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This day in history: American writer Alex Haley was born on this day in 1921. He is best known for his 1976 book Roots: The Saga of an American Family. ABC adapted the book as a television miniseries of the same name and aired it in 1977 to a record-breaking audience of 130 million viewers.
The book was often sold as non-fiction in bookstores, and Haley himself claimed that the main character, Kunta Kinte was his great-great-great-great grandfather who arrived in Annapolis, Maryland on the slave ship, the Lord Ligonier, in September of 1767.
However, black commentator Stanley Crouch insists that Haley was a “ruthless hustler” and “one of the biggest damn liars this country has ever seen.” Crouch declares the story a “hoax” that beautifully illustrates “how history and tragic fact can be pillaged by an individual willing to exploit whatever the naïve might consider sacred.”
"Black thinker Thomas Sowell, who has written prolifically on race and slavery, makes the same point as Crouch—even if not quite as bluntly. Regarding the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, Sowell remarks that Roots “presented some crucially false pictures of what had actually happened—false pictures that continue to dominate thinking today.”
For instance, 'Roots has a white man leading a slave raid in West Africa, where the hero, Kunta Kinte [supposedly, Haley’s ancestor] was captured, looking bewildered at the chains put on him as he was led away in bondage.' Moreover, even 'the village elders' likewise appeared perplexed by the sight of these 'white men' who were 'carrying their people away.' In glaring contrast to this depiction, Sowell correctly asserts, the location from which Kunta Kinte was taken—West Africa—had been 'a center of slave trading before the first white man arrived there—and slavery continues in parts of it to this very moment.' He adds: 'Africans sold vast numbers of other Africans to Europeans. But they hardly let Europeans go running around in their territory, catching people willy-nilly'.
According to Sowell, Roots did more harm than good in fueling 'the gross misconception that slavery was about white people enslaving black people.' In reality, 'the tragedy of slavery was of a far greater magnitude than that.' Slavery knew no racial boundaries. 'People of every race and color were both slaves and enslavers, for thousands of years, all around the world.' Sowell likens slavery to cancer in that it transcends time and place. He concludes: 'If reparations were to be paid for slavery, everybody on this planet would owe everybody else.'" Source
Haley was also accused of plagiarism. "In the late 1960’s, Harry Courlander—a white man—composed The African, a fictional work about a young African boy who is captured, made to endure the horrors of the mid-Atlantic passage, and eventually sold into slavery in America. In 1978 he sued Haley for plagiarism. Upon expressing regret that at least 81 passages were lifted virtually verbatim from Courlander’s novel and recast in Roots, and upon the Judge’s unambiguous finding that Haley was guilty of plagiarism, Haley agreed to an out of court settlement whereby he would pay Courlander $650,000 (roughly 2 million dollars in today’s terms)." Source
See also: See also: They Were White and They Were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America on Amazon
See also: When Blacks Owned Slaves, by Calvin Dill Wilson 1905
https://thebookshelf2015.blogspot.com/2017/02/when-blacks-owned-slaves-by-calvin-dill.html
See also: A History of White Slavery by Charles Sumner 1853 and When the Irish were Slaves, article in The Month 1890
See also Bible Defense of Slavery and other Southern books on CDrom - Join my Facebook Group - For a list of all of my digital books and books on disk click here
The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America
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