Alex Haley (1921-1992). Biography and creativity

Abiographer, journalist, and celebrated novelist, Alex Haley was born in Ithaca, New York, on August 11, 1921, the oldest son of Simon Alexander Haley, a college professor, and Bertha George Palmer, an elementary school teacher. Soon after their son’s birth, when both parents were in graduate school—his mother at Ithaca Conservatory of Music and his father at Cornell University—Simon and Bertha sent their infant son to Henning, Tennessee, where he was raised largely by his grandmother and aunts.

Haley heard about family history from his grandmother, Cynthia Palmer, who told Alex the family lore, tracing their lineage to a slave taken to America from Africa, named IKintay. Alex whiled away the hours listening to tales on his grandmother’s porch, tales that would ultimately inspire him to write his highly influential masterwork Roots. Kintay refused to accept his christened slave name of Toby and frequently tried to escape from his plantation.

This story fascinated Haley because of Kintay’s pride and determination to retain his African identity. With it in mind, Haley wrote Roots, a fictional saga based on research and the tales he heard as a child, an endeavor fueled by Haley’s desire to tell his family’s story, which he believed as representative of the African-American experience. In addition to this novel, which most Americans knew through a television series, Haley, after extensive interviews, coauthored The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which records the life of a key figure in the Civil Rights movement as told from Malcom X’s perspective. (For more information on this work, see the entry on Malcolm X.)

Although Haley eventually became an author known to millions, he was not an outstanding student. After graduating from high school and attending Alcorn A&M in Mississippi, Haley transferred to Elizabeth City State Teachers College in North Carolina, where he studied from 1937 to 1939. Haley joined the U.S. Coast Guard during World War II and began writing in his spare time to relieve boredom on long sea voyages. He wrote love letters for his fellow sailors, which they sent to their girlfriends and wives, and began composing adventure stories. Haley also published several magazine articles during this period, eventually working as a Coast Guard journalist. After an illustrious 20-year military career in the Coast Guard, during which he ascended from mess boy to chief journalist, Haley retired in 1959 at the age of 37. He then decided to embark upon a second career as a writer.

After divorcing his first wife and having his pension appropriated to pay for child support, Haley moved to a basement apartment in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City, barely subsisting on what little he managed to save or borrow until he could establish himself as a writer. Eventually, Haley’s perseverance was rewarded: Haley’s articles started appearing in popular magazines, including Reader’s Digest. These publications led to a Playboy magazine assignment: an interview with the famed jazz musician Miles Davis in 1962. The Playboy assignments led Haley to many other candid and insightful interviews with public figures such as Elijah Muhammad, Muhammad Ali, Martin Luther King, Jr., Quincy Jones, Johnny Carson, and the American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell. In 1963, Playboy asked Haley to write an article on Malcolm X, the controversial African-American nationalist.

During the interview with Malcolm X, then one of the followers of Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X asked Haley to help him tell his life story. As a representative for Elijah Muhammad and as a gifted orator with a busy schedule of speaking engagements, Malcolm X delegated the task of recording his life to Haley. The result of that collaboration, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, was published in 1965 and sold 6 million copies.

Haley wrote the text from notes he made during informal conversations, extended interviews, dictations, and diary entries. Although Malcolm X did not live to see the book published, he read and authorized the semiautobiography before his premature death in February 1965, when he was assassinated by unknown assailants while lecturing at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City. The book offered an unexpected portrait of a man many Americans conceived of as a militant racist. The Autobiography of Malcolm X portrays Malcolm X as both a humane and visionary thinker with great insights into the black experience, a once- militant man (Malcolm X described himself as “the angriest black man in America”) who, after his conversion to Islam, rejected separatist views and embraced what he referred to as a “Human Society.”

Haley’s rendering of Malcolm X’s life remains an influential, insightful look at one of the most important and charismatic black leaders during the turbulent fight for civil rights in the 1960s, a leader who, after angrily fighting for the black cause, focused on hope for a peaceful future. Like the autobiography of Frederick Douglass, Haley’s work is an important historical document and a humanistic work of literature now considered part of the American literary canon.

A few weeks after finishing The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Haley began researching his family’s genealogy, which led him to write his epic-length and Pulitzer Prize-winning (1977) novel Roots (1976). The tales that Haley heard as a young boy in the 1920s and 1930s inspired him in 1964 to research his maternal ancestry. After digging through national and state archives, Haley approached Doubleday with an idea for a novel, which he planned to entitle Before This Anger, a record of his family’s history and eventual triumph over slavery. Securing an advance, Haley conducted further research in the United States.

This research project widened dramatically in scope when Haley, purportedly after consulting the African linguist Dr. Jan Vansina, learned that certain words his grandmother had spoken were similar to the language spoken by the Mandingo people of Gambia. With the help of another advance, this time from Reader’s Digest, Haley traveled to Gambia, eventually locating the region where his ancestor Kunta was abducted. While there, Haley claims to have spoken with a griot—a village historian trained from a young age to memorize and recite an account of the important events that transpired in village life.

The griot allegedly told Haley of a villager named Kunta, the eldest son of Omoro Kinte, who disappeared while chopping wood. Haley, convinced he had found the link between his ancestry in colonial America and Gambia, was ecstatic. Over 12 years he researched and wrote this quasi-historical, semifictional story of his family, during which he frequented archives, interviewed relatives, and even traveled to Liberia, taking a ship from there to America to help him reenact the Middle Passage his ancestor Kunta Kinte endured.

Roots tells the story of Haley’s maternal ancestors, their passage to the United States, and their lives as slaves. The book begins with Kinte (Kintay), the young rebellious slave, before he is captured in Gambia and sold into slavery in 1767. It follows the family through their trials, describing the hardship of slave life, until they are emancipated in 1865. The narrative ends in the present day, as Haley reflects on the significance of his family’s story. The original version of the novel appeared in condensed form in Reader’s Digest; the full-length work earned critical praise and topped best-seller lists. A year after publication of the complete book, the 12-hour Roots miniseries aired on ABC January 23-30, 1977, seen by an estimated 120 million viewers. ABC’s televised version of the novel propelled both the book and the author into overnight fame; Haley and Roots became household names. Significantly, the series defied network expectations, drew an enormous audience, helped redefine black-oriented programming, and spawned a new television genre: the multiple-evening series.

Roots had a significant impact on literary and television history. To appreciate Haley’s contribution to popular culture, the cultural context of America at the time he published Roots must be considered: Haley struck a cord with many Americans, offering a well-documented narrative that traced the history of African-American oppression and African-American culture, related from the perspective of individual characters and on a human scale. In 1977, Haley received the Pulitzer Prize for Roots, as well as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP’s) Spingarn Medal. In a survey of university and college administrators conducted by Scholastic Magazine, Haley was selected as one of America’s foremost literary figures. By December 1978, Roots had sold almost 5 million copies and had been reprinted in 23 languages. In 1979, ABC aired a second miniseries, Roots: The Next Generation, also written by Haley, which chronicled the family history up until the publishing of Roots. James Earl Jones played Haley’s character, shown interviewing the American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell and researching his family saga.

After the phenomenal success of Roots, Haley’s reputation was tarnished when the author faced plagiarism charges. Margaret Walker Alexander, African- American poet and novelist, author of Jubilee (1966) and winner of the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award, charged Haley with copyright infringement on April 20, 1977. Eventually the charges were dropped, but Haley incurred $100,000 in legal fees. Harold Courlander, a white specialist on African- American folklore, also charged Haley with plagiarism, contending that large passages from Roots were taken from his novel The African (1968). In an interview held after Haley’s death, Judge Robert Ward told the interviewer Philip Nobile he would have ruled against Haley and had considered charging him with perjury. But on the eve of Judge Ward’s decision, Haley agreed to pay Courlander $650,000, and the case was closed, with Haley conceding that he incorporated passages from Courlander’s work.

Despite the scandal, Haley continued to write. In 1988, he held a promotional tour for his novella A Different Kind of Christmas, which tells of slave escapes in the United States before the Civil War. The story focuses on Fletcher Randall, the son of slave-holding Southern parents, who meets a family of Quaker abolitionists while studying at Princeton. Interestingly, Haley paints the portrait of a man who initially defends slavery but grows to see it as an evil institution. Ultimately Randall works as an agent for the Underground Railroad, helping slaves escape to freedom. In the same year, Haley also promoted a drama, Roots: The Gift, a two-hour television special that chronicles the story of two principal characters (slaves) from Roots who make a break for freedom on Christmas Eve.

Haley nearly completed a final novel, Queen (1993), which tells the story of a mulatto woman who struggles with her identity. Originally intended to have the same scope as Roots, with Haley tracing his paternal genealogy through his grandmother’s rapist slave master to the shores of Ireland, Queen was finished by David Stevens and published as Alex Haley’s Queen. It was subsequently adapted for the screen in 1993, with the acclaimed actress Halle Berry playing the main character. Thematically, the story explores the hardships and prejudices experienced by a mulatto who overcomes staggering odds to develop her own identity.

During Queen’s life, she is ridiculed by the black slaves as a child and hated by most of the whites, especially the wife of James Jackson, a man who loves Queen. She tries to pass for white on occasion but is never comfortable living a lie. Many of her own people distrust her; she is treated as an outcast. The story focuses on the struggles of biracial individuals and the fear of miscegenation during a time when biracialism was not tolerated. Besides chronicling Queen’s life, the novel explores the complicated relationship between blacks and whites, sweeping from the antebellum South through the Civil War and Reconstruction era to the dawn of the 20th century.

Miscegenation, the mixing or interbreeding of different races or ethnic groups, especially the interbreeding or sexual union of whites and nonwhites, greatly interested Haley. He, like many African Americans, was a product of generational race mixing common on plantations during slavery; the rape and abuse of slave women were implicitly acceptable practices that were unpunished privileges of white slave owners, who often committed such offenses without criminal repercussions. Queen details these offenses and the emotional quest of its protagonist, Queen, a fictionalized version of Haley’s paternal grandmother, who seeks to know her father and ultimately deduces he is the slave master. Although James Jackson never acknowledges his daughter, the novel does detail how Queen makes her way in the world, marrying a former slave named Haley and bearing three sons who carry her lineage.

Haley’s minor works include an unfinished fictionalized recounting of his childhood tentatively entitled “Henning.” In a similar vein, he collaborated with Norman Lear to create the television series Palmerstown, USA (1980), which was loosely based on his childhood in Tennessee. Haley also started work on a biography of Frank Willis, the security guard who revealed the Watergate break-in, an act that eventually caused the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon.

In 1987, Haley returned to Tennessee to live on a 127-acre estate north of Knoxville after residing in Beverly Hills, California, for a number of years. He died of a heart attack at a hospital in Seattle, Washington. When Haley died in 1992, he was $1.5 million in debt. One year later his reputation as a scholar and journalist was again called into question when, in February 1993, Philip Nobile, after examining the Haley papers deposited at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and interviewing many people connected to the book, concluded in a famous Village Voice cover story: “In fact, virtually every genealogical claim in Haley’s story was false. Haley’s account of his African fieldwork, particularly his encounter with the griot—the heart and soul of Roots, was complete fiction. Documents and tapes in Haley’s University of Tennessee archives reveal that Haley’s family history was fabricated from the beginning.”

Despite Haley’s questionable research and use of sources without crediting them, Roots remains an important work, one that marked a critical juncture in understanding the black experience and, as did Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, created a cultural sensation. The Autobiography of Malcolm X stands as one of the most significant sources on the life of this prominent member of Black Islam, an indispensable tool accessible to all, one that continues to be read, written about, and studied. A memorial to Alex Haley and Kunta Kinte was unveiled in 2002 in Annapolis, Maryland, on the site where Kinte first set foot on American soil. The Alex Haley Museum also opened in Annapolis in 2002.