of TV’s most disturbing moments.

“It humanised slavery,” said Walter Fields, past political director of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People.

“There really is no such thing as a slave. You are enslaved. Slaves are not natural.

“In our nation’s history we’d always treated slaves as objects, non-humans. Things that were owned. Roots put a human face on slavery.

"Most of us had really learned about it in churches. Because in public schools it wasn’t really being taught.

“It was a pretty radical idea to do a television series that was focused on slavery. It made Americans confront an ugly period in our past.

"You could hide a textbook. You could change the ­narrative of a speech. But you couldn’t run away from Roots.”