Roots did have an extensive educational licensing component, but squabbles over profits emerged here as well. Wolper negotiated a deal with Miami-Dade Community College to provide educational materials (marketed by Random House and Films Incorporated) that would allow participating colleges to offer Roots-based classes to students for credit. Students would purchase From Freedom to Freedom: African Roots in American Soil (1977), a two-volume study guide and collection of readings on black history.9 The deal gave Films Incorporated, a Chicago-based film supply company, the exclusive rights to sell 16 mm prints of Roots to schools and libraries. “I am very pleased with the way our marketing organization has accepted and responded to the challenge of selling ‘Roots,’” a Films Inc. executive wrote to a colleague, praising sales of the film series to the California State University consortium, Chicago City College, City College of New York, the University of Missouri, and other institutions. “Our people and the people at Miami-Dade are proceeding with almost a missionary zeal to convert inquiries into sales.” A handwritten note on the bottom of the memo calculated the company’s revenue from Roots: “11 schools × $5,400 per film = $60,000 and we haven’t even started our own promotion campaign! We believe we will have at least ½ million dollars in sales prior to the telecast.”10 On the one hand, this educational marketing deal encouraged thousands of college students to watch, read, and discuss Roots in relation to work on black history and culture by scholars like Margaret Just Butcher, W.E.B. Du Bois, Gladys-Marie Fry, Winthrop Jordan, and Eric Williams. On the other hand, the arrangement produced another set of competing claims on the Roots property. Films Inc., for example, sent letters to schools across the country warning them that the only legal way to view Roots in the classroom was to purchase the 16 mm film from their company. “We are taking this opportunity to help protect our customers from innocent infringements of the copyright on Roots,” the company informed educators. “Anyone recording the program on videotape infringes on the copyright and may be subject to prosecution under the United States Copyright Laws. . . . Please protect your school or organization. Do not videotape the ABC telecast of Roots. But by all means, do watch this great television event.”11 Wolper shared these concerns that new videocassette recorder (VCR) technology would cut into film sales of the Roots, but he was more concerned that the company’s warning letter had not given him due credit. “I object to [your letter] strongly,” Wolper wrote. “It indicates ‘a celebrated movie from Films, Incorporated.’ Hereinafter, all materials issued by Films, Incorporated will have product referred to as, ‘David L. Wolper’s Production of,’ or ‘A David L. Wolper Production.’”12 These disputes over who should receive credit for Roots were often petty, but they were motivated by very real monetary concerns.
Figure 22. Alex Haley (right ) signing a copy of Roots for Dr. Robert McCabe, who coordinated the nationally marketed Roots college course from Miami-Dade Community College. George Sims, Haley’s longtime friend and research assistant, looks on. 1976. Image Courtesy of Florida State Archive.
For his part, Haley was frustrated that Doubleday was profiting handsomely by publishing Roots. Though Haley had signed a contract with Doubleday for Before This Anger (which grew into Roots) in 1964 and had missed several deadlines to complete the manuscript, he felt that the publisher had been stingy with advances and travel money. Making matters worse, in 1976 Doubleday acquired Dell Publishing, to whom Doubleday had previously sold the paperback rights to Roots. The acquisition meant that Doubleday would get a larger percentage of the profits on the paperback sale of Roots, while Haley would get a smaller royalty payment on each copy.
Haley sued Doubleday in March 1977, on the advice of his entertainment lawyer Lou Blau, in an attempt to negotiate a better deal for the Roots paperback. “I really find myself representative of two groups of people, who have been cast in the lot of sharecroppers,” Haley told the press. “One of them is black people, who have long struggled to throw off their second-class status. . . . And the second group is writers, who are like sharecroppers in the sense that it is we who sweat and produce the crops and then someone else owns the land, the company store, and the cotton gin, and at harvest time they give us what they think we ought to have.”13 Haley stressed that he still had good relationships with his editors Lisa Drew and Ken McCormick. “My quarrel is with the corporate Doubleday, which to me manifests that it possesses no heart nor soul,” Haley emphasized. “As owners of Dell, they would gross ninety-five percent of what I sweated 12 years to produce for them. That’s worse than sharecropping. . . . I produced the crop. Corporations do not write books. Authors do. I resent deeply being dealt with on terms made obviously when I was hungry.”14 Haley withdrew the suit in the summer of 1977 and later said he had learned that Hollywood, where people “sue each other and then have lunch,” was very different from the publishing industry. “It was my naiveté,” Haley said. “I felt terrible.”15
Shortly after Haley’s case against Doubleday made headlines, the London Times published journalist Mark Ottaway’s story accusing Haley of fabricating much of his research.16 The charges received international attention and were especially worrying for Gambian officials, who believed Roots’s success would lead to a tourism boom in the small African nation. “It can safely be said that with his book ‘Roots,’ Alex Haley has given The Gambia more publicity in the United States and around the world than the country ever had, or is likely to have had, for years to come,” M.D. N’Jie wrote about the book’s impact on his country. “To The Gambia, it is manna from heaven at this time when she is pushing ahead with the development of tourism.”17 After the Ottaway story broke, Haley’s scheduled return trip to Gambia to promote Roots quickly became an effort in damage control. Haley sent Gambia tourism minister B.L.K. Sanyang an urgent telegram in advance of his April 1977 visit. “Bringing around 18 top rank journalists, television, movie, and still photographers, carefully picked during past weeks and invited to join my next visit to Gambia to accomplish our planned major media promotion of the country,” Haley wrote. “But this intended goal suddenly now faces problem of world newswires carrying variously hurtful London Sunday Times long story.” Haley continued describing the problems Ottaway’s article presented. “Story in general cannot but hurt the Gambian gains we have seen including tourism and especially worldwide ideal public image,” Haley wrote. “Please consider what might prove best steps to influence my coming press party toward effectively positive counter action of this damage to your and my . . . efforts together with the offices of the Secretary General and of the President as well as so many other people devoting themselves to the advancing of the Gambia.”18 Gambian officials had facilitated Haley’s research with the hope that Roots would pay dividends. All of this now seemed to be in jeopardy. A Gambian’s tourism official told the Guardian, “We deeply fear that the doubt now surrounding Roots could put off many of those American pilgrims who’d come in search of their roots.”19
Haley’s trip to Gambia was the cover story in People and Ebony and received coverage in other newspapers across the country. The New York Times described Haley’s visit as the biggest news event in the Gambia since the country had gained independence from Britain in 1965.20 Haley told People that Roots was a mix of fact and fiction but angrily denied the London Times story. “When you consider how many blacks were taken out of here, it seems like the Good Lord would let one of us trace his family tree back to his ancestors,” Haley said. “It just incenses me that if one was able to do it—after nine years of research—some s.o.b. would come here and question it. . . . I don’t think this is just my family story; it’s a saga of American blacks. If I don’t put him down, everyone can say blacks have no history.”21
While Haley described Roots as “faction,” his insistence on the accuracy of the people, places, and dates in the Gambian part of his story painted him into a corner. Haley consistently projected an air of certainty in the face of skepticism about whether Kunta Kinte was actually his ancestor. On
at least one occasion, in a letter to his editor Murray Fisher in the early 1970s, Haley considered changing a key detail in this origin story and making this fictionalization explicit to readers. “In one of the reference books I have here, I have come across a significant item,” Haley wrote. “For years . . . I have noted the name of a Gambian village spelled ‘Jillyfree,’ notably in the Mungo Park adventures in the Gambia in 1730s.” Haley said he had come upon the “startling information” that “Jillyfree,” a village associated with slave trading, was the same as “Juffure,” which he had identified as the Edenic birthplace and home of Kunta Kinte. He worried that academics would point this out immediately after the book’s publication. “I think the very best move is to create a fictional village name for Kunta to be born and reared in. . . . Then, in the final section, of low-key telling about the components of the book the reader has just read, say that this was done, a fictional name . . . sheerly because there were the several villages where there were Kintes . . . and this book is symbolic of them; as it aspires to be symbolic of all of the Gambia villages; and for that matter all of the West Africa villages, from which slaves were taken.” Haley said he hoped this would “solve a potentially knotty problem in the anticipation of it.”22 Despite these concerns, Haley decided to paint an idealized picture of Juffure for business and personal reasons. In terms of marketing, Doubleday wanted to sell Roots as nonfiction, and ABC was eager to promote the book as factual. For his part, Haley wanted Roots to do uplifting and restorative work that he did not think could be accomplished by sticking strictly to the facts. This was especially true with the African section of the book. “I know Juffure was a British trading post and my portrait of the village bears no resemblance to the way it was,” Haley said in the midst of the Ottaway controversy. “But . . . I, we, need a place called Eden. My people need a Plymouth Rock.”23 On the one hand, Haley could have staved off some of the criticism of Roots if he had made his desire to write a mythic history more clear in the book. On the other hand, much of Roots’s cultural power accrued from Haley’s embrace of history as myth and the push by Doubleday and ABC to market this myth as a true story. The television miniseries, especially, elevated the story to a different scale and lacquered over concerns about historical inaccuracies. Most readers and viewers understood Roots to be a mix of fact and fiction, and it is not at all clear that the millions who read or watched Roots were shaken by the Ottaway controversy.
While Haley battled the Ottaway allegations in the court of public opinion, he also faced plagiarism charges from Margaret Walker and Harold Courlander. Walker claimed that Haley had copied from Jubilee, her 1966 historical novel set in the Civil War–era South. Walker’s book, like Roots, was a fictionalized version of a family story that had been passed down from her grandmother. Walker researched on and off for over two decades before finally finishing Jubilee as her PhD dissertation at the University of Iowa. As a novelist, Walker was adept at character development and more creative in handing the fictional aspects of history. While she started with a true story, she said, “Imagination has worked with this factual material . . . for a very long time.”24 Judge Marvin Frankel heard the case in the US District Court in New York. Frankel ruled that the similarities between Roots and Jubilee did not constitute plagiarism because both books were based on historical facts and used common words and metaphors that were not subject to copyright protection. “No claim of copyright protection can arise from the fact that plaintiff has written about such historical and factual items, even if we were to assume that Haley was alerted to the facts in question by reading Jubilee,” Frankel ruled.25
Shortly after winning the lawsuit brought by Walker, Haley was back in a Manhattan courtroom facing similar charges from Harold Courlander. Courlander had written several well-regarded fictional and nonfictional works on African history and culture, as well as books on oral traditions among Hopi communities in the American Southwest and African retentions in Haitian culture and music. Like millions of other Americans, Courlander watched Roots on ABC. What he saw struck him as very similar to his 1967 novel The African. “Many of the incidents, phrasings and images seen on TV aroused in me a feeling of déjà vu,” Courlander said.26 Days after the Roots series finale, Courlander wrote to tell his publisher about these similarities. “How can I say it calmly, without feeling too much?” Courlander wrote. “There is Haley’s book, Roots, selling so fast they can’t keep track of how many. But where is The African, which scooped Roots by ten years? I have reread The African. There are many similarities that can’t escape anyone who has read both. Whatever the literary qualities of the Haley book, I’m certain that The African can survive a comparison with honor.”27 Courlander was worried about the potential plagiarism of his work, but he also saw an opportunity to capitalize on the Roots phenomenon. “The climate engendered by Roots is most propitious for a new hardcover (or Crown paperback) printing,” Courlander wrote. “I believe urgently that now is the time for a reissue of The African and enough promotion to relate it to the present moment. . . . If it is not done swiftly now, I won’t care if it ever appears again or not. I have the feeling that I’ve been left standing at the airport after the plane has gone.”28 Herbert Michelman, editor-in-chief at Crown Publishing, urged Courlander to find specific examples of where Roots resembled The African. Courlander wrote back days later with a list of what he called “remarkable similarities.” “It is quite obvious to me that Haley read The African and borrowed freely. . . . The examples I send ought to give some idea of Haley’s plagiarism,” Courlander wrote, before again imploring his publisher to get The African back in print. “I think that with the climate in which Roots is prospering, the African could sell quite a few copies, particularly with the right promotion. . . . Crown would seem to have a stake in protecting The African as a property.”29 Courlander later complained that Roots’s tremendous popularity made it difficult to get anyone to take his complaints seriously. “Roots was no longer a mere book but a kind of natural phenomenon like fire and water,” he lamented.30
Having won his case against Walker, Haley was initially dismissive of Courlander’s plagiarism charges. “It’s beginning to sound as if I went around finding various books to copy,” Haley said before the case went to court. “Well, it wouldn’t take me 12 years to do that. I type faster than that.”31 The Courlander court case lasted six weeks, and the experience exhausted Haley. Throughout the development of Roots, Haley had always relied on his speaking and storytelling ability to persuade audiences. The courtroom was one of the rare places when his words failed him. “It seemed incredible to me that nobody could believe what I said,” Haley said. “I worked as hard on that book as a man could. I don’t want the book which is a symbol of hope and of history to be eroded, ridiculed, held in contempt or anything like that. That frightened me. It frightened me more than it angered me.”32
The court proceedings did not go well for Haley. “The courtroom is not the world of a writer,” Haley later said. “It is a world of calipers, of tweezers, of picking apart your words. I had to send literally crates of notes, all my notebooks, scraps of paper. It was my viscera. In these kinds of cases it’s the defendant that has to prove everything. How can you explain every word that you write?”33 Haley maintained that he had never heard of or read The African, which made it difficult for him to explain how a page from the book ended up in his notes, or how several passages in Roots were strikingly similar to The African. Haley’s lawyers initially argued that the similar materials related to slavery and the Middle Passage were not protected by copyright law because they were part of the common black experience. The lawyers also argued that all of the passages made up only 1.1 percent of Roots.34 Judge Robert Ward was skeptical of these arguments and became increasingly hostile toward Haley over the course of the trial. In his chambers Judge Ward told lawyers, “Haley could not have written this.” Summarizing the power dynamic in the trial a lawyer said, “Judge Ward is the master and Alex is Toby.”35 While t
he judge was preparing his ruling, Haley’s team agreed to settle with Courlander for $650,000. Haley said that Roots: The Next Generations, which ABC had scheduled to air in February 1979, figured into his decision to settle. “I did not want the blight of a trial going on before the miniseries Roots II was about to come out,” Haley said. “So by settling, the whole affair was over by the time the film came out. Otherwise it would have been a different scene. That was my main consideration. Many people had done so much to make that series, I didn’t want anything hovering over it. Looking back, I’m glad I took the action I did. I only wish I’d done it earlier.”36 In a 1991 interview, Haley struck a more defiant tone regarding the plagiarism lawsuits. “The people who sued me and claimed I took from them . . . my first thought was, if your stuff was all this marvelous why didn’t you do something [with it], you know. . . . You’ll see people going on to this person, ‘These words are mine.’ Well damn. All [your] words didn’t do much for you.”37
Historian C. Eric Lincoln, a friend of Haley who knew the author as he struggled to finish Roots, suggested that Haley did not know the rules governing plagiarism. “The very fact that Alex was not an academic and had no significant academic experience would have made it unlikely that he had any real concept of the rules guarding the misappropriation of other people’s literary work,” Lincoln argued. “This was compounded by the fact that most of his research was done by George Sims.” Lincoln offered his own opinion of how Haley came to copy from published work. “My view of what happened is this, George went into the library and found the facts that Alex needed. I know George knew nothing about attribution and he brought back a stack of data and put it in front of Alex and Alex used it, having no sense of documentation. I’m sure that that’s what happened. . . . If Alex plagiarized anybody, and he probably did, it was innocent and unintentional.”38 Lincoln was probably right that Haley’s plagiarism resulted from how he incorporated the materials Sims gathered into Roots. In a 1975 letter to editor Murray Fisher, for example, Haley described sending Sims to the library to gather information to build out a scene with his grandfather Tom Murray, who was a blacksmith. “I discovered with shock or nearly such that as much researching as I’d done, I had scarcely a page’s worth about blacksmithing,” Haley told Fisher. “An emergency appeal to George Sims, however, brought me soon after what I’ve by now transcribed and organized into a good inch-and-a-half depth on blacksmithing, atmospherically and factually.”39 Haley probably incorporated parts of Courlander’s book in a similar fashion.
Making Roots Page 18