Alex Haley

Alex Haley visits the village of Juffure in The Gambia, West Africa. The people pictured are family of the village griot (in the white robe), whose story helped Haley to establish kinship.

In 1921 Haley was born in Ithaca, New York. He grew up in Henning, Tennessee, and even after his family moved, he spent his summers there. Haley’s mother, Bertha, died when he was only twelve years old.  Haley’s father, Simon, was a respected professor of agriculture who died just before Roots was completed.

Haley was an indifferent student and eventually joined the Coast Guard.  He found he had a talent for writing, and began to submit pieces to magazines.  When he left the service at age thirty-seven, he had become the chief journalist for the Coast Guard, a position that had been created for him.

After struggling to make ends meet in his new civilian life, Haley received an assignment from Playboy to interview Miles Davis, the first of what were to become infamous as “the Playboy interviews.”  Soon afterwards, he began to collaborate with Malcolm X on his autobiography, which after Malcolm X’s death in 1965 became a bestseller.

After finishing his book on Malcolm X, Haley began researching his own family history.  He traced the names of  Tom and Irene Murray, his great-grandparents, and found a griot in Africa with knowledge of the Kinte family.

After twelve years of research, he wrote Roots: The Saga of an American Family, which became an immediate best-seller.  It was adapted into the wildly popular television miniseries of the same name.  The miniseries was followed by another, Roots: The Next Generation, and the television movies Roots: The Gift, Queen, a drama about Haley’s paternal grandmother, and Mama Flora’s Family, centering on the life of his maternal great-grandmother.

After the publication of Roots, Haley spent much time lecturing around the country. On a lecture trip to Seattle in 1992, Haley suffered a heart attack and died at age seventy-one.

 

 

 

 

Roots: The Saga of an American Family

“Roots: The Saga of an American Family” (1977) became a sensation immediately after its publication in 1976. It was adapted into a popular miniseries, and became one of the most-watched television programs in American history. Two sequels, “Roots: The Next Generations” (1979) and “Roots: The Gift” (1988), quickly followed, as well as another film based on the family history of the Haley clan, “Queen” (1993).

This award-winning six-part historical epic was one of the first examples of the miniseries format and one of the highest-rated television programs in broadcasting history. Based on the best-selling novel by author Alex Haley, Roots chronicles the progress of Haley’s own family across many generations, from the kidnapping of an African warrior by American slave traders to eventual post-Civil War freedom. Kunta Kinte (LeVar Burton) is a young tribesman of coastal Africa who has passed the rituals marking his transition into manhood. Searching for wood to build a drum, he is set upon by slavers who sell him in the United States after a nightmarish Atlantic crossing. Defiant, Kunta refuses to consider himself a slave, despite some sage advice from his mentor, the more mature Fiddler (Louis Gossett Jr.). As the years pass, the aging Kunta (John Amos) is hobbled for his repeated escape attempts. Realizing he’ll never return to Africa, Kunta settles down, becoming husband to Bell (Madge Sinclair) and father to Kizzy (Leslie Uggams), a girl infused with her father’s independent spirit. Sold and then raped by her new master, Kizzy has a son, Chicken George (Ben Vereen), a happy go lucky cockfighting expert who uses his skills to buy his freedom. George paves the way for his children, the great-grandchildren of Kunta Kinte, who finally become free in the aftermath of the Civil War.

“Roots” appealed to readers of every background: for African American readers, the story inspired pride and a greater understanding of the past; and for readers of other ethnicities, it was a powerful look at an American family’s immigrant past.  Moreover, Haley’s work is widely credited with starting the American genealogy craze.

The continuing controversy over Haley’s writing and research methods and the facts of his narrative has not dimmed his achievement. “Roots” is viewed as a mythic saga of African American history, portraying the ways in which enslaved Africans endured suffering and fought for their place in American society.  It has earned a place among the popular classics of American literature and remains a profoundly influential and well-loved books.