Alex Haley

By Tom Kirvan

The co-author of “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” Alex Haley was an acclaimed writer long before the book on the black leader and human rights activist climbed the bestseller list in 1965.

Haley’s star would rise to even greater heights in 1976 when he published “Roots: The Saga of an American family,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning book that remained on The New York Times bestseller list for 46 weeks and sparked a nationwide interest in genealogy.

His magnum opus spawned a television adaption in 1977, a mini-series that drew record ratings over eight consecutive nights.

“When you start about family, about lineage and ancestry, you are talking about every person on earth,” said Haley in explaining the appeal of his book.

“In every conceivable manner, the family is the link to our past, the bridge to our future.”

His saga covering seven generations of a single African American family was originally thought to be the Black version of “Gone with the Wind,” the epic Civil War drama that focused on the life of Southern belle Scarlett O’Hara. Unlike the 1940 movie, however, “Roots” made no attempt to whitewash the brutal history of slavery, addressing the topic head-on with conviction.

Alex Haley*

“Racism is taught in our society, it is not automatic,” declared Haley. “It is learned behavior toward persons with dissimilar physical characteristics.”

Born August 11, 1921, in Ithaca, N.Y., Haley was the eldest of three sons. His father was a professor of agriculture, while his mother was a homemaker. He attended a pair of historically black colleges – Alcorn State University and Elizabeth City State College – before dropping out of school to join the U.S. Coast Guard, where he would spend the next 20 years.

After retiring from the Coast Guard, which he served during World War II and the Korean War, Haley began writing for Reader’s Digest and then Playboy magazine, interviewing such notables as Muhammad Ali, attorney Melvin Belli, entertainer Sammy Davis Jr., late-night TV star Johnny Carson, football great Jim Brown, and Malcolm X.

In the late 1970s, Haley began work on a second historical novel based on another branch of his family, but he did not finish the book before he died in 1992 of a heart attack at the age of 70. Screenwriter David Stevens finished the book – “Queen: The Story of an American Family” – in 1993, the same year that it was adapted into a TV mini-series.

A year before he died, Haley said that “I look at my books the way parents look at their children.

“The fact that one becomes more successful than the others doesn’t make me love the less successful one any less.”

*University of Texas at Arlington Photograph Collection, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons