ALEX HALEY’S LEGACY REEXAMINED
Levar Burton and Ilyasa Shabazz reflect on the ‘Roots’ author’s importance after the racial justice ‘summer of awakening’
Sitting on his grandparents’ porch in Henning, Tennessee, just outside Memphis, Alex Haley said he first heard the family stories that inspired the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Roots: The Saga of an American Family.” In America’s ongoing reckoning with racism, Haley’s contributions have played a pivotal role. He is also the co-author of “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” The Commercial Appeal looks back on his living legacy.
As a recent transplant to Los Angeles, studying theater at the University of Southern California in the mid-1970s, Levar Burton wrote a paper on “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” his freshman year of college.
It was Burton’s first connection to the work of journalist Alex Haley, whose 50-plus interviews with the renowned activist formed the basis of the autobiography, published within months of Malcolm X’s 1965 assassination.
Soon after, Haley began his second book. Inspired by the stories Haley said he first heard as a boy living with his grandparents in Henning, he researched and wrote “Roots” over 12 years.
Burton was in his sophomore year of college when he reconnected with Haley’s writing, rec
ognizing the author’s name in a casting announcement for a television adaption of “Roots.”
He went on to win a starring role, as the young Kunta Kinte, kidnapped from The Gambia in West Africa and auctioned into American slavery in 1767.
The series changed Burton’s life — and American consciousness of the racism embedded in the country’s founding, he said.
“‘Roots’ was really an important occurrence for this country, in terms of at least beginning to recognize the original sin,” said Burton.
Now 63, Burton’s drawn much inspiration from what he calls “the summer of awakening” — the Black Lives Matter protests that took to the streets in every state following the Memorial Day killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.
As monuments to Confederate leaders came down around the country, protesters in Annapolis, Maryland, rallied at a statute of Haley, the Capital Gazette reported, at the dock where Kunta Kinte is believed to have been brought ashore.
“I’m wildly encouraged by the fire I saw in the streets, in the hearts and in the bellies of young people. I’m encouraged that we are in a process, still, of enlightenment. We aren’t there yet,” Burton said.
“Part of that process is a retrenchment of the old way, the old feelings, the old sense of entitlement. We are certainly bumping up against those ideas and those structures, like policing,” he said.
Burton cheered the movement along from the sidelines, mindful of COVID-19, during the summer protests. But he began the year with an intervention of his own regarding police violence, in the oral storytelling tradition that was part of Haley’s work and is central to his own.
In the web series This is My Story, the longtime “Reading Rainbow” legend who now reads short fiction in his podcast, Levar Burton Reads, gave voice to first person accounts of “the racist experiences most Black people who live in America, have in common.”
He began with his own experiences, from the start of the same school year he was cast in “Roots.”
While attending USC on a full-ride scholarship, Burton didn’t own a car, walking nightly during breaks in studying. Nightly, he said, he was stopped by police.
Handing over his ID every day for weeks had become routine until, he said, an officer pulled a gun on him. Burton said he recognized the face of the cop who’d stopped him multiple times, though the officer had no apparent recollection of him.
Introducing the web series on Twitter, Burton invoked “Roots” as an example of storytelling’s power to drive change.
“There was an America before ROOTS and there was an America after ROOTS and post ROOTS, America was a greater, more enlightened nation. We came to a better, deeper, more informed understanding of the evil nature, intent and outcomes of chattel slavery as practiced in America,” Burton tweeted on the first day of 2020.
The series aired over eight consecutive nights in 1977, surprising ABC, which Burton said developed its broadcasting plan as a strategy for containing damage, within a week, if the series tanked. It instead broke Nielsen ratings records, with an estimated 130 million Americans watching at least a portion of the eight-part series, which won eight Emmy Awards the same year.
“What they didn’t anticipate was the audience growing almost exponentially every night,” Burton said of the network’s plan for the show chronicling the traumas endured by Kinte and his family — and their triumphs, through the end of the Civil War.
“Everybody in the country was either watching it, or talking about it, or both,” Burton said. “The country experienced this moment in a genuinely shared ex
perience.”
‘Because you lived, I live today’
If you ask the author’s nephew Chris Haley, another shared experience of similar magnitude is in order, for the country to continue reckoning with the realities of racism. The Research Director of the Legacy of Slavery in Maryland program, the younger Haley helped build a searchable database of more than 400,000 pieces of information drawn from runaway ads, court documents and other information published before the Civil War.
“There needs to be a Town Hall, which encompasses the United States of America, quite frankly. Where slavery ever existed in the United States of America, that’s where it needs to be,” he said.
Meanwhile, at the individual and family level, there’s much healing to be found in researching family history in America, said the younger Haley, who became an archivist independent of his famous uncle.
Initially interested in music history, Chris Haley was drawn to a Maryland State Archives project involving the Underground Railroad and has stayed at the institution for 20 years.
Genealogy is inherently challenging, he said. For people of African American and Native American heritage, the challenge often runs much deeper, given the “purposeful disregard” to which ancestors were likely subjected, Chris Haley said.
Known as the “brick wall,” in genealogy parlance, that disregard of the past often creates a barrier to finding records for ancestors past a certain point, today.
Researching his maternal family history, Chris Haley said he’s hit it himself and encourages people to “hold that brick” as there are times when new information or research ideas provide an eventual breakthrough. “However difficult the genealogy is, the family search is, it’s worthwhile,” he said, because it’s healing to find an ancestor, independent of how far back they lived.
“To let that person know, even if its spiritually: ‘I care enough — that you lived and because you lived, I live today.’”
Genealogy also contributes mightily to understanding the shared history of our country, involving brutality he said. “The further back you go, the further back you’ll find connections between people of different ethnic backgrounds.”
Our greatest common human denominator is family
Family as a pathway to empathy was on Alex Haley’s mind when he wrote a statement for “Roots: The Next Generation,” a 1979 sequel to the original miniseries.
“Before you get to the nations, the races, the creeds, or any of the other circumstances we humans like to regard as difference between ourselves, we are first many millions of families sharing this earth,” Alex Haley wrote. “After the miracle of life itself, the greatest common human denominator is families.”
Burton considers Haley one of the four key storytelling mentors of his life — he’s currently directing a documentary centering first-person accounts of Black veterans who became active in the civil rights movement.
As a person, Burton remembers Haley as “one of the kindest, most generous, most genuine human beings” with whom he spent time.
“He had a genuine desire to commu
nicate something, in the griot tradition, to pass something important and elementally essential on to his audience. And that was the nature of humanity, in all of its glory, in all of its failings. The human struggle was what he was communicating,” Burton said.
Haley ended his closing statement to the sequel by encouraging people to collect family history from elders before they are gone. “Ask them please tell us all their memories hold about those relatives that lived before us.”
The poignancy of every day people — and proof
Teresa Mays, president of the AfroAmerican Historical and Genealogical Society of Memphis, TN and the MidSouth, she said was glued to the television when “Roots” aired.
As an inquisitive child raised by elders, Mays said she began asking the aunt and grandmother who raised her about family history as a child, hooked on Perry Mason and other detective shows growing up.
“I asked the question, ‘Who is your mother. Who is your father. What did they do,” Mays recalls. When “Roots” aired, she was glued to the television she said. “I was like I’ve got some of that information… I realized there are other people who want to do this too, who want to find out about their families,” said Mays, who is also the multicultural advisor for the Tennessee Genealogical Society.
She made her first breakthrough in finding her great-great-great grandmother in Census records at the Memphis Public Library — and has developed a rigorous verification process since, involving primary source records and other historical documentation.
Researchers often build on one another’s work, meaning accuracy must be airtight, Mays said. “Whatever you say, you have to be able to prove.”
That said, people may be surprised by the poignancy of all that is possible to verify.
“... Not everything is about tearing down the wall and going back to Africa,” Mays said of unearthing her family history since the Civil War. “These people who were cooks, chauffeur, drivers, maids, seamstresses ... they paved the way for me,” she said. “I just feel empowered when I go back and see who they were.”
Larger truths about America
Historian Peniel Joseph, writing about Haley’s contributions in the New York Times in 2016, credited “Roots” for upholding the strength of the Black family, at time when it was under assault.
The book drew criticism alongside its runaway success by experts who pointed to inconsistencies. As “a piece of historical scholarship,” the book is not without flaws, Joseph wrote. But that’s not the point, he continued.
“... ‘Roots’ was nevertheless a masterpiece of popular writing that spoke to larger truths ... blacks were no longer a people without a history, and whites were no longer innocent bystanders to the wreckage of antebellum America,” Joseph wrote.
The book brought “the inherent contradictions of American democracy” to the fore, Joseph wrote. “How a nation founded on principles of freedom and equality could, for far too long, thrive and prosper on the blood and toil of African-americans. These are enduring lessons, and we owe our awareness of them in large part to his work.
Chris Haley takes care not to promote his uncle’s book out of context. But he readily gives “Roots” credit for helping replace stigma with pride. Of lineage that traces back to people who were enslaved, he said: “Now it’s an empowerment, whereas before it was an insult.”
Mays said she’s not yet been able to identify her enslaved ancestors, but she finds fortitude in what her family survived nonetheless.
“We’ve had to be resilient. We’ve had to have that bounce back to make it. By finding your parents, your grandparents, you have a connection to that resiliency,” she said.
The everlasting influence of Malcolm X
It’s no coincidence Alex Haley wrote “Roots” after his time with Malcolm X, said Chris Haley. “That’s part of what Malcolm X helped imbue to my uncle was that feeling of pride in our African ancestors and to remind him and remind so many other people that it’s worthwhile, that it’s self empowering, to look back into your past,” Haley said.
Ilyasa Shabazz, one of the six daughters of Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz, who was a renowned advocate in her own right, said “Roots” allowed one to reflect on a key question: “Who am I?”
Her father’s famous name stands for the answers yet to be had, given all of the Black history in America, and world history involving the contributions of African civilizations, that is yet to be properly taught, Shabazz said.
“The X in my father’s name came to represent the unknown in our identity,” she said. Ongoing interest in Malcolm X’s life shows his example, as a truthteller who insisted on historical accuracy and sought solutions to racial injustice is potent for those fighting systemic inequality today, Shabazz said.
“Moral character matters,” she said. “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” has appeared consistently on the plethora of reading lists that sprung up as demand for anti-racist literature surged alongside the protests in the streets throughout 2020.
On social media, Malcolm X is quoted around 53,700 times per hour, Shabazz said she learned while researching young people’s interest in her father.
In the New Year, Shabazz will continue to add to the literature on her parents’ life and legacy with a young adult novel she co-wrote, “The Awakening of Malcolm X,” releasing in January. The book centers on the activist’s adolescent years in jail and is a follow up to Shabazz’s young adult book on her mother, “Betty Before X.”
Shabazz’s own generational views on social justice inspired the projects, she said. Her longtime experiences with mentoring underserved children taught her, “The importance of parenting our children whether we biologically birth them or not.”
For young adult readers and particular those at a cross-roads, she hopes the transformation her father underwent as a young man who dove into reading while serving time, offers an example of the transforming power of self love.
That’s part of what Shabazz would also like adult readers who continue to pick up the autobiography Haley cowrote to know about her father’s message of empowerment.
“Black Power is not exclusionary. It’s simply rooted in the understanding that no one can be left out of the human family and each of us will be held accountable,” she said. “It’s about having the capacity to recognize right from wrong.”
Information on visiting the Alex Haley Museum in Henning, Tennessee, the author’s final resting place, can be found at www.alexhaleymuseum.org. The Kunta-kinte Alex Haley Memorial in Annapolis, Maryland, is a publicly accessible outdoor installation, at the City Dock. For more information, visit www.kintehaley.org.