Haley had settled the Courlander case because he wanted to salvage his reputation, but he did not really succeed, in part because of the inconsistent way that America’s celebrity culture dealt with accusations of plagiarism. In 1989 Thomas Mallon, a noted writer of historical fiction, published Stolen Words, an analysis of several leading cases of alleged plagiarism—although not Haley’s. “It seems plagiarism is something people get off with scot-free or it’s a career killer, the single thing they’re known for,” Mallon said years later. “What we need . . . is a certain proportionality.” Whether “somebody takes a kind of delight in an icon’s being reduced to a bum in the space of a week, ought to be factored into people’s reputations. It should diminish our overall estimation of him, but we should not run him out of the human race.” Haley saw a reputation for plagiarism as a possible “career killer.”2
Accusations of plagiarism were a phenomenon common in Hollywood, where Haley lived from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. The financial stakes were higher and much was to be gained from claiming theft of intellectual property. There, such accusations did not carry the same opprobrium that they did in intellectual and literary circles in New York. A number of successful films—Nosferatu, A Fistful of Dollars, Rocky, Coming to America, and The Terminator—were allegedly based on misappropriated ideas. In Hollywood, the victim whose intellectual property was poached was often well compensated for it after the fact. Such settlements were seen as merely the cost of doing business in the entertainment industry. Most people in Hollywood understood the Courlander case as Haley’s cost of fame.
It was ironic that, while Alex Haley was dealing with the accusations of factual inaccuracy and copyright infringement in 1977 and 1978, he was also working on another, and some thought better, recounting of his family’s past. In long interviews with producers and scriptwriters that were far easier for him to render than a book, he supplied information for Roots: The Next Generations, broadcast in early 1979. The miniseries was fourteen hours long (two hours longer than the original Roots) and was shown over seven consecutive nights. The production cost $18 million, three times as much as the first Roots. It followed Haley’s family from the 1880s through World War II, which was the time covered in the last thirty pages of Roots, and then touched on the decades that followed, culminating in Haley’s trip to Africa. As in the first Roots broadcast, white characters were created who had not appeared in the book, but here they were necessary to develop important themes about race relations and to tell the true story of the black experience after Reconstruction. Much of it adhered to the facts Alex had made well known since the 1960s, including his troubled marriage to Nan. But it also contained many new characters, mostly whites, and scenes created just for television that filled out the narrative of black history from Emancipation in the 1860s to the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
“Roots II” emphasized several new themes. It explored the ways that race complicated romantic love among blacks and between blacks and whites, suggested mostly with characters not present in Haley’s writing. It created an unlikely interracial marriage between a white planter’s son and a well-educated black teacher in Henning. The series rendered in realistic scenes the ugliness of post-Reconstruction race relations, including segregation, the convict-leasing system, lynching, disenfranchisement, the persistent racism of working-class whites, and the amorality and arrogance of white paternalism, portrayed chillingly by Henry Fonda. It captured the demeaning compromises that blacks had to make to survive in the white supremacist South. It took the narrative of black history through the important events of the twentieth century, covering the nuances of white supremacist customs; the exploitation of the sharecropping system; the conflict between Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois; the discrimination against blacks in the U.S. Army; the racial terrorism in American cities after the war; the rise of the all-black Pullman porters union; and the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. White hatred provided the main tension of the plot, but there were enough conflicts in the Haley family saga to keep the momentum of the series rolling. A few benevolent whites were inserted in the story to relieve the otherwise unrelenting malevolence of the dominant majority. There were some false steps in the plot. The writers devoted almost a whole episode to white bigots in Alabama in the 1930s who were violently enforcing exploitation of black sharecroppers over Simon Haley’s fierce opposition. Such violence existed, although not where the script located it, and there was no evidence in Alex Haley’s research that Simon was involved in anything like it. This part of the story contradicted what was known about Simon’s personality. The last episodes, focusing on Alex’s rise as a writer, felt slow and a lot like typical television melodrama. The history lessons seemed more forced than in the earlier episodes. So, too, did the recalling in each episode, almost by rote it seemed, of the Kunta Kinte heritage.
“Roots II” had a large cast of black actors. The main male characters—Tom Murray, Will Palmer, and Simon Haley—were played as overburdened men, without much texture, although all were on screen for long stretches. Most important, the miniseries dispensed entirely with Simon’s extroverted, crowd-loving nature. On the other hand, several of the smaller parts were played brilliantly: Ossie Davis as a Pullman porter, Bernie Casey as a World War I soldier, and Paul Winfield as a black college president stole their respective scenes. James Earl Jones, Haley’s old friend, played Haley as a grown man. Donald Bogle found Jones unconvincing because he “overacted”; he made Haley more demonstrative than he was in fact, especially in the expression of anger. But when Beah Richards as Cynthia Palmer spoke to Alex about his ancestors, Bogle thought “her power and convictions lifted the drama completely out of TV land.” He concluded that, in contrast to the way actors in the first series “pushed for big emotions and big emotional responses from the audience . . . the sequel was frequently a quieter drama focusing partly on class struggle and espousing the American work ethic and a belief in the American Dream.” More white star actors filled the cast of “Roots II” than were in its predecessor. Henry Fonda as a former Confederate colonel, Olivia de Havilland as his wife, Andy Griffith as Alex’s helpful Coast Guard commander, and Marlon Brando as the American Nazi George Lincoln Rockwell raised the illustriousness of the cast higher than that of the white actors in the first series. Brando, having recently starred in The Godfather, had begged for a part, and his few minutes on screen were riveting.3
Airing from February 19 to February 25, 1979, Roots: The Next Generations was viewed by one hundred and ten million Americans, just twenty million fewer viewers than the first miniseries. It got better reviews. Newsweek said it was “richer in physical sweep and psychological shadings, graced with acting seldom seen on the tube.” The reviewer in the New York Post said it was “a fuller, sweeter, more agonizing story, and its conflicts cut deeper into our twentieth century sensibility.” Whereas the first series was largely the story of a rebellious black man challenging white authority, “Roots II” focused on blacks’ accepting American values about progress and success. The overarching message, as in the first Roots, was the continuity of survival and hope in black families.4
The judgments of historians made decades later matter less in evaluating the historical significance of the series than the impact when it aired. “Roots II” completed Haley’s “saga of a people” on television, and with the help of David Wolper, he had given more than a hundred million Americans a new understanding of the black experience in the United States. Together the two Roots miniseries had filled in huge gaps in the public’s knowledge of black history, and it had given Americans vivid images that would enable them to hold on to that new awareness.
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Both Roots series were autobiographical, and so was Haley’s next television production, Palmerstown, USA, a weekly series that ran in 1980 and 1981 and comprised seventeen episodes. Haley collaborated with the producer Norman Lear, who had enjoyed great success in the 197
0s with several television series, most notably All in the Family. Haley suggested the plots of the episodes and collaborated on some scripts. Palmerstown finally realized the plot and themes of the novel “The Lord and Little David,” which Haley had begun writing in the early 1950s and tried to get published well into the 1960s. It incorporated the original presumption of “Before This Anger,” that there was a time in the South, the 1930s, when blacks and whites got along more amicably than they would in the 1960s. Palmerstown drew on Haley’s life, but it was not as explicitly autobiographical as the two Roots miniseries. He named the town after a branch of his family and modeled it on Henning. The main premise of the series, a relationship between two boys in a southern town during the Great Depression, was also personal. Haley had had a white friend in Henning, Kermit, with whom he spent much time until age twelve. That relationship had ended badly, when Kermit tried to assert his supposed racial superiority over Haley. In Palmerstown, the boys remain friends throughout the course of the story.
Haley’s notes for the scripting of Palmerstown, provided to guide writers, revealed his understanding of the sociology of the South: “This series reaches for something deep within the American culture which has not been accurately portrayed.” It focused on two of “America’s most bedrock” groups, each of them exploited—blacks and poor whites. Haley put these groups side by side in a small town, much like Henning, that comprised five hundred folks evenly divided by race. “One of the secrets of small towns is they contain no anonymous individuals, as cities do,” Haley wrote. “Anyone who is raised in a small town can tell you something singular, something salient, about everyone else.” One telling instruction to the writers was not to “belabor racial inequities.” A recent docudrama about Martin Luther King Jr.’s career had done that, which was why, Haley said, it had failed with white audiences. “Deal obliquely with race matters; as Roots did, permit viewers to derive their own subjective editorials.”5
In Palmerstown, black Booker T. Freeman and white David Hall are sons of a blacksmith and a grocer, respectively. The two boys observe the racial tensions among adults. The boys’ fathers argue over a grocery bill, and the tension trickles down to them. Racial epithets are thrown about. The series explored the theme of class through the way that poor whites were the source of conflict in Palmerstown; it continued the persistent theme in Haley’s work of the strength of black families. Each episode developed a crisis in the town and then resolved it. The series was nostalgic about the South of the 1930s and romantic in its treatment of racial issues. Donald Bogle insisted that the show ignored the ugly realities of the segregated South and the abiding cultural distinctions that sustained blacks. But even if it was a much less satisfying program than “Roots II,” Bogle thought that black audiences would be happy to watch another black drama, especially if it came from Alex Haley.6
By the end of Palmerstown’s run, Americans had been given forty-three hours of Alex Haley’s family history on television in four years. Such attention won him great admiration among many Americans, especially blacks, who as a group knew that television had slighted them before Haley came along. His stories treated the black experience seriously, whereas such popular programs as Good Times, in which the actor Jimmie Walker often shouted “Dy-no-MITE!” were seen by many as demeaning blacks.
Haley had moved on from Roots to celebrate equality in American life and good human relations in the South, but his largest impact on American culture probably was his encouragement of black nationalism. The black media critic Herman Gray believed that Roots had enabled discourse on blackness in a way that caused the “rearticulation of the discourse of Afrocentric nationalism.” Gray thought the work had also brought about a renewed interest in black studies and the development of “African-centered rap and black urban style.” Roots encouraged a racial nationalist temper in the archetype of Kunta Kinte. The rappers Lil Wayne and Missy Elliott made reference to Kunta Kinte in song. Filmmakers John Singleton and Spike Lee referred to Kunta in Boyz n the Hood and Do the Right Thing, respectively.7
In 1994 four cultural anthropologists wrote in an academic journal that “Afrocentricity could not have existed without Roots.” Afrocentrists believed and taught that European civilization was derived from African origins—an understanding of history that Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam had advanced. Afrocentrist history was often condemned as ahistorical, and it caused a furor on some American college campuses in the 1980s. Afrocentric history was not what Alex Haley had presented in Roots, but he paved the way for men like his friend Leonard Jeffries, who did teach it. Afrocentrists were “preaching to the already converted,” the anthropologists said, because Roots had already taught black Americans they had “their own stories of origin and identity.” Haley and Malcolm X “wanted to use Africa in this crucial manner in order to shield the American Black against the ego deficiency produced by White racism.”8 Many Americans thought Haley and Malcolm had succeeded.
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Haley did little writing in the early 1980s. “Even as the Roots madness died down, I continued to do too much speaking and not enough writing,” he recalled. “Because I don’t like to turn people down—it bothers me to hurt anyone’s feelings.” Lecturing was easy and lucrative—he was now paid $10,000 per lecture—and it gave him good reason to indulge his wanderlust, although he said he did not keep up the frenetic speaking pace of the late 1960s and early 1970s. By the late 1980s his income from royalties had declined to the point that he needed to lecture to maintain a high standard of living. Haley continued to make freighter trips in the 1980s, ostensibly to write. He usually sailed for four to six weeks at a time, often over the Christmas holidays. He sailed along the Pacific side of Latin America in 1984 and from Savannah to Rotterdam the following year. In 1988 he went to Australia, taking along a friend, Tennessee former governor Lamar Alexander. At some point Haley leased an apartment in Seattle. It is not clear what the attraction was there, but he visited the city regularly.9
What writing he produced usually followed a familiar pattern—it was autobiographical and meant to end up on television. The one story that was not autobiographical was about a mountain man and his son, called “Appalachian.” In 1985 Reader’s Digest published “Easter in Henning,” an excerpt from Haley’s forthcoming book, “Henning, U.S.A.,” which in fact never appeared. He also discussed a project called “Queen,” about his paternal grandmother, which would, as he said, “square another debt” to his father; Simon Haley had hinted for years that the story of his side of the family, particularly his mother, Queen, would make a good book. Queen had cared for Alex and his brothers for a time after the boys’ mother had died. He had heard many stories about her and her white father, Colonel Jackson.10
In 1986 Haley decided to return to his roots in Tennessee. He had lived in California, mostly in Los Angeles, since the early 1970s, and with Haley now at age sixty-five, the move represented a large shift in lifestyle. He and his brothers had reacquired the family home in Henning, which they had sold after Aunt Liz died. The property had fallen into disrepair and been damaged by a fire, but now they renovated it and, thanks to Alex’s fame, had it named a state historic landmark. The Haley brothers planned to turn the house into a tourist site. Alex Haley was drawn home for Tennessee Homecoming ’86, a yearlong celebration that promoted tourism by urging those who had left Tennessee to discover the progress that the state had made in their absence—and spend money they had earned elsewhere. The celebration hearkened back to the tradition at southern evangelical churches of setting aside one Sunday in the month when former members returned to visit old friends. It also reflected the lasting impact of Roots on American culture: many people had been prompted to reconnect with their past through “roots travel,” and the growing phenomenon, especially among blacks, of both family and community reunions. People who had migrated to the North traveled in big groups to the towns or rural communities where they had been born. They often wo
re t-shirts announcing such events as “The Haley Family Reunion” or “The Henning, Tennessee Reunion.” The phenomenon continues to this day.
Tennessee Homecoming ’86 also formed committees to do research on local history in preparation for the state’s bicentennial, in 1996. The national bicentennial of 1976 had put Americans in the mind of celebrating two-hundredth anniversaries. Tennessee Homecoming was the idea of Governor Lamar Alexander, a young, progressive-minded Republican. In Tennessee politics of the mid-1980s, Alexander projected a modern approach to government, a break with the old one-party Democratic control of the segregationist South. He supported education and opposed racial divisiveness. Alexander accomplished the shift in political perception so successfully that he became popular enough for Tennesseeans typically to refer to him simply as “Lamar,” a familiarity he encouraged by habitually donning a checkered flannel shirt, almost regardless of occasion. What better way was there to demonstrate a “new Tennessee” than to engage its newest celebrity, a genial black writer, in celebration of the old Tennessee? Alexander and Haley were already acquainted, and the young governor liked the writer’s positive attitude, especially his oft-repeated slogan, “Find the good and praise it.” Alexander drew him into the project, making him the honorary co-chair of the celebration, along with the country-music comedian Minnie Pearl. Haley and Alexander traveled across the state on a train during Tennessee Homecoming.
In the fall of 1986, Haley bought two condominiums in Knoxville, home of the University of Tennessee and the Tennessee Valley Authority, in the Appalachian Mountains area of eastern Tennessee. In his 1946 book Inside U.S.A., the writer John Gunther had called Knoxville the ugliest city in the United States, but it was undergoing a renaissance of late, having a hosted a well-attended World’s Fair in 1982. In Knoxville Haley created a circle of friends composed mainly of prominent white men, most of them local celebrities. They included John Rice Irwin, a school superintendent and folklorist who had founded the Museum of Appalachia and thus could help Haley with his miniseries, “Appalachian”; Alexander, who in 1988 became president of the University of Tennessee; the Harvard professor Richard Marius, formerly of the University of Tennessee faculty, who ran a writing program for high school students in Knoxville each summer; Jim Clayton, an industrialist; and David White, a media entrepreneur. Edye Ellis, a black television newscaster, was the notable exception to the white, male character of Haley’s crowd. “I don’t go to parties,” Haley told the New York Times in 1988. “I live very well with myself.” Perhaps so, but he was known to give big parties in Knoxville, especially after he bought a mansion on Cherokee Boulevard, Knoxville’s most prestigious address.
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