The Publication of Roots
Forty-five years ago, August 17, 1976, Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley was published by Doubleday and shot straight into the hearts of the people. It was a good story, well-told, that spent more than 46 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and for more than five months, held the coveted number one slot.
Roots won a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation in 1977, and the novel won the National Book Award Special Citation for History that same year.
Alex Haley’s Roots took hold partly because ABC purchased the rights for a mini-series, out of a sense of “social obligation.” The network created and produced eight separate consecutive episodes that held the American public’s attention in January of 1977.
It was the mini-series, not the book, that caused my husband to hold our infant daughter up to the moon, declaring her name, “Katie Elizabeth,” in a quasi-parody of the scene where Kunte Kinte’s father held him up to the sky, offering a universe of possibilities. (Most kids know the gist of this scene from Disney’s Lion King.)
It was the mini-series that skyrocketed the career of Levar Burton, a prolific actor now known not just for his role as Kunte Kinte, but for roles in dozens of movies and television shows, including Geordi LaForge in the Star Trek franchises and as the host of the Reading Rainbow.
It was the mini-series, watched by 130 million people, that created the iconic reputation of Roots: The Saga of an American Family.
This story was based on the family history tales author Alex Haley had always heard about his ancestor, Kunte Kinte, and his abduction from Gambia by slave-traders. Roots chronicles Kinte’s forced journey to America, his trials as a slave, and his life as the progenitor of six successive generations of African-American people.
The Mini-Series that Rocked America
Matt Zoller Seitz, writing in Vulture, declares that Roots is
“the most important scripted program in broadcast network history,”
a sentiment echoed by others.
Produced by David Wolper, (the same guy who produced the ThornBirds,) the mini-series gave visual impact to the stories that had previously been ignored — or at least, under-represented.
“Nearly 40 years haven’t dimmed its ability to illuminate one of the grimmest aspects of U.S. history: its 200-year participation in the transatlantic slave trade and the racism that became institutionalized throughout the country up until the 1960s, barely a decade before Roots aired. When you consider Roots’ timeline proximity to the civil rights marches and riots of the sixties, the intraracial arguments about nonviolent-versus-violent resistance to oppression, and the overall whiteness of popular culture at that time, its very existence seems remarkable. Once you actually watch it, it seems still more remarkable. Haley and James Lee’s screenplay indicts white viewers in a meticulous, unrelenting way, showing that the entire nation was complicit in this horror, which ripped indigenous people from one continent and transplanted them in another, taking away language and religion and ritual and replacing it with the practices of oppressors, then insisting that they graciously accept servitude as a fact of life, or worse, as the manifestation of an alien Christian god’s will.”
What You Might Not Know…
Granted, it was a long time ago, but when you think of Roots today, you probably don’t think about the court cases and allegations of plagiarism that were levied against Alex Haley.
Not once, but twice.
Part of the problem came from the fact that Roots was sold in the nonfiction section of many bookstores, even though it is “historical fiction.”
The problem was compounded by the fact that Alex Haley worked so hard to showcase the research he had done and his desire to use facts, not fiction, as the foundation of his book. He spent the last seven chapters of Roots detailing the authenticity of his story.
When that line between fact and fiction becomes so blurred you don’t know when you’re stepping over it, lawsuits ensue.
The Court Cases
Alex Haley was not just accused of blurring the lines between fact and fiction. He was accused of outright plagiarism. Not once, but twice.
The first suit came a year after the publication of Roots from Dr. Margaret Walker Alexander, a professor at Jackson State College in Mississippi and the author of a lesser-known book, “Jubilee,” published in 1966. Dr. Walker’s book had been based on the life of her great-grandmother, a slave in Georgia in the era before and after the Civil War. Dr. Alexander, a prominent author and scholar, claimed that parts of Haley’s book, Roots, had been “largely copied” from her own, citing thirty-five examples of plagiarism.
Judge Marvin Frankel, however, ruled that there were “only insignificant similarities,” and dismissed the case.
But the next lawsuit, brought in 1978 by Harold Courlander, a 70-year-old author of “The African,” published in 1967, apparently packed more punch. Courlander claimed (like Dr. Alexander,) that Haley had copied passages of his book for use in Roots, alleging “substantial similarities” between The African and Roots.
The Outcome
In a six-week trial without a jury, the Federal District Court of Manhatten declared that Courlander was right. Roots did contain material taken from The African. Three passages were noted to be verbatim.
Haley adamantly denied all wrong-doing or intent to plagiarize. He believed that in his copious research, some of which was based on information that student researchers had turned into him, he had copied a passage from a book quoted by a student.
In December of 1978, the court settled in favor of Courlander who won an undisclosed amount of money, (after some legal haggling about the ability of the Judge, Robert J. Ward to be impartial and back-and-forth negotiations about the proposed size of the monetary settlement.) The final settlement was believed to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Mark Ottaway: Contributing Factor
After the publication of Roots and the mini-series in January of 1977, so many people were excited by the idea of tracing their genealogy back to their “roots,” that Gambia experienced a renaissance of tourism. A savvy British journalist, Mark Ottaway, working for The Sunday Times out of London, got the idea that he would go to Gambia and report on the changes taking place because of the Roots cultural phenomenon.
Alex Haley’s troubles were just beginning.
Mark Ottaway discovered that many of the claims that Alex Haley had made about his research, were — at best — unsubstantiated. What resulted was an exposé written by Ottaway that outlined Haley’s shoddy research, cobbled together stories from unreliable sources, and non-existent records that he had supposedly consulted. Ottaway writes that Haley’s research was…
“so confusing, so obscured by contradictory statements from different sources, that he [Haley] very nearly decided to make the African section, if not the entire book, a mere historical novel.” Although “neither you nor I know exactly what happened,” Haley allegedly said, the story of Roots represented the “symbol of the fate of my people.”
After the Ottaway piece, “Tangled Roots,” was published in 1977, Alex Haley was given a chance to respond.
What followed was a nasty battle of reputation. Haley claimed that the British journalist was a fraudulent racist out for a headline. The 5000-word exposé by Ottaway stimulated the interests of journalists from all over the world who confronted Haley about the “truth” of his novel.
“I spent twelve years doing this book,” he [ Haley] said, “and I resent any person who is obviously opportunistic, spending seven days in Africa and then writing a story which seeks to blemish the deepest, strictest, most honest research I could do, given the materials I had to work with.”
Lessons for Every Writer
Here’s the real problem — and a lesson for every writer alive.
Nonfiction has to be totally true, based on meticulous research and irrefutable evidence.
Fiction has to be sold as fiction, not passed off as non-fiction.
Research is good and explaining how you did it might help give credence to your work, but outlining your process does NOT equate to telling the absolute truth.
History and historical fiction are not the same thing.
As The Guardian cited,
Had Haley presented Roots from the outset as a novel (or overwhelmingly fictional), the doubts about its authenticity wouldn’t have mattered. But he didn’t.
If even Pulitzer-Prize winning authors can fall from grace, it could happen to you, too.
Whatever you write, be truthful. Be careful. Be authentic.
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