Alex Haley

It's a known African tradition for a newborn child to be taken out at night and held up to the heavens to behold its magnificence and, in a sense, connect to a divine existence.

But I don't believe the profundity of the ritual was realized until Alex Haley depicted it in his book Roots, and it was brought to life in the television series.

The African father holding up his infant son to a starry night sky and boldly stating, "Behold the only thing greater than yourself." Decades after the series, the scene reappeared in the popular film The Lion King when the film's baboon shaman, Rafiki, lifts the cub Simba to the sky toward the end of the song The Circle of Life.

As I was working on this book, I was amazed at the reaction of people when I mentioned that scene.

Um, and it's just something that to this day, and I believe because so many people watched it, you got descendants of those people that are still talking about it.

They kinda keep it going.

And like we're talking about it right now, and I just think that's the impact of, you know, Alex Haley's Roots, um, just the, the number of people that saw it.

And of course, there's so much to unpack there, but it, it was just watched by so many people, and it just resonated with so many people.

That's my opinion.

Well, plus Alex Haley said, find the good and praise it.

I mean, we're inclined to always focus on the negative.

What's wrong? You know, all this generation, oh, the phone.

...

Alex Haley's grand-

Oh

... grandsons on the pod.

And then he learned that he was completely wrong.

And yeah, so I didn't learn that until after I was an adult and I read Alex Haley's book.

Malcolm and Martin had this huge complex relationship between the two of them about how, you know, Malcolm, it might be said, if you're looking at it from our perspective now, that Malcolm wanted Martin to fight a little harder, to have a little more edge, and Martin wanted Malcolm to kind of, you know, fight harder, but play within the rules a little bit more.

Right, exactly.

It's a known African tradition for a newborn child to be taken out at night and held up to the heavens to behold its magnificence, and in a sense, connect to a divine existence.

But I don't believe the profundity of the ritual was realized until Alex Haley depicted it in his book Roots, and it was brought to life in the television series.

The African father holding up his infant son to a starry night sky and boldly stating...

Behold, the only thing greater than yourself.

They kind of keep it going.

And like we're talking about it right now.

And I just think that's the impact of Alex Haley's roots.

Just the number of people that saw it.

It's a known African tradition for a newborn child to be taken out at night and held up to the heavens to behold its magnificence and, in a sense, connect to a divine existence.

But I don't believe the profundity of the ritual was realized until Alex Haley depicted it in his book Roots, and it was brought to life in the television series.

The African father holding up his infant son to a starry night sky and boldly stating, "Behold, the only thing greater than yourself." Decades after the series, the scene reappeared in the popular film The Lion King when the film's baboon shaman, Rafiki, lifts the cub Simba to the sky toward the end of the song The Circle of Life.

As I was working on this book, I was amazed at the reaction of people when I mentioned that scene.

Um, and it's just something that to this day, and I believe because so many people watched it, you got descendants of those people that are still talking about it.

They kinda keep it going.

And, like, we're talking about it right now, and I just think that's the impact of, you know, Alex Haley's Roots, um, just the, the number of people that saw it.

And of course, there's so much to unpack there, but it, it was just watched by so many people, and it just resonated with so many people.

A search for black origins.

As an example, perhaps one of the greatest literary hoaxes with strong racial overtones was committed by Alex Haley, author of the spurious book Roots, which fraudulently purports to trace his ancestry back to a village in Africa.

What is particularly troublesome about this hoax is that although knowledgeable researchers doubted Haley's work from the beginning, it wasn't until December 1978 when Haley settled a plagiarism lawsuit with Harold Korlander, author of the 1967 novel The African, for $650,000 that it became clear how seriously Haley had fudged his facts.

In the meantime, the book had sold 1.5 million copies and Alex Haley had won a Pulitzer Prize.

Ironically, Haley was quoted on April 10, 1977 in the New York Times, quote, It would be a scoop to beat all hell if Roots could be proved to be a hoax, and that's one of the reasons why it's so important to me to document as best I could.

The Roots hoax had enormous consequences, for the story it fabricated was used to inspire militancy in a generation of black people and was a significant factor in the development of black political power in the post-Civil Rights Movement 1970s and 1980s.