In Black America

Speaker: From the University of Texas at Austin, KUT radio, this is in Black America.

Alex P. Haley: The question is asked of me as a view in different ways and. I am quick to say that I don’t feel we should go around saying as many do that. You know it is worse than it ever was and this and that and the other. ’cause that that’s simply not true.

I think that the more near the truth is that we have come a long way since the sixties or the forties or the thirties or whatever longer. The further back you go, the longer way we have come. But that equally clearly we should say we yet have a long way to go. And I think that’s where it is. We are in some interim.

Stage and state. I don’t know exactly where along the way it is, and neither do you. Nobody does, but we are. We have Come a long way.

John L. Hanson Jr.: Alexander Murray Palmer, Haley biographer, script writer and novelist. Haley is best known as the author of Roots, the Saga of an American family, and the autobiography of Malcolm X.

As a young boy, he first learned of his African ancestor Kente by listening to family stories of his maternal grandparents. While spending his summer in Henning, Tennessee after 12 years, Harold’s Quest to learn more about his family history resulted in him writing the Pulitz Surprise Winning Book Roots.

The book has been published in 37 languages and was made into the first week long television miniseries viewed by an estimated 130 million people. Roots also generated widespread interest in genealogy. In 1939, Haley’s writing career began when he entered the US Coast Guard. He was the first member of the US Coast Guard with a journalist designation.

In 1999, the US Coast Guard on Haley by naming a Coast Guard cutter after him, Haley’s personal model quote, find the good and praise it. End the quote appears on the ship emblem. He retired from the military after 20 years of service and then continued writing. Ha was a fascinating storyteller and was in great demand as a lecturer both nationally and internationally.

He was on a lecture tour in Seattle, Washington when he died of a heart attack on February 10th, 1992. He was seven years old. I’m John L. Hansen Jr. And welcome to another edition of In Black America on this week’s program. A tribute to the late Alex Palmer Haley. In black America.

Alex P. Haley: Well, it was mostly having begun, and then the more you got, the more deeply you got into it. You. We’re kind of in a position that if you didn’t go on, you may as well never have started. You know, you just have such a, an, uh, incremental investment. Uh, and also the, the, the, the challenge, you know, uh, you, you are really kind of at that time fighting a bit of a battle with yourself.

As to whether or not you’ve done something worthwhile or something dumb or whatever. And I was frequently having people say to me how dumb this whole thing was. You know, there were people who said that. Uh uh, for one thing I guess I heard most frequently of all would come from black scholars who happened to, I would go talking with them about it for one another reason, and a great many of them.

Uh, had the view of what do you want to resurrect slavery for? And it got to the point that I really quit talking too much about what I was doing, and it was principally a personal challenge to see how far could I go with it?

John L. Hanson Jr.: Alex Haley served in the Coast Guard during World War ii, the Korean conflict and the Cold War.

He was the first African American coast guardmen in the modern era. To reach the rank of Chief Petty Officer, he paved the way for other African American men and women to rise into the senior enlisted ranks in the Naval Services Hell. He also holds a distinction of being the First Coast Guardsman to be distinguished.

The specialty rank of journalists in recognition of his able service to the Coast Guards and Naval public Affairs and history programs. This was a significant position of responsibility for shaping the public image of the Coast Guard and reporting news within the service. And it broke the previous tradition of African, African-American sailors serving almost exclusively in menial jobs as cooks and stewards.

Haiti began his writing career with assignment with Reader’s Digest and Playboy Magazine, where he conducted interviews. During this time, he met Malcolm X, then the spokesperson for Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam. Lady was asked by Malcolm X to write his life story. The result of that collaboration, the autobiography of Malcolm X was published in 1965 and sold 6 million copies.

Haley was born on August 11th, 1921 in Ithaca, New York. Soon after his birth, he moved to he Tennessee at the age of 15. He graduated from high school at at Alcorn State University in Mississippi for two years. His father persuaded him to join the Coast Guard. He enlisted in 1939 in January, 1977. For eight consecutive nights, 130 million viewers watched the groundbreaking history making saga of an American family who did not come over on the Mayflower or pass through Ellis Island.

Ruth, the story of CTA Kinte, a West African enslaved in this country, and his descendant captivated the American television audience as no other dramatic program had done before in February, 1988 on a visit to Central Texas in black America. Spoke with Alex Haley.

Alex P. Haley: Well, a whole variety of things. Um, I have.

Spoken a lot. I have fought the Battle of Correspondence as, as best I can. And simply to say that, you know, you get so much mail that comes from people asking things which are very, very personal to them. And I’m very close to my mail and I hate not to respond to letters. So I try my best to answer as much as I can and still don’t do probably half of it.

And then I have written some enough that, uh, I have, I’m about at this. Time about, uh, two weeks away from finishing my next book, the book, which will be titled Henning, which is the name of my little hometown in Tennessee, and it should be turned into the publishers about. Four weeks from now after I’ve been able to do two weeks work on it.

John L. Hanson Jr.: I recently returned from Africa and I got a very good feeling when I got to Senegal and had an opportunity to go to Gory Island and and see the Slave House. When you went back and doing the research for Roots, what type of an emotional feeling that you feel going back to Africa?

Alex P. Haley: Well, you know, you’re kind of in.

Kind of in awe really if you know the full significance of where you are when you are at Go Ray. But lemme tell you something about you. I was thinking when I walked in that door, I guess you did get an emotional feeling because if you are around tribes in Africa enough, you get to sort of get some general feeling about tribal configurations, you know, faith and all that.

And I would bet you if anything that if it were possible. You could trace yourself back to your Kunta Kente. I’ll bet you anything you came from the wall off tribe, you look like a wall off.

John L. Hanson Jr.: That’s what they told me when I was in

Alex P. Haley: Chicago. I know Village. They wouldn’t know you left home. That’s the truth.

You really do have very, very clear wall off features.

John L. Hanson Jr.: When researching roots, what gave you the inspiration and the energy to undertake such a difficult task?

Alex P. Haley: Well, it was mostly. Having begun. And then the more you got, the more deeply you got into it. You were kind of in a position that if you didn’t go on, you may as well never have started.

You know, you just have such a, an, uh, incremental investment. Uh, and also the, the, the, the challenge, you know, uh, you, you are really kind of at that time fighting a bit of a battle with yourself. As to whether or not you’ve done something worthwhile or something dumb or whatever. And I was frequently having people say to me how dumb this whole thing was.

You know, there were people who said that. Uh uh, for one thing, I guess I heard most frequently of all would come from black scholars who happened to, I would go talking with them about it for one another reason and agreed many of them. Uh, had the view of what do you want to resurrect slavery for? And it got to the point that I really quit talking too much about what I was doing, and it was principally a personal challenge to see how far could I go with it.

I was astounded that I had been able to get as far as I did at certain points because it really all had been, had begun with. Stories told on the front porch of the living room by my grandmother and her sisters about the family. And, uh, you know, my brother George, about George was about two years old when I first heard the story of the, the family, going back to the person whom they called, quote the African, who said his name was Kente.

And that meant about as much as, you know, as, as nothing to me in one sense. And those stories which they told about the family in my mind were sort of corollary to another set of stories I heard in a different locale, and that was biblical parables. You know, like you, where are you from? I mean, natively,

John L. Hanson Jr.: right?

Natively from Detroit.

Alex P. Haley: Oh Lord, that, well anyway, um, I guess you all had Sunday school in Detroit too, but we sure did in, in Tennessee. But you know, you tend to learn these things early and I, I often think about it and I sometimes say when talking that, um, I guess when I was about. 11 years old. By that time, my head was a jumble of stories that I had heard from adults from one another locale, and it was kind of mixed up like I would, you know, chicken George and David and Goliath, and Miss Kizzy and Moses.

They were all kind of mixed up in there and I would have had to stop and think about where some of them came from.

John L. Hanson Jr.: And in that way, six

Alex P. Haley: sisters gathered who had not seen each other since they were girls. They were now, with one exception, all grandmothers, like my grandmother, they all began to act in ways I can remember so vividly.

As I say, they hadn’t seen each other in all these years, and they used to at times right there in the house, particularly during the mornings, any two of them would walk up to each other and just kinda standing and look at each other, and then they would put hands on each other’s shoulders and just kinda shake each other and just laugh.

They were so happy to see each other again after all these years. And then it would generally be in the evening after supper, as we called it, and you do too here. The evening meal, they would wash the dishes and they would kind of filter out onto the front porch. In time terms, it would be about as dusk, deepen into early night.

There were lots of honeysuckle vines right outside the porch. And they were, you know what? Lightning bugs. They had lightning bugs all over their honeysuckles. And you know how Honeysuckle vine smell that thick, sweet smell, just early dark, and there were lots of rocking chairs on the front porch. And anybody, any of the ladies sat in any chair except nobody.

But grandma said in her white wick a rocking chair, and I always stood right behind her chair. It seemed to me I should be close to grandma. I always had the little boy feeling I should protect her since grandpa was gone. And the first thing, it sounds sort of crazy, but I, I remember it so well. It seemed that the first thing was they had to get all the rocking together.

You know, some people have a quick rock and others have a sort of slow language rock and they’d have to get these chairs synchronized the way they moved. And then I remember so well sitting there, they would all start running their hands down in the apron pocket. And coming up with these little shiny tin cans of Sweet Garrett snuff, and they would load up these lower lips and, and, and after a while they’d take these little practice shots and, um, and easily the champion in that department was my great aunt Liz, who, who had come in from somewhere called Oak Mulee, Oklahoma.

And, um, Ann Liz could drop a lightning bug at six yards when she got, you know. Once they got everything settled and rocking and the snuff, they would just start talking and our little boy was sitting there listening. And night after night after night in no given order, but just sort of mixing it around, talking bit of this and a bit of that.

They would talk about the family. They seemed to have nothing that interested them as much as the history of their own family, although nobody thought of it as formal terms as history. They were just talking about their own family. They talked about their, their father and mother, Tom Murray or Blacksmith and his wife Irene.

And then they talked about the plantation in Alamance County, North Carolina, where they had lived and where their father and mother had been slaves. And they talk about old Masa and old Mrs. Murray who had owned them. And I remember as a little boy, it just sort of struck me as funny. All, I didn’t say anything.

Kids never, you didn’t say anything then. Older people talking, you kept your mouth shut. But um, I would wonder to myself, it was so funny about somebody owning somebody, it just didn’t sound right. And then they would talk. They would start sometimes shaking their heads and make remarks like, oh, he was just scandalous.

And that was a preface to start to talk about the deeds of all sorts of daring do, and something they used to call, sounded terrible, called womanizing and so forth. And they were talking about their grandfather, somebody called Chicken George that used to fight cocks. And then they would on occasion talk about his mother, who was very quiet.

They said, never had a whole lot to say, but when she would talk, people listened closely in her name, they called her Miss Kizzy, and then they would talk about Miss Izzy’s father. And when they got to him, it was almost like he was some character out of mythology. He was different from the others, and they did not know a great deal about him.

And they talked almost hushed about him. He was somebody they called the Africa. Who said his name was Kinte and the whole thing was just talked back and forth and, and in and out. And that was how as a little boy from say the ages of six or five through, say 10 every summer. The first summer was the only time all six sisters came, but every other summer, some number of those sisters would come in.

Every summer they would talk about it. And I learned the stories of their family very much as I learned the stories of the biblical parables, which I heard in Sunday school.

John L. Hanson Jr.: You’re listening to In Black America with Johnny O. Hanson Jr. We’ll be back in just a moment. And now back to this episode of In Black America

Alex P. Haley: hitting Tennessee was the kind of bible belt southern town that.

Black or white in that town, you were either Methodist, Baptist or sinner. That was the way people saw it and every child went to Sunday school and in Sunday school you learn the stories. So that, I would say by the time I was 10, my head in the story terms of the, was a jumble of things like, uh, David and Goliath and Chicken George and Boes, and they were all mixed up together and I would’ve had to stop and consciously think about it.

To figure who belonged in which group, and thus I learned in the way that people, we all best learn something when we are young. Now, an illustration of that, I’m sure some of you have had this experience. I certainly have a great deal if you’re talking with very elderly people. So frequently you’ll come into situations in your own family or others.

But they may not be too clear on what happened last week, but they can tell you exactly what happened when they were eight years old, nine and so forth, you know? And the reason for that is because peoples, all of our minds tend better to retain that which came into those minds early before there was a lot of competition for so many things to know.

And that was how the story that became so entrenched for me, I grew on up. Went to school some. My father was a college professor and it is, uh uh, nowadays a lot is made about. I went through this school and that school and did so well. I didn’t do all that well at all. I made CS C minus, and the reason I went into service is to tell you the truth, was that when I was a sophomore in college, I was at Alcorn in Mississippi.

And I made a D in French and that in my father, his, he was a college professor. As I say in his eyes, that was more than the family’s honor could stand, and that that was the summer he began to speak to me about how much he had enjoyed the army in World War I. And so he recommended I go into service his plan, be one that I stay one hitch three years.

Then he said I would mature. And then I could come back and finish college, get a master’s, and get a PhD and be a college professor and be decent like he was. That was the way they had saw it. And he didn’t have any plan, nor did I, but I wound up finally spending 20 years in the service. I loved it. I loved being a sailor and traveling all over and doing the things sailors did.

And I was a cook. And, um, during the days I would cook all day and then at, see there was nothing to do at night. And that was how purely by accident I began to write. Literally how I got stumbled into being a writer, which I never had even thought about, was I used to write lots and lots of letters, and my shipmates knew I did.

And when we would go ashore in foreign lands, like it was Australia and New Zealand guys would meet girls, the ship goes back out to sea, or everybody’s talking about girls, they wanted to write letters to ’em. A lot of the guys just couldn’t write letters. But they knew I wrote lots of letters and they began to ask me if I’d help write love letters for them.

And I began to do it. I would interview them at night, they’d line up and I would say, what was it? You know? And literally that’s the way I stumbled into writing. And most of the guys were white. And they’d tell me, I’d ask them this, that, the other about the girl, and then say like, if a guy told me the girls hair was blonde, well out in the middle of the ocean, I’d get in some fit of creativity and come up with something like.

Your hair is like the moonlight reflected on the rippling waves

John L. Hanson Jr.: and,

Alex P. Haley: and every night there’d be a bunch of guys carefully copying in their own handwriting this stuff and they would give me a dollar a letter and I began to do pretty well. And, and that was literally what gave me the first concept that there was something in the writing business.

And that was what started me on that long, long road that most writers trod or tread. I wrote every night, I believe, for eight years before I sold something to a magazine, a little piece. And then I was in, you know, sold on the idea of trying to be a writer. And I stayed in the service and finally was selling to magazines.

Came out of the service, began to work for Reader’s Digest, then went to Playboy, where I wrote the interviews, and one of them was Malcolm X. That led to the book about him. And then that, when that was finished, I, out of curiosity about the story I’d heard as a boy. Just got to thinking about it and one day in Washington, I went in the archives and asked for the census record of Alamance County, North Carolina 1870.

Having learned somewhere in the interim that the first time black people were named in the census was after the Civil War, and remembering the word Alamance County, much as you might remember. Uh, Jerusalem or Galilee from having heard it as a child in Sunday school so much that it’s just become a fixed part of you.

And I got that census and turning the crank, looking at the names of all these people long gone. And about the six roll of microfilm, it just sort of came up through the scope, the names of the family that had been talked about on the front porch. And that just galvanized me. And it wasn’t that I had not believed my grandma, you did not believe my grandma, but there was something about seeing on microfilm in the United States National Archives, the very things grandma, aunt Liz, aunt Georgia, and plus all they talked about.

That just fascinated me and I began the long research that would ultimately take up nine years of research and three years of writing. Not done with any sense of, as I say. Great nobility and I shall go forward and do this. I was just hung up with it and I just wanted to tell it. And at some point in the process, I began to become aware that what I was really dealing with was not so much my family story as it was the symbolic story of a people.

Because all of us who are what we called black people, have fundamentally the same basic background story. Be assured that you too have Acuta Kente. Or female equivalent who was born and read somewhere in some West African village. Who at some point along the way was captured in some manner, was put in the hold of some slave ship, brought across the same ocean into some succession of plantations, and from that day to their struggle for freedom in its various forms.

And that’s the fundamental broad story. Of all of us.

John L. Hanson Jr.: When you finished the research and you put the manuscript together, did you receive any rejections from publishing houses when you initially tried to get the book published?

Alex P. Haley: Not, not. No. No, I didn’t. You know, a funny thing is that story, I don’t know if you heard it that, but for quite a time.

A story to that effect circulated rather widely that I had had a very hard time selling it. That’s not true at all. The fact was that the publishers practically pulled it outta my typewriter because it had been sold before I finished it, the television rights had been sold. What is her name? Ruby D. The actress Ruben d Ozzy.

You know Ozzy’s wife’s

Speaker: wife?

Alex P. Haley: Mm-hmm. Heard me speaking about the research process. And then she met David Waler, the great producer, and David said something about he was looking for something generational of theme, so Ruby told him. About what she had heard me talking about and David came looking for me, which is sort of like, you know, the Mountain Olympus comes to you and uh,

John L. Hanson Jr.: were you in awe when he called you?

Alex P. Haley: I was in awe. Awe. I was, I was, I don’t know what the proper word is. I was beyond awe. Moreover, I remember I was in, uh, Jamaica, in the West Indies because I didn’t have enough money to stay here and work. It’s cheaper there. Mm-hmm. And when he called me, um, or he didn’t call me, my manager called me saying that David wanted to buy it, just as outright as that.

And I really didn’t have money enough to get back to this country. My manager had to send me fair. And, uh, so I came on back and, and, you know, and everything. Went beautifully. David turned out to be magnificent guy to work with and learn from. And, uh, anyway, I did not have that problem at all of selling it.

I, but rejection slips, I got in abundance in my, you know, early years of trying to be a writer. There were, from the time I started, I rode every day. I was then in the US Coast Guard and I was riding on ships at night ’cause I was a cook by day and I got. Eight years of steady projections lived before I sold the first thing, like almost any other writer.

John L. Hanson Jr.: You wrote the autobiography of Malcolm X during my generation and was must reading for all college students. How did you come to meet Malcolm Little Leonard on Malcolm X and the writer’s biography?

Alex P. Haley: When I got out of the Coast Guard. I retired, you know, I was, uh, I had been in 20 years. I was 37. And the first magazine assignment that I got was from, surprisingly to me, the Reader’s Digest asked if I would do a piece about the organization known colloquial as the black Muslims, or, you know, the Nation of Islam.

And he, Malcolm was the spokesman. So that was how I first met him. And then subsequently, I, uh. I began to do the interviews for Playboy Magazine and I interviewed him for that. Then a publishing editor, Ken McCormick, a venerable editor, read the Playboy interview and asked Malcolm if he would be willing to tell his life in book lengths.

Detail and Malcolm Deur and you know about it. He finally agreed and then he, Malcolm asked me if I would, uh, write with him the book, and that’s how that happened.

John L. Hanson Jr.: There has been generations removed from Malcolm X since his death. What kind of man was Malcolm X? Personally and professionally as you know it

Alex P. Haley: often I get asked that, as you would imagine.

Usually I try. There’s one word above all others, I just say the man was electrical. He really was. I have never known anybody before or since who generated the kind of excitement that he did just in his being and his persona. You know, he, he lived more than the average 10 men did in his 39 years. He was that particularly professionally.

And then personally, I guess he was also. Under a lot of pressure, a lot of nervous energy. It was hard for him to sit down like we are sitting, he would be pacing the floor. He was like a caged tiger all the time. He, um, was, it seemed as if he challenged himself to do all that he possibly could do and then a little bit more, that type thing.

And together with that, he had a. You know, a, a sentimental street, rarely seen, and little eccentricities. Of course. One of them I remember he had, um, you know, when he was in prison, he, uh, said that he had almost forgotten in the streets all he had learned in school. So in prison, he decided he would, in effect, kind of reeducate himself.

John L. Hanson Jr.: Delay Alex Murray Palmer, Haley. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions asked your future in Black America programs, email us at In Black america@kut.org. Also, let us know what radio station you heard us over. Don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast and follow us on Facebook. Nx, you’re gonna have periods programs online@kut.org.

Also, you can listen to a special collection of In Black America programs at American Archive of Public Broadcasting. That’s American archives.org. The views and opinions expressed on this program are not necessarily those of this station or of the University of Texas at Austin in Black America. ’cause the listener supported production of KUT and KUTX in Austin, Texas.

You can support our work by donating@supportthispodcast.org. I’m sure we have the opportunity again for Texaco producer David Alvarez. I’m Johnny O. Hanson, Jr. Thank you for joining us today. Please join us again next week.

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