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 American
biographer, scriptwriter, author who became famous with the publication
of the novel ROOTS, which traces his ancestry back to Africa and
covers seven American generations as they are taken slaves to the
United States. The book was adapted to television series, and woke
up an interest in genealogy, particularly among African-Americans.
Alex Haley was born in Ithaca, New York. His father was a teacher
of agriculture. The family moved to the small town of Henning, Tennessee,
when Alex Haley was an infant. In Henning Haley heard stories from
his maternal grandmother, Cynthia Palmer, who traced the family
genealogy to Haley's great-great-great-great-grandfather, who was
an African, called "Kin-tay" and brought by slave-ship to America.
Haley did not excel at school or university. During WW II Haley
enlisted in the Coast Guard as a mess boy. He started to write adventure
stories to stave off the boredom, and getting a new rating - Chief
Journalist. After twenty years of service, Haley left the Coast
Guard in 1959 to become a full-time writer. Following the years
of poverty Haley produced THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X, his first
major work. It appeared in 1965 and had immense effect on the black
power movement in the United States. From conversations with the
spokesman for the Nation of Islam (Black Muslim) movement, the author
built an account of the life of Malcolm X in his own words. Malcolm's
belief that he would not live to see the book proved correct: he
was shot to death shortly before it went to press.
In 1965 Haley stumbled upon the names of his maternal great-grandparents,
when he was going through post-Civil War records in National Archives
in Washington, D.C. This resulted to odyssey that took 11 years
and which is now part of literature history. On basis of family
tradition and research Haley travelled by safari to the village
of Juffure, to trace his own ancestor and to meet with a native
griot, an oral historian, who could name Haley's own ancestor
Kunta Kinte.
 When
Roots appeared in 1976 it gained critical and popular success, although
the truth and originality of the book faced criticism. James Baldwin
considered in his New York Times review, that Roots
suggest how each of us are vehicle of the history which have produced
us. On the other side - representing a minority opinion - Michael
Arled viewed the book and television series as Haley's own fantasies
about Going Home. It was also claimed that the griot in Juffure
was a well-known trickster and told Haley just what he wanted to
hear. However, Haley donated money to the village for a new mosque.
He had also founded in the early 1970s with his brothers the Kinte
Foundation to collection and preservation of African-American genealogy
records.
In 1977 Roots won the National Book Award and a special
Pulitzer Prize. The book sold in one-year more than million copies.
It challenged the view of black history as explored in such works
as Stanley M. Elkin's Slavery (1959). Slaves did not give
up all their ties to African culture, but humour, songs, words and
folk beliefs survived. The book showed that the oppressed never
became docile: Kunta Kinte suffered amputation of a foot for his
repeated attempts to run away. He valued his heritage so much that
he never accepted the ways of his slave masters and insisted on
being called by his real name Kinte, not by his slave name Toby.
Haley himself commented that the book was not so much history as
a study of mythmaking. "What Roots gets at in whatever
form, is that it touches the pulse of how alike we human beings
are when you get down to the bottom, beneath these man-imposed differences."
 Among
Haley's later literary projects were the history of the town of
Henning and a biography of Frank Wills, the security guard who discovered
the Watergate break-in. In television series Palmerstown, USA
(1980) Haley collaborated with producer Norman Lear. The series
was based on author's boyhood experiences in Henning. A DIFFERENT
KIND OF CHRISTMAS (1988) was a short novella in which the son of
slaveholding Southern parents slowly realizes that the practice
of slavery is wrong. QUEEN (1993), a strong epic novel, examined
the roots of his father's side of the family. The book was completed
by David Stevens. Haley died on February 10, 1992.
Haley's Playboy interviews with Malcolm X, Johnny Carson,
Martin Luther King, Miles Davis, and others, written in the years
between 1962 and 1992, have been published in an anthology. MAMA
FLORA'S FAMILY (1998), based on Haley's writings and written by
David Stevens, is a story of Flora, a black girl born to a sharecropping
family in Mississippi. Flora's life is followed from her childhood
in the pre World War I period to the present. The Civil Rights-Black
Power paradigm, that caused disagreements in many black families,
is one of the central themes of the book.
Roots: television miniseries, January 23 - January 30, 1977.
- Roots attracted some 130 million viewers - the largest audience
up to then. The idea of miniseries had not been used widely in
the United States except on public television. ABC had in the
1975-76 success with Rich Man, Poor Man, which encouraged the
network to finance additional miniseries, including Roots. The
show was run on eight consecutive nights, an hour or two each
night. During the time it played a heavy blizzard snowed up one
third of America. Each episode was complete within itself, ending
in positive, hopeful note, except the sixth and seventh. - Roots
was produced by ABC, written by William Blinn, Ernest Kinoy, James
Lee, and M. Charles Cohen, directed by David Greene, John Erman,
Marvin J. Chomsky, Gilbert Moses, and starring Ed Asner, Chuck
Connors, Carolyn Jones, O.J. Simpson, Ralph Waite, Lou Gossett,
Lorne Greene, Robert Reed, LeVar Burton (as Kunta Kinte), Ben
Veeren (as Chicken Geroge), Lynda Day George, Vic Morrow, Raymond
St Jacques, Sandy Duncan, John Amos, Leslie Uggams, MacDonald
Carey, George Hamilton, Ian MacShane, Richard Roundtree, Lloyd
Bridges, Doug McClure, Burl Ives. - A second series, Roots: The
Next Generations, was shown in 1979. It spanned the period from
1882 to the 1970s. The show ran in six 96 minutes episodes.
For further reading: American History, American Television,
ed. by John E. O'Connor (1983); Alex Haley's Roots Revisited by
Betty Winston Baye in Essense 22 (February, 1992); Alex Haley,
ed, by Nathan I. Huggins (1993); Alex Haley & Malcolm X's the
Autobiography of Malcolm X, ed. by Harold Bloom (1996)
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