The Black Informant

From Wikipedia:

Haley earned a Pulitzer Prize special award in 1977 for Roots, and the television miniseries garnered many awards, including nine Emmys and a Peabody. Haley’s fame was marred, however, by charges of plagiarism. After one trial, in which he admitted that large passages of Roots were copied from The African by Harold Courlander, Haley was permitted to settle out-of-court for $650,000. Haley claimed that the appropriation of Courlander’s passages had been unintentional. In 1988, Margaret Walker also sued Haley, claiming that Roots violated the copyright for her novel Jubilee. That case was dismissed by the court.

Additionally, the veracity of those aspects of the story which Haley claimed to be true has also been challenged. Although Haley acknowledged the novel was primarily a work of fiction, he did claim that his actual ancestor was Kunta Kinte, an African taken from the village of Juffure in what is now The Gambia. According to Haley, Kunta Kinte was sold into slavery where he was given the name Toby and, while in the service of a slavemaster named John Waller, went on to have a daughter named Kizzy, Haley’s great-great-great grandmother. Haley also claimed to have identified the specific slave ship and its specific voyage that transported Kunta Kinte from Africa to North America in 1767.

However, noted genealogist Elizabeth Shown Mills and the African-Americanist historian Gary B. Mills revisited Haley’s research and concluded that those claims of Haley’s were not true. According to the Millses, the slave named Toby who was owned by John Waller could be definitively shown to have been in North America as early as 1762. They further said that Toby died years prior to the supposed date of birth of Kizzy. There have also been suggestions that the griot in Juffure, who, during Haley’s visit there, confirmed the tale of the disappearance of Kunta Kinte, had been coached to relate such a story.

Although a friend of Haley’s, Harvard University professor Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., one of general editors the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature, has acknowledged the doubts about Haley’s claims, saying, “Most of us feel it’s highly unlikely that Alex actually found the village whence 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.” (source)

Columnist Stanley Crouch wrote about this back in 2002. Here is an excerpt:

Ward urged Courlander - the man whose novel “The African” Haley pillaged - to be quiet about his huge settlement. Ward thought that Haley had become too important to black people to be torn down in public. As I said once before in this column a few years ago, that was paternalism at its very worst: Treat them like children; they can’t handle the truth.

Haley called Nobile in February 1979 at New York magazine when he was reporting on the federal case. Haley said he shouldn’t report on the case because the Ku Klux Klan could use the outcome against his people.

On another occasion, I heard Haley protest on the radio that “they” were trying “to say that black people have no history.” At another point, according to Nobile, “He compared the truth about him to those people who attacked Anne Frank and said that there was no Holocaust. He would resort to anything.”

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.”

The book remains an opportunistic insult to black people, and no amount of excuses will change that harsh fact. (source)

The movie and book Roots has always been (and still is) a great story to me. Part of what made it great to me was that its contents were presented as a part of historical truth. Its one thing to use a creative license when retelling events in history, however it is something totally different when one STEALS another person’s work, make up other portions and present the whole thing as fact.

With or without this book/movie, slavery did happen here in America. I just find it somewhat disheartening to know that Haley stooped so low in order to get broke off. Accuracy should always be paramount when dealing with history–especially with a fractured history like ours.