Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [385]
Roots and Alex Haley attracted controversy over the years—which comes with the territory of path-breaking iconic books, particularly on the topic of race. In 1978, novelist Harold Courlander sued Alex Haley, claiming that portions of Courlander’s novel The African had been plagiarized in Roots. After a trial, Haley settled out of court for $650,000 after admitting that several passages of Roots were copied from Courlander’s novel. However, Haley stated that the appropriation of these passages was unintentional and also claimed that researchers helping him had given him this material without citing the source. The settlement permitted the continued publication of Roots as Alex Haley wrote it. In 1988 Margaret Walker also sued him, claiming that Roots violated the copyright for her novel Jubilee. Her case was dismissed by the court.
There were also some questions about whether Roots was fact or fiction, and whether Alex Haley confused these two issues. Haley addressed these issues head-on in the book itself:
To the best of my knowledge and of my effort, every lineage statement within Roots is from either my African or American families’ carefully preserved oral history, much of which I have been able conventionally to corroborate with documents. Those documents, along with the myriad textural details of what were contemporary indigenous lifestyles, cultural history, and such that give Roots flesh have come from years of intensive research in fifty-odd libraries, archives, and other repositories on three continents.
Since I wasn’t around when most of the story occurred, by far most of the dialogue and most of the incidents are of necessity a novelized amalgam of what I know took place together with what my researching let me to plausibly feel took place.
Haley received the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal in 1977. Four thousand deans and department heads of colleges and universities throughout the country in a survey conducted by Scholastic Magazine selected Haley as America’s foremost achiever in the literature category. (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was selected in the religious category.) The ABC-TV network presented another series, Roots: The Next Generation, in February 1979 (also written by Haley). Roots had sold almost five million copies by December 1978 and had been reprinted in twenty-three languages.
Haley’s later literary projects included a history of the town of Henning, Tennessee, and a biography of Frank Wills, the security guard who discovered the Watergate break-in. In the television series Palmerstown, USA (1980), Haley collaborated with the producer Norman Lear. The series was based on Haley’s boyhood experiences in Henning.
A Different Kind of Christmas (1988) was a short novella, in which a slave manages to escape and as a result, the son of slaveholding southern parents slowly realizes that the practice of slavery is wrong. Then, in the late 1980s, Haley began working on a second historical novel based on another branch of his family, traced through his grandmother Queen—the daughter of a black slave woman and her white master. Queen (1993) was a strong epic novel, which focused on Simon Alexander Haley’s side of the family.
In 1987 Haley left his home in Beverly Hills, California, and moved to Tennessee, his family’s home state. Haley died of a heart attack on February 10, 1992, at the Swedish Hospital Medical Center in Seattle, Washington, before he could complete Queen. At his request, the novel was finished by David Stevens and was published as Alex Haley’s Queen. It was subsequently made into a movie in 1993.
Haley was posthumously awarded the Korean War Service Medal from the government of South Korea ten years after his death. This award, created in 1999, did not exist during Haley’s lifetime, but demonstrates how both his life and his legacy continue to impact the lives and works of people throughout the world to this day.
On October 10, 1991, Alex Haley gave a speech to the employees of Reader’s Digest that included information