Alex Haley

Author

• Born: August 11, 1921
• Birthplace: Ithaca, New York
• Died: February 10, 1992
• Place of death: Seattle, Washington

Writer

The author of two influential books on the black experience, Haley was one of the most famous and successful African American writers of his time. Roots: The Saga of an American Family(1976), his historical saga that reminded many African Americans of their African heritage, was one of the biggest successes in publishing and television history.

Areas of achievement: Journalism and publishing; Literature

Early Life

Alexander Murray Palmer Haley was born in Ithaca, New York, to Simon Alexander Haley, a graduate student in agriculture at Cornell University, and Bertha George Palmer, who studied at the Ithaca Conservatory of Music. The eldest of three sons, Haley spent his early years at the home of his maternal grandparents in Henning, Tennessee. His later work would be influenced by the family stories told by his grandmother and her sisters.

The family moved around the black college communities in the South while Haley’s father taught agriculture. After graduating from high school at the age of fifteen, Haley enrolled at Elizabeth City Teachers College in North Carolina. He left after two years and in 1939 enlisted in the Coast Guard as a mess boy, one of the few positions open to African Americans at the time. The outbreak of World War II led him to remain in the military rather than completing his education. In 1941, he married Nannie Branch, with whom he had two children.

Haley’s career as a writer began in an unconventional way. To relieve his boredom at sea, he wrote love letters for his shipmates. He then began to write for magazines and, after many rejection letters, published articles in Reader’s Digest and Harper’s Magazine. After the war, a journalistic position was created for him by the Coast Guard and he advanced to the rank of chief journalist. His writing career gained momentum after his retirement from the service in 1959 at the age of thirty-seven.

Life’s Work

Haley moved to New York City to work as a freelance writer and had articles published in a number of magazines. In 1962, Playboy invited him to conduct a series of interviews with prominent African Americans, including Miles Davis, Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, Sammy Davis, Jr., Quincy Jones, Leontyne Price, andMalcolm X.

The interview with Malcolm X, the black religious leader and activist, led Haley to write his first major book, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965). Based on extensive conversations with Malcolm X, Haley wrote the book in a first-person, autobiographical style. Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965, shortly after the book went to press. The book sold millions of copies and became a classic text of the Civil Rights movement and required reading for black activists all over the world.

In 1964, Haley’s marriage to Nannie Branch ended. The same year, he married Juliette Collins, with whom he had one child. They divorced in 1972.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X established Haley as a writer, but it was his second book, Roots (1976), that turned him into a household name. Roots was based on the history of his mother’s family, as told to him by his grandmother, Cynthia Murray Palmer. His grandmother, who had been born in 1871, spoke of her great-great-grandfather Toby, who insisted on using his African name, “Kin-Tay.” He had been kidnapped and enslaved in Africa and then brought to America, where he ended up in the South and founded the family line that led down to Haley.

A publishing contract from Doubleday enabled Haley to finance research trips across the South. After he discovered that some of the names mentioned by his grandmother in her stories, such as “Kin-Tay,” were of Mandinka origin, he made a preliminary visit to Gambia in West Africa in April, 1967. Invited back later by Gambian officials, Haley traveled up the Gambia River to the village of Juffure, which he was told was his ancestor’s birthplace. There he was introduced to a griot (an oral historian) named Kebba Kanji Fofana who told Haley about a man named Kunta Kinte who disappeared while cutting wood in the forest. Fofana recounted the history of the Kinte clan, and Haley also met people who claimed to be direct descendants of Kinte’s blood brothers.

Inspired by his findings, in 1972, Haley set up the Kinte Foundation of Washington, D.C., to promote research into African American history and genealogy. He continued his research while traveling around the country giving lectures. Reader’s Digest published an early version of Roots. In 1976, the year of the bicentennial of the founding of the United States, Roots: The Saga of an American Family was published. The book traced Haley’s family back six generations to the birth of Kunta Kinte in 1750. It described the horrors of the slave trade’s Middle Passage and documented the experiences of Kinte’s descendants in America from the days of slavery through emancipation and beyond. It ended with the burial of Haley’s father. Roots became an immediate best seller and broke publishing records; its initial print run of 200,000 was unprecedented for an African American author. The book was translated into dozens of languages, and Haley won a Pulitzer Prize in 1977. When the story was made into a television miniseries by ABC, it became a national phenomenon. Broadcast over eight consecutive nights in January and February of 1977, Roots was watched by a record-setting 130 million people. The program sparked an interest in genealogy among Americans of all backgrounds. Haley became a multimillionaire and was awarded honorary doctorates and invited to serve on the boards of historically black universities.

Despite its commercial success, it was not long before Roots began to receive criticism. Although it addressed some of the prevailing stereotypes of Africa, it presented traditional life in an idyllic light. There were also allegations of copyright infringement that resulted in two court cases. In 1977, Margaret Walker alleged that Haley had copied his plotting from her 1966 Civil War novel, Jubilee. The case was dismissed, but the following year, novelist and folklorist Harold Courlander stated that passages in Roots had been lifted from his book The African, published in 1967. Haley reached an out-of-court settlement with Courlander. Although he admitted that he had copied several passages from Courlander’s novel, Haley claimed that the plagiarism had been unintentional as he had not read the book but had been given the material by researchers who failed to cite the source.

In 1979, Roots: The Next Generations, a sequel to the miniseries, was broadcast. It also attracted large audiences. Haley lectured widely, made appearances on radio and television, and continued to write for popular magazines. In 1980, he collaborated on the television series Palmerstown, USA, based on his childhood in Henning. He published only one more book, A Different Kind of Christmas (1988), a novella about the Underground Railroad. In December of the same year, Roots: The Gift was broadcast on television. The story follows two principal characters from Roots as they make a break for freedom on Christmas Eve. Haley began working on a second historical novel that traced his paternal lineage, focusing on his grandmother Queen, the daughter of a slave woman and her white master.

In 1987, Haley left Beverly Hills, California, and moved to Tennessee, his family’s home state. He suffered from health problems including diabetes and high blood pressure. While in Seattle for a speaking engagement, Haley died of cardiac arrest at age seventy.

At the time of his death, Haley was separated from his third wife, Myra Lewis. He left several unfinished manuscripts. One of these, Queen, was completed at Haley’s request by David Stevens. It was published as Alex Haley’s Queen in 1993 and made into a miniseries that aired in February, 1994. Another work, Mama Flora’s Family, also completed by Stevens, was published and adapted into a television miniseries in 1998. Other unfinished works include a novel, Denning, named for Haley’s childhood home, and a book about C. J. Walker, the first female African American self-made millionaire. After Haley’s death, many of his possessions, including his farm and manuscripts, were auctioned to pay debts he had incurred in his later years.

Significance

The author of two works of lasting cultural importance, Haley is a key figure in African American letters. His books generated an unprecedented level of interest in history and genealogy among African Americans who had been dispossessed of their heritage and identity by slavery. Roots and the television drama based on it inspired millions of black people around the world. The work was adopted for African American studies curricula and inspired many works on black history and heritage by other authors. In 2002, a memorial to Kine and Haley was erected in Annapolis, Maryland.

Bibliography

Bundles, Amelia. “Looking Back at the Roots Phenomenon.” Black Issues Book Review 3, no. 4 (July/August, 2001): 12-15. Bundles, who worked as a researcher for Haley, discusses the significance of Roots and its effect on Haley’s life.

Ferris, William R. “Alex Haley: Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1989—Angels, Legends, and Grace.” Southern Cultures 14, no. 3 (Fall, 2008): 6-25. Profile and interview in which Haley speaks about his life and influences.

Haley, Alex. Alex Haley: The Man Who Traced America’s Roots—His Life, His Works. Pleasantry, N.Y.: Reader’s Digest, 2007. A collection of articles Haley wrote for Reader’s Digest from 1954 to 1991, including an early excerpt from Roots and Haley’s accounts of the research he conducted. The accompanying DVD contains portions of Haley’s speeches and interviews.

Mobile, Philip. “Uncovering Roots.” Village Voice, February 23, 1993, 31-38. Based on interviews with some of the people involved, this article discusses the claims of plagiarism against Haley.