Alex Haley (28 page)

But Nobile did not elicit the outrage he seemed to expect. His article got only a brief mention in the
New York Times,
and while it was the basis for a British Broadcasting Corporation documentary exposé, the BBC never got the film shown on American television. Today that film is a lost artifact, not found in American research repositories. Millions of Americans had been educated and moved emotionally by
Roots,
and they simply may not have wanted the work's meaning destroyed by a character assassination.

By 2002 Nobile had moved into unconstrained ad hominem attack mode. On the website History News Network, read widely by professional and lay historians, Nobile wrote a snarky public letter in the guise of Haley to Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose, two historians who had been accused of plagiarism. “Don't worry, be happy,” Nobile wrote. “There is life after literary disgrace. Look at me. They nailed me for copying the main plot and character for Roots from Harold Courlander's slave novel . . . and for fabricating a family tree stretching back to 18th century Gambia. (Luckily, nobody found out that I relied on a well-paid white-ghostwriter, too, the same one who secretly revised
The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
)”
22

By 2000 the neglect of Nobile's exposé had become fodder in the culture wars, allegedly an example of political correctness among the liberal elite to protect a miscreant black writer. The failure to “get” Haley was offered as evidence that liberal intelligentsia had little regard for historical truth or honesty. In 2002, when NBC broadcast a twenty-fifth anniversary retrospective on
Roots,
Stanley Crouch, a black cultural critic, wrote that the truth about
Roots
was still ignored because blacks were “obsessed with being a ‘lost' people in America. . . . Younger black people were told they were not Americans, but victims of Americanism.”
Roots,
he wrote, was an “insult to black people, and no amount of excuses will change that harsh fact.” Crouch's view did not represent those of many blacks, but a strong and growing contingent of American conservatives liked hearing such criticism from an important black intellectual. A 2005 book,
Hoodwinked: How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture,
relied mostly on Nobile to assign Haley much responsibility for Afrocentrism and to link him to “the myriad lies and half-truths that America's progressive elite has used to hijack an entire culture.”
23

* * *

Nobile's attack mattered in weighing the historical significance of Haley, because it narrowed the range of assessment. Loud accusations of lying and theft have to be addressed before a more sober, fair, and balanced assessment can emerge. Nobile's article registered with academics. He had caught Haley in misrepresentations of facts, and few professors countenanced that. The British literary scholar Helen Taylor used Nobiles' critique in her fair-minded 1995 review of the work of “the griot from Tennessee.” Jan Vansina, the African historian who had helped Haley in 1967 and whom Haley referred to time and again as his authority on Mandinka language, quoted Nobile in his 1994 biography to the effect that
Roots
was “a willful fabrication” for personal advantage. In 1999 Haley's Knoxville friend Richard Marius wrote the entry on Haley for the
Tennessee Encyclopedia.
He called Nobile's article “measured” and “a devastating final shot” at Haley.
24

It was easier to ignore Haley than to sort out the details of his alleged wrongs. Haley was all but left out of the creation of a canon of black American literature. When the
Norton Anthology of African-American Literature,
a work of almost three thousand pages covering hundreds of literary excerpts, appeared in 1997, no passage from
Roots
was included. “We didn't exclude Alex Haley from the canon, he just didn't make the cut,” said Henry Louis Gates Jr., editor of the anthology. “[There were] a lot of people who were good who just didn't make the cut.”
25

Gates and his advisers thus excluded a work that sold more than any other, that arguably touched the racial sensibilities of more Americans than any other, and that recast Americans' popular understanding of slavery more than any other. This decision seems short-sighted at the very least, and probably reflected the influence of Nobile, although Gates denied such an influence. To another reporter, Gates admitted that “most of us feel it's highly unlikely that Alex actually found the village from which his ancestors sprang.
Roots
is a work of the imagination rather than strict historical scholarship. It was an important event because it captured everyone's imagination.” That accurate assessment of Haley's work was perhaps justification for including it in the canon of African American letters, since all the works in the anthology were, after all, works of imagination. The anthology did include an excerpt from
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
(with the wrong publication date given), which carried only a brief mention that Haley had helped with the book. By then, virtually all students of black literature were crediting Haley with creating and preserving Malcolm's story, even if they thought he had depicted Malcolm inaccurately in regard to some particulars.
26

Ultimately Gates paid a silent tribute to Haley with a successful series of television programs on the genealogy of celebrities. In 2005 and 2006 he produced and hosted a miniseries,
African American Lives.
On that program, through historical evidence and DNA testing, the lineage of black celebrities—including Gates himself—was traced and revealed to those celebrities on camera, among them Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey, Quincy Jones, Tina Turner, Morgan Freeman, and Maya Angelou. The show was so popular that Gates returned in 2010 with another miniseries,
Faces of America,
which traced the genealogy of white celebrities of various ethnic backgrounds. Then, in 2012 and 2014, the series morphed into
Finding Your Roots—with Henry Louis Gates Jr.
It might have been Haley's fate to do the show, had he lived. It might never have emerged under the astute direction of Gates had Haley not done
Roots.
Haley was at least partly responsible for the ongoing exploration of Americans' roots.

To be sure, Haley's friends remembered him and his accomplishments. In 2007, on the thirtieth anniversary of the
Roots
miniseries,
Reader's Digest
produced a slick, full-color book with a dozen selections of his pieces from the magazine. Haley had meant a lot to the
Digest,
and it to him, and the book was a tribute to his work and that relationship.
27
In 2005 Al Martinez, a
Los Angeles Times
reporter, wrote an article entitled “He's the Man That February Forgot.” Another Black History Month had passed without offering any accolades for Haley. “His fall from grace was abrupt and humiliating,” Martinez said. But the memory of Haley “shines brightly in my mind,” Martinez wrote, because they had “told stories together, but mostly, we shared each other's company without demands or impositions.” Even after Haley became “a racial icon, he was the same self-effacing man I had always known. This distinguished him and, perhaps, also in a way diminished him. He wasn't your average hero.”
28

One tribute came from Haley's old friend and traveling companion Lamar Alexander, who in 2013 was the United States senator responsible for organizing the second inauguration of Barack Obama as president. Speaking briefly in front of the U.S. Capitol, Alexander complimented the peaceful reaffirmation of Obama's leadership, even as the senator knew that a large segment of whites in his home state freely expressed their hatred of the first black president. “The late Alex Haley, the author of ‘Roots,' lived his life by these six words: ‘Find the good and praise it.'”

* * *

Alex Haley happened to rise to celebrity in America at a time when American popular culture was fascinated when heroes were knocked off their pedestals. In the 1980s Martin Luther King Jr. had been shown as a plagiarist in his sermons and his dissertation. John F. Kennedy's womanizing was the subject of endless stories. Presidents Eisenhower and Franklin Roosevelt were posthumously taken to task for extramarital affairs, and longtime FBI director J. Edgar Hoover for bizarre private behavior. As Haley's detractors knew, the rules of American celebrity dictated that, once a person came under scrutiny, he or his defenders fought an uphill battle to regain his standing. In Haley's case, there was too little reflection about whether the allegations were as bad as some alleged, whether the punishment for wrongdoing fit the crime, or what, exactly, were the motives of the accuser.

The positive impact of Alex Haley's writing on the thinking and attitudes of Americans was lost—lost, at least, on the popular media. If, however, one measures that impact by the tens of millions who have read
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
and
Roots,
and the hundreds of millions who have seen the television and film renderings of those works, then Haley wrote the two most important works in black culture in the twentieth century. More than any other writer, he changed the way the masses of Americans understood the black experience. He gave whites a compelling reminder of the ugliness of racial exploitation and blacks a sense of ownership of their past, with all its travails but also its triumphs. His work was a great contribution to American culture and race relations, and it deserves to be remembered.

Note Abbreviations

Frequently Cited Sources

AHP Alex Haley Papers, University of Tennessee Libraries, Special Collections

ARC Anne Romaine Collection, University of Tennessee Libraries, Special Collections

MXC-S Malcolm X Collection, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library

KMP Ken McCormick Papers, Container 44, Papers of Doubleday and Company, Library of Congress

Frequently Cited Works

MM,
MX
Manning Marable,
Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention
(New York: Viking, 2011).

AMX
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
(New York: Ballantine, 2003). Currently, this is the most widely available edition.

McCauley Mary Siebert McCauley, “Alex Haley, a Southern Griot: A Literary Biography” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, George Peabody College of Vanderbilt University, 1983).

Frequently Cited Names in the Notes

AH Alex Haley

AR Anne Romaine

MX Malcolm X

PR Paul Revere Reynolds Jr.

Notes

Please note that some of the links referenced in this work are no longer active.

Chapter 1: Grandma's Boy

1.
Unless otherwise cited, the information on the Palmer and Haley family in this chapter is drawn from the many interviews that Alex Haley gave in the 1960s and 1970s and from his various autobiographical works, only some of which were published but all of which can be found in his papers at the University of Tennessee's Special Collections. Alex and George Haley gave lengthy interviews to researchers. See especially Anne Romaine interviews of Alex and George Haley, Anne Romaine Papers, University of Tennessee Library Special Collections, MS 2828, box 1, folders 1, 2, 7, and 8. See also Mary Seibert McCauley, “Alex Haley, a Southern Griot: A Literary Biography” (unpublished PhD dissertation, George Peabody College of Vanderbilt University, 1983). This work contains long quotes from McCauley's interviews of Alex Haley. The author interviewed George Haley on May 11, 2014.

2.
Transcript, Haley “Roots” lecture, n.p., AHP, MS 1888, box 30, folder 18.

3.
Search for Roots
manuscript, AHP, MS 1888, box 34, folder 55.

4.
Alabama A&M Reports, 1932–34, Alabama A&M University Archives, Normal, Alabama.

5.
Charles S. Johnson,
Shadow of the Plantation
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934).

6.
George Haley, interview by AR, ARC, MS 2032, box 2, folder 34.

7.
Donald Bogle,
Blacks in American Films and Television: An Encyclopedia
(New York: Garland, 1988), 295.

Chapter 2: The Cook Who Writes

1.
Roy Byrd, interview by AR, March 10, 1993, handwritten notes, ARC, MS 2032, box 2, folder 26.

2.
Logan Lannon, interview by AR, February 3, 1993, handwritten notes, ARC, MS 2032, box 2, folder 26.

3.
AR, “Alex Haley Notes,” 1991, ARC, MS 2032, box 4.

4.
George Webb, interview by AR, January 21, 1993, handwritten notes, ARC, MS 2032, box 2, folder 26.

5.
AR, “Alex Haley Notes,” 1991, ARC, MS 2032, box 4; “
Roots
II” file, AHP, MS 1888, 38, 12.

6.
AH, “Why I Remember,”
Parade,
December 1, 1991.

7.
Nan Haley, interview by AR, February 22, 1992, ARC, MS 2828, box 1, folder 6.

8.
AH, “The Most Unforgettable Character I've Met,”
Reader's Digest,
March 1961, 73–77.

9.
The Seafarer,
vol. 1, no. 17, February 1944, ARC, MS 2828, box 2, folder 19.

10.
The Seafarer,
vol. 1, no. 9, n.d. (but probably late 1943), ARC, MS 2828, box 2, folder 19.

11.
Byrd, interview by AR.

12.
Ibid.

13.
New York Times,
May 21, 1950; Kenneth Black, interview by AR, February 20, 1993, handwritten notes, ARC, MS 2032, box 2, folder 26.

14.
New York Post,
August 2, 1943; Dominic J. Capeci Jr.,
The Harlem Riot of 1943
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1977).

15.
MM,
MX,
108.

16.
Horace R. Cayton, “Fighting for White Folks?”
Nation,
September 26, 1942.

17.
“
Roots
II” file, AHP, MS 1888, box 38, folder 12.

18.
Ibid.

19.
James Playsted Wood,
Magazines in the United States
(New York: Ronald Press Company, 1956), 154, 222, 201.

20.
Alex Haley: The Playboy Interviews,
ed. Murray Fisher (New York: Ballantine, 1993), viii.

21.
Notes, “The Lord and Little David,” AHP, MS 1888, box 9, folder 2.

22.
Peggy Dowst Redman to AH, July 17, 1954; Maryse Rutledge to AH, January 22, 1954, both in AHP, MS 1888, box 9, folder 4.

23.
John H. Johnson with Lerone Bennett, Jr.,
Succeeding Against the Odds
(New York, 1989), 207,155–59.

24.
John B. Mahan, interview by AR, March 14, 1993, handwritten notes, ARC, MS 2032, box 2, folder 26.

25.
William Earle, interview by AR, March 1, 1993, handwritten notes, ARC, MS 2032, box 2, folder 26.

26.
Barnaby Conrad,
Name Dropping: Tales from my Barbary Coast Saloon
(New York: HarperCollinsWest, 1994), 60–66.

27.
Barnaby Conrad, interview by AR, n.d., ARC, MS 2032, box 2, folder 28; C. Eric Lincoln, interview by AR, April 21, 1993, ARC, 3041, 2, 1; Nan Haley, interview by AR, February 22, 1992, ARC, MS 2828, box 1, folder 6.

Chapter 3: People on the Way Up

1.
Nan Haley, interview by AR, February 22, 1992, ARC, MS 2828, box 1, folder 6.

2.
Haley diary entry, July 12, 1963, AHP MS 1888, box 19, folder 8. Fella apparently had sex with an underage girl. At the time he was sixteen years old. It is not clear whether it was the girl or her parents who accused him. Haley refers to the charge as one of statutory rape, but in 1962 the closest designation the New York Penal Code had to statutory rape was rape in the second degree, or sex with a girl under eighteen without force, coercion, or mental incapacity. The code makes no explicit provision for sex between minors. There is no evidence that what took place was forcible rape; nor is there evidence that it was not.

3.
”Origins of Roots” manuscript, AHP, MS 1888, box 34, folder 8; Logan Lannon, interview by AR, February 3, 1993, handwritten notes, ARC, MS 2032, box 2, folder 26; McCauley, 46–8; Ronald Wells, interview by AR, March 8, 1993, handwritten notes, ARC, MS 2032, box 2, folder 26; Jeffrey Elliot, “The Roots of Alex Haley's Writing career,”
Writer's Digest,
August 1980.

4.
McCauley, 49.

5.
Biographical information, AHP, MS 1888, box 19, folder 8.

6.
”Search for Roots” manuscript, AHP, MS 1888, box 19, folder 8.

7.
”Roots: The Second Hundred Years,” story meeting, January 9, 1978, AHP, MS 1888, box 38, folder 6.

8.
AH, “Negro Entertainer's Contribution to the American Way of Life,”
Cosmopolitan,
1962.

9.
Haley autobiography typescript, AHP, MS 1888, box 19, folder 8.

10.
AH, “She Makes a Joyful Noise,”
Reader's Digest,
November 1961.

11.
Miller Williams, letter to the editor,
Readers Digest,
and Alex Haley, January 22, 1963; Miller to Haley, January 28, 1963, ARC, MS 2083, box 3, folder 23; AH to Barney McHenry, February 11, 1963, ARC, MS 2032, box 3, folder 28.

12.
AH to PR, July 14, 1964, AHP, MS 1888, box 44, folder 14; McCauley, 45.

13.
MM,
MX,
139.

14.
MM,
MX,
117.

15.
MM,
MX,
113–123.

16.
”
Roots
II” file, AHP, MS 1888, box 38, folder 12;
AMX,
390.

17.
MM,
MX,
160-61;
New York Times,
March 12, 1961; James Baldwin,
The Fire Next Time
(repr. New York: Dell, 1963), 72.

18.
C. Eric Lincoln,
The Black Muslims in America
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1961).

19.
AH, “Mr. Muhammad Speaks,”
Reader's Digest,
March 1960.

20.
Nat Hentoff, “Through the Looking Glass,”
Playboy,
July 1962.

21.
Thomas Weyr,
Reaching for Paradise: The Playboy Vision of America
(New York: Times Books, 1978), 171–172;
Los Angeles Times,
June 5, 2002;
Playboy,
September 1962.

22.
M. A. Jones to DeLoach, memo, October 9, 1962, ARC, MS 2032, box 2, folder 16.

23.
AH and Alfred Balk, “Black Merchants of Hate,”
Saturday Evening Post,
January 27, 1963.

24.
MM,
MX,
232.

25.
McCauley, 68.

Chapter 4: The Fearsome Black Demagogue

1.
See books by Paul R. Reynolds:
The Writer and His Markets
(New York: Doubleday, 1959),
The Writing and Selling of Non-Fiction
(New York: Doubleday, 1963), and
The Middle Man: The Adventures of a Literary Agent
(New York: William Morrow, 1972);
New York Times,
June 11, 1988; PR to AH, April 8, 1963, AHP, MS 1888, box 44, folder 13; AH to PR, April 9, 1963, AHP, MS 1888, box 44, folder 14.

2.
New York Times,
February 11, 1978; Handler, Introduction to
AMX,
xxvi.

3.
Reynolds,
Middle Man,
199–200;
AMX,
463; MM,
MX,
248.

4.
MM,
MX,
247; PR TO AH, June 26, 1963, AHP, MS 1888, box 44, folder 14.

5.
PR to AH, May 14, 1963, AHP, MS 1888, box 44, folder 14.

6.
MX to PR, June 3, 1963; AH to PR, June 3, 1963; PR to AH, June 4, 1963; AH TO PR, June 27, 1963, all in AHP, MS 1888, box 44, folder 14.

7.
PR to AH, July 3, 1963, AHP, MS 1888, box 44, folder 14.

8.
AH to PR, September 5, 1963, October 3, AHP, MS 1888, box 44, folder 14.

9.
Russell J. Rickford,
Betty Shabazz: A Remarkable Story of Survival and Faith Before and After Malcolm X
(Napierville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2003), 80, 152; Betty Shabazz, interview by AR, January 27, 1989, ARC, MS 2032, box 3, folder 6.

10.
AMX,
394-95; AH to MX, September 25, 1963, MXC-S, folder 3, box 6.

11.
AMX,
396.

12.
Ibid., 396–398.

13.
Ibid., Handler introduction, xxvii.

14.
Ibid., Epilogue, 406.

15.
MM,
MX,
238;
New York Times,
May 12 and 19, June 4 and 25, July 28, 1963.

16.
AH to PR, June 27, 1963; AH to Wolcott Gibbs Jr., October 10, 1963, both in AHP, MS 1888, box 44, folder 14.

17.
PR to AH, September 18, 1963, AHP, MS 1888, box 44, folder 14; James F. Dwyer to Wolcott Gibbs, Jr., September 16, 1963, KMP.

18.
PR to AH, October 1, 1963, AHP, MS 1888, box 44, folder 14.

19.
AH to PR, October 10, 1963, AHP, 1888, box 44, folder 14.

20.
W. E. B. Du Bois,
The
Souls of Black Folk,
pp. 116, 126, 127, 132, 133, 169, 170, 204, and 227 in the 1903 edition, which can be found at several web locations, including:
https://archive.org/details/cu31924024920492
and
http://web.archive.org/web/20081004090243/http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng//files/15/52/47/f155247/public/DubSoul.html
; W. E. B. Du Bois,
The World of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Quotation Sourcebook,
ed. Meyer Weinberg (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1992), 208; George Bornstein, “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Jews: Ethics, Editing, and The Souls of Black,”
Textual Cultures
1(Spring 2006): 64–74.

21.
AH to Wolcott Gibbs, Jr., October 27, 1963, AHP, MS 1888, box 44, folder 14.

22.
AH to PR, September 22, 1963; AH to Wolcott Gibbs, Jr. September 25, 1963; AH memos to McCormick, Gibbs, and Reynolds, November 11, 14, 1963, and January 6, 1964; AH to Wolcott Gibbs, Jr., October 27, 1963, all in AHP, MS 1888, box 44, folder 14.

23.
AH to Wolcott Gibbs, Jr. October 11, 1963; AH Memo to McCormick, Gibbs, Reynolds November 14, 1963, both in AHP, MS 1888, box 44, folder 14.

24.
PR to AH, December 12, 1963 AHP, MS 1888, box 44, folder 14.

25.
MM,
MX,
26–32, 260.

26.
PR to AH, December 4, 1963; PR to AH, December 12, 1963; AH memo to McCormick, Gibbs, and Reynolds, December 12, 1963, all in AHP, MS 1888, box 44, folder 14.

27.
AMX,
411–13.

28.
MM,
MX,
283–84.

29.
AMX,
416–18.

30.
AH to PR, December 11, 1963; AH memos to McCormick, Gibbs, and Reynolds, January 19 and March 21, 1964; AH to PR, March 26, 1964, all in AHP, MS 1888, box 44, folder 14; AH to PR, February 6, 1964, KMP.

31.
AH memo to McCormick, Gibbs, and Reynolds, February 18,1964, ARC, MS 2032, box 3, folder 24; AH memos to McCormick, Gibbs, and Reynolds, February 10,1964; March 21,1964; and March 25, 1964, all in KMP.

32.
New York Times,
March 9, 1964.

33.
MM,
MX,
301–303.

34.
Davis quoted in MM,
MX,
324.

35.
AMX,
418.

36.
PR to AH, May 14, 1964, AHP, MS 1888, box 44, folder 14;
AMX,
419.

Chapter 5: Marked Man

1.
AMX,
338-339,
New York Times,
May 8, 1964.

2.
AMX,
420.

3.
MM,
MX,
352.

4.
MM,
MX,
178–179, 200.

5.
McCormick to John Appleton, May 13, 1964, KMP; PR to AH, May 14, 1964, AHP, MS 1888, box 44, folder 14; AH to Ken, Tony and Paul, June 14, 1964, AHP, MS 1888, box 44, folder 14.

6.
AH to MX, June 21, 1964, MXC-S, box 3, folder 6.

7.
AH to PR, June 21 and July 8, 1964, AHP, MS 1888, box 44, folder 14.

8.
”Search for Roots” manuscript, 2nd draft, January 18, 1979, n.p., AHP, MS 1888, box 34, folder 3; PR to AH, July 9, February 5, 1964; AH to PR, January 28, 1964, AHP, MS 1888, box 44, folder 14.

9.
PR to AH, June 23 and July 9, 1964; AH to PR, July 14, 1964, both in AHP, MS 1888, box 44, folder 14.