Sorry Kids, But Alex Haley's "Roots" Was A Fraud

From TomPaine.com:

"Let's speak candidly," Gates explained to Alex Beam of the Boston Globe (November 3, 1998). "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." Translation from Gates's buttery diplomatese: Haley was a literary imposter who slicked the discovery of Kunta Kinte, and ripped off black history as well as other writers' words, and I'll be damned to stick him in the Norton just because Roots sold a zillion copies and the miniseries broke Neilsen records. Sometimes race solidarity demands too much.

From Stanley Crouch:

In the early 1980s, when Alex Haley, the author of "Roots," was speaking at Lincoln Center, investigative reporter Philip Nobile asked him a straightforward question. Since he had paid Harold Courlander $650,000 in a plagiarism suit, why shouldn't Haley be considered a criminal instead of a hero? Haley had no answer. Well, what would you expect from someone who had pulled off one of the biggest con jobs in U.S. literary history? Yet the "Roots" hoax has sustained itself. Every PBS station in America refused to show the 1997 BBC documentary inspired by Nobile's reporting on the book.

Since "Roots" has brought millions of black tourist dollars to Gambia, one Gambian said to me, "Yes, it is a lie but it is a good lie."

From Newsense.org:

Last month, The New York Times ran an article commemorating the “Roots” anniversary. After several paragraphs of ritual praise for “Roots” as “timeless,” “eye-opening,” “poetic,” “gripping,” “a great drama” and containing “visual elegance and emotional power,” the article stated that the sense of horror the show engendered in viewers was real, “even if Kunta Kinte’s story did not ‘really happen’ the way Haley depicted it.” After cataloging some of the discrepancies in Haley’s work, the article rescued the author with this telling statement: “None of those details mar the effectiveness of the drama or the essential reality beneath its story. When his facts were challenged, Haley, who died in 1992, began calling his work ‘symbolic history,’ and on the levels of emotional truth and broad historical strokes, ‘Roots’ remains immensely potent.”

This description encapsulates one of the fundamental problems with modern liberalism. Emotions take precedence over facts and the truth is dismissed as mere “details.” The story of “Roots” is false, but that cannot be allowed to hinder the drama’s “essential reality beneath the story.”

For The New York Times, a foundation of specific false claims and historical inaccuracies somehow helps create broad historical strokes of “emotional truth.” The story may not be true, but the emotions of the viewer are, and this fact supposedly negates the story’s falsified premise. Thus we are told that “Roots” ultimately deserves its iconic status because it “remains immensely potent.” Not true, but “potent.”

As it turns out, there is a word for stories that did not “really happen,” but may be emotionally “potent” anyway. That word is “fiction.” There is also a word for “reality beneath the story,” “emotional truth,” and “symbolic history.” That word is “lies.”

Comments

[Dave]

Roots is mostly accurate in its genealogy. Only when going as far as Kizzy did he err. But she did exist as the daughter of a slave named hoping George and Isbell.

[aaroncates]

I don't think it matters at all that Alex Haley plagiarized. To me, the issue isn't about whether or not his family story is accurate. Regardless, his history of African American treatment is extremely accurate, and that cannot and should not be brushed aside. There's a difference between "white guilt" and "white acknowledgement".

A lot of people may not know this, but at least in the southeastern United States, almost no one is honest about how evil and disgusting slavery was. The whole time I was growing up in Tennessee, slavery got about a paragraph in the history textbook, and it basically read "Africans sold themselves into slavery. They were mostly treated well, and after they were freed, everybody got along."

If the writers of those books and the teachers who taught out of them were honest, that paragraph would read, "Despite varying treatments of slaves, it is historical fact that for 250 years, Africans were taken from their homes, either by being bought or stolen, were herded onto ships like cattle, beaten, branded, and after their arrival in America they were forced to work until the day they died. Females were often raped, forced to bear their masters' children, and then raise them. They had no control over their own lives or destinies, and to this day their economical status as a race has been determined by the racism that allowed their enslavement in the first place."

You can say all you want "White people today have nothing to be ashamed of." But the truth is, they do. Not of their ancestors' crimes against their fellow man, but ashamed of their constant unwillingness to admit the depravity it takes to own, dehumanize, and "domesticate" another person. The claim that "some treated their slaves well" simply does not hold up. At the end of the day, slaves were treated like slaves.

Alex Haley may have pulled a hoax with his genealogy, but he told the gospel truth about what black people in America went through. He forced Americans to stare their past in the face. It wasn't about getting anyone to apologize. It was about getting people to recognize. Unfortunately, his lack of genealogical evidence has given the people who are too scared to face reality yet another excuse to ignore history.

There's a reason the issue of slavery is still such a heated topic of debate; the misconception that is a debatable topic. It isn't. Until all Americans accept and recognize the evils of the past, it will never truly be laid to rest.

[Jamaya]

You dumb racsit white cracker,get your story straight. Do some research!Ya dumb ass!

[LIBS&Rinosuck]

Ce Ce, I am OFFENDED BY YOUR COMMENT! I am white, and I abhor racism. Racism exists in all races, unfortunately.

[Me]

Yes, it's mostly fiction. Alex Haley paid $650K to the author of "The African" and admitted it himself. So what? It woke up a nation to the truth. I grew up in the south. I'm white. I got in trouble for: playing dolls with a black girl at age 7, drinking out of the wrong water fountain on a trip through Georgia, sitting with the black kids in the cafeteria the first day our high school was integrated. In Shelbyville, Tennessee these people were called 'nigras'. Openly and often. I was not even supposed to acknowledge them. Ticked me right off because the black maid's daughter was 7 years older than me and nice to me. The white kids they wanted me to play with were trashy little girls who called me names and smoked cigarettes at age 9. I thought it was completely stupid that my relatives preferred them to a Christian black teenager who made me dolls out things she found in the yard. I was thrilled that a 14 year old paid me any attention. My elders broke a hairbrush over my butt spanking me for disagreeing with them. We grew up in East Tennessee where there weren't many black kids, so racism wasn't quite as bad, but Middle Tennessee? Sheee ite! It happened. Deal with it, white folk, cause I lived through some of it. Well into the 1960's there were separate water fountains all over the south. Alex Haley got rich telling this story and ripping off another author was wrong, but they settled it with money. Roots raised white awareness of how evil racism can be. It also raised black pride in America. It helped heal the wounds of the issue that just would not be healed. I just again finished watching the library DVD I checked out of 'Queen'. He deserves every award he ever got.

[briana]

this is rude i have to do a school project oh Haley and all you can say is this info is a fraud .wow ,don't believe what you always here this page
sickens me

[Darkforeboding]

I don't want to take anything away from the book "Roots." It was a work of fiction. Even though it was there were probably some similar stories that were true. Alex Haley did a disservice to his readers by representing "Roots" as his work and as a true story. And he did another disservice to his readers by making the main theme of the book "you can't trust toubab." Lying about the story only suggests that there isn't a real story out there that is worth hearing, and that isn't true.

[wishing u greatness]

I feel so sorry for where we have come from and where we are headed,I too shall pray for those who mistreated so many people, You can hide it state move on and even pretend it all was a lie but in time you yes you will need to answer to a higher power...

[jg collins]

I met Alex Haley once. He sat down and told me (among other things) that he and his aide filed early drafts and research notes in the same stack. As a result, he said, by the time he finished the first draft, after ten years of work, he could no longer tell research from manuscript. Thus notes from one source made it into the final draft, according to Haley himself. (There were 80, actually.)

Yes, the book was fiction, but Haley (just like James Frey of "A Million Little Pieces," 2003) represented it early on as a true story for marketing purposes.

Haley did all he could to make it real, including a trip to a typical part of Africa. Let's not be too hard on him. He was a professional writer and paid his dues a hundred times over, like most of us. But let's not pretend he was perfectly blameless, either.

I still like him, despite all that.

[TooMuchTime]

And if any body was a fraud Christopher Columbus discovering America when the Native Americans were there first.

**********

First off, the "native americans" of which you speak were the second group of people to cross the land bridge between what is now Russian and Alaska.

This second group displaced the first through murder and slavery. Sounds rather familiar, no?

I am a native american; that is, I was born here.

All of this is just so much PC bullsh!t. We are fed lies and plagerism as though it was the truth. That is the real problem.

[PD]

A.S hit the nail on the head. Nothing should be beyond examination. There are still too many subjects where emotion overrides rational debate. What I remember quite vividly about Roots is the enormous sense of belonging and pride it gave to black people at the time. On that level it was very positive. Though when Alex was exposed as a fraud a lot of my friends felt crushed and deflated. They were angry that the first real connection with 'their' own history was tarnished in this way. Tom is right when he maintains TV networks, publishers and Alex Haley himself sold it as a 'true story'. Vested commercial interests clearly got the better of the truth. If you go to The Gambia and the West African coastlines you will see forts on the beaches where African tribes traded in human misery with europeans. That is why it was called The Slave Trade. Africans traded fellow Africans for european goods. Wealthy African traders would often send their sons off to europe for a 'good education', without a thought for the slaves who perished on the same journey. The reality is that slavery has been and still is, part and parcel of African culture. I have witnessed many African-Americans beat a path to West Africa in search of their own 'truth' only to weep in anguish when they discover how complicit their people were in this tyranny. I hope one day a well researched, credible and honest account is written that does justice to the memory of those who died in this atrocity. The truth is out there somewhere, but it doesn't live on the pages of Alex Haley's book.

[Edward E Carayol]

Roots was never a fraud and is never a fraud. I am currently writing an article about the Mandinka people.. Kunta Kinteh was one, he was from The Gambia Juffereh, and Alex Hailey traced his roots straight to him (kunta kinteh). Say whatever u want to say about Roots, he plagiarized it..... he's a fraud.... But u arev welcomed to The Gambia to see the resemblance of The Late Alex Hailey to the other descendants of Kunta Kinteh... Genes dont lie, but people do....

[A.S.]

P.S. The reality is that it is "politically incorrect" to discuss this plagiarism. That should not be the case - truth should trump political correctness.

[A.S.]

It doesn't bother me so much that "Roots" is more fiction than Alex Haley portrayed it to be (although that was wrong). What does bother me is that, in the suit Courlander filed against Haley, it was found that 80 or so passages were lifted from "The African". It was determined that Mr. Haley committed perjury and the judge stated he would have charged him with perjury had the case not been settled out of court. The judge also stated that he would have ruled in Courlander's favor. I don't like that fact that Mr. Haley accepted a Pulitzer prize and accolades for the rest of his life when he "cheated". "Roots" is a wonderful story and I'm glad it was told. It really did open the eyes of a lot of people to how slavery was. It's effect on America was astounding, in a very good way. I just don't like someone taking credit for something not their own. Why is there so much resistance to acknowledging the truth about the authorship and veracity of "Roots"? It's a classic, its publication and the miniseries were a watershed event in American History. It also happens to be mostly fiction and parts were stolen from another author. And, yes, as many here have pointed out, racism occurs from both sides; and many people do not know that slaves are STILL being sold out of Africa, among other places. I heard recently that 400,000 humans are "trafficked" each year (worldwide) - sold into slavery for work, prostitution, etc. In some countries, I believe it is still legal to own slaves. Abominable to consider humans as property.
With what I have read, the Pulitzer Prize should be revoked (or whatever the correct term is for that)in the interest of setting the record straight. I cannot admire a person who takes credit where it is not due.

[w.a.]

I am of the generation that was lied to. I grew up thinking that Roots was true, that Alex Haley really did find his ancestors and trace them all the way back to Africa. But now hearing all this, it's a bit disappointing. I've even heard that he fabricated most of his ancestors -- he didn't trace them at all! Is that true???

Even though most of the story is fabricated, I'm still very glad that I read the book because now I know things about slavery and black history that they wouldn't teach me in school. I know how my ancestors were chained in their own waste and beaten and raped and tossed overboard to the sharks. I went to kind of racist or either indifferent schools where no one cared about teaching black history so my education concerning the slave era was very limited. But now, thanks to Haley, I know these things and in the end, it doesn't really matter whether or not his ancestors were real or if the Gambians set up his meeting with the griot.

I've been reading the comments and it's really sad to see people getting angry here and pointing fingers about who did what. Wasn't the whole point of Roots to educate us so we wouldn't continue on in hatred? The book wasn't meant to villianize all whites and glorify blacks. It was simply meant to educate us about events in our history that often go overlooked and ignored.

So please, let's not start pointing fingers and going back and forth about who did what and who enslaved who first. Human begins enslave human beings. It's been going on since the beginning of time and, given the power-hungry nature of man, it's not likely to stop completely. Everybody is guilty of racism: white, black, purple, pink, and blue. Everyone. No one is saying it’s just all white people so calm down and get a grip.

[John Do IV]

Hey you, T. McMahon, you are nothing but an stupid redneck racist motherfucker. Why don´t you just simply admit it? Screw you and your little website, you bastard son of a bitch.

[Garrett R. VanAtten]

You know every time I get to this site I think more and more to my self "This is how you know when someone does not have a life, is when they make a web site dedicated to one man's book and how it is so much of a "fraud" as Tom has put. I guess the point is if it were a fraud Alex Haley was trying to make a point and that point was to teach children of every race how hard it was for the Average African when they were brought to America by the Euro's so unfortunatlly for Tom, he will not be able to stop the idea of what the world was like a long time ago.

Just thought this was an interesting read

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States

Take a look at the picture of Peter the slave. And then you say that the black man who hates his master is a racist? WOW, what logic!

I think the whites aren't told to feel ashamed of their past, but to learn from it and not to make the same mistakes or hate the same way their ancestors did. Most of those who advocate "sending the blacks to their homeland" came to this land much after the "Africans" landed here.

So much so that even the American Nazi Party's leader George Rockwell's ancestors came to America AFTER Hailey's, and yet he called the blacks African and himself an American.

Some people's logic is just twisted, and that's how it'll always be.

[i luved roots]

in response to cw drummer they hated the whites because they were kidnapped by the whites so screw you

[Boomer]

The monumental lie that is Alex Haley's “Roots” is perpetuated by a noxious combination of Political Correctness & white guilt. White liberals in this country, particularly in academia, tend to treat African-Americans as if they’re mentally impaired children that require special treatment and a lower set of standards in order to succeed. What these well-meaning but sorely misguided white “progressives” fail to understand is that perpetuating this hoax will do more harm than good to African-Americans in the long run.

Sadly, it’s reached a point where any hint at a discussion of Haley’s well documented acts of plagiarism is strictly verboten, hence why that 1997 BBC documentary exposing Haley is banned. Think about that. We’re now banning documentaries, and in effect, curbing free speech to keep this lie going. It’s absolutely disgraceful.