Alex Haley found the good and praised it
Alex Haley would have been 100 years old this week. It is a good time to recall that his sensational book, “Roots,” published in 1976, inspired much of the world’s renewed zeal for discovering our ancestors.
“Roots” won a Pulitzer Prize. It became one of the best sellers of all time. The 12-hour television series in January 1977, drew the largest audience in television history.
“He was truly a gifted person who wrote a book that was monumental,” said Benjamin Hooks, then executive director of the NAACP. “It was the story of our people, it was the story of how we came from Africa.”
It was not just the story of Black people, Haley later wrote. “About 90% of my mail is from whites, and I have yet to receive a hate letter, “he said. “The … writers tell me that (1) they are white; (2) ‘Roots’ caused them to realize they had never understood the Black condition; and (3) the book started them thinking about their own family. I have gotten thousands of letters in which the writers pour out their hearts to me, with the one recurring poignant line: Help me find out who I am.”
After “Roots,” libraries around the world began filling up with people of all backgrounds looking for their own roots.
Haley tried to image the journey of enslaved Africans to the U.S.
As a boy in the summers he would sit on his grandparents’ front porch in Henning, Tennessee, listening to his grandma and great aunts telling stories of Kunta Kinte and other African ancestors.
Alex once told me, “Sitting on that porch, rocking and telling those stories, Aunt Liz could knock a firefly out of the air at 15 feet with an accurate stream of tobacco juice.”
Three weeks before Christmas in 1987, Alex invited me to join him as one of eight passengers on a German cargo freighter crossing the Pacific from San Diego to Sydney.
According to my notes from the trip, sitting on the deck admiring the stars after dinner he told me, “It took 12 years to write ‘Roots.’ For days I rode in the belly of the ship trying to imagine what it was like when one of every four captured Africans died in those hulls, trying to hear their shrieks in the wind. I could see no way out of the mass of material that eventually became ‘Roots.’
“Then there came a time — maybe I was halfway done — when the book took over, just swept me ahead with it, like a stream rushing. The book became itself, and I became merely the instrument that made it happen.”
Haley had his detractors, but his books sold millions of copies
Some have tried to diminish Alex’s work. They say some details are inaccurate. But what would one expect of a story passed down orally by seven generations of families fractured by slavery?
Details may be questionable, but the story is painfully true. Some say Alex borrowed the stories of others. But these stories have been in plain view for two centuries crying to be told.
Haley’s biographer Robert J. Norrell says this: “Haley wrote the two most influential books on African American history in the second half of the 20th century.” (The other book was “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” published in 1965, a National Book award winner and one of TIME’S ten most important nonfiction books of the 20th century.)
“Each of his books,” Norrell wrote, “sold at least six million copies … Haley sold more books than any other African American author and all but a few white ones.”
Alex sold many more books than his critics did because he told stories better than they could, stories that had been waiting for the right person to tell them.
That right person was Alex.
I shared Haley’s wisdom at President Barack Obama’s 2013 inauguration
At his funeral in Memphis in 1992 I said that he was “God’s storyteller, put on this earth to teach us the lessons of ‘Roots,’” which he told me were “Struggle for Freedom” (”Roots I”) and “Struggle for Equality” (”Roots II”).
Another lesson is in the six words by which he lived his life: “Find the good and praise it.”
These six words are etched into the stone on the grave in front of the porch where he listened to the stories that became “Roots.” I repeated these words when I spoke at the inauguration of our country’s first African-american President in January 2013.
“’Find the good and praise it’ are six words that continue to be a good lesson for all of us. And the Haley Museum in Henning should be a destination for every family, of every background, who wants help “finding out who I am.”
Lamar Alexander, a Republican United States Senator from 2003 to 2021, was Governor of Tennessee in 1986 when the Alex Haley Museum was created.