In Black America; Remembering Alex P. Haley

From the University of Texas at Austin, KUT Radio, this is In Black America. 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's worse than it ever was and this and that and the other because that's simply not true. I think that the more near the truth is that we have come a long way since the 60s or the 40s or the 30s 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're 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. 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 Kutekentek by listening to family stories of his maternal grandparents while spending his summer in Hintoneseed. After 12 years, Haley's quest to learn more about his family history resulted in him writing the fuel of surprise winning book Roots. The book has been published in 37 languages and was made into the first week long television mini-series viewed by an estimated 130 million people. Roots also generated widespread interest in genealogy. In 1939, Haley's widely career began when he entered the U.S. Coast Guard. He was the first member of the U.S. Coast Guard with a journalist's definition.

In 1999, the U.S. Coast Guard honored Haley by naming a Coast Guard cutter after him. Haley's personal model, quote, find the good and praise and end the quote, appears on the ship emblem. He retired from the military after 20 years of service and then continued writing. Haley 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 70 years old. I'm John L. Hanson, Jr. and welcome to another edition of In Black America. From this week's program, I'll tribute to the late Alex Palmer Haley in Black America. Well, it was mostly.

But having begun, and then 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 just have such an incremental investment and also the challenge. 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 for one thing, I guess I heard most frequently of all would

come from Black scholars who happen to go talking with them about it for one another reason. And a great many of them 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. 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 Guardman in the modern era to reach the rank of Chief Petty Officer. He paved a way for other African American men and women to rise into the senior enlisted ranks in the Naval Services. Haley also holds a distinction of being the first Coast Guardsman to be distinguished in 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 American sailors serving almost exclusively in menial jobs, as cooks and stewards. Haley began his writing career with the Simon with Reedus 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 so six million copies. Haley was born on August 11, 1921 in Ithaca, New York. Soon after his birth, he moved to Henning, Tennessee. At the age of 15, he graduated from high school at an 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 passed through Ellis Island. Ruth, the story of Kutikinte, a West African enslaved in this country, and is descended 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. Well, a whole variety of things I have spoken a lot. I have fought the battle of correspondence as best I can, and simply to say that 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 that, so I try my best to answer as much as I can and still don't do a problem half of it. And then I have written some enough that I'm about at this time, about two weeks away

from finishing my next book, The Book, which will be titled Hening, 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. I recently turned from Africa, and I got a very good feeling when I got to Senegal and had an opportunity to go to Gory Island and see the slave house. When you went back and doing the research for roots, what type of an emotional feeling did you feel going back to Africa? Well, you know, you're kind of in all, really, if you know the full significance of where you are when you're at Gory. But let me 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're around tribes in Africa enough, you get to sort of get some general feeling about tribal configurations, you know, face and all that.

And I would bet you, if anything, that if it were possible, you could trace yourself back to your country. I bet you anything. You came from the Wall of Tribe. You look like a Wall of. And that's what they told me when I was in the village. They wouldn't know you left home. That's the truth. You have very, very clear Wall of features. When researching roots, what gave you the inspiration and the energy to undertake such a difficult task? 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 an incremental investment. And also the challenge, you know, 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 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 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 you know my brother, George, about George was about two years old when I first heard the story of the family going back to the person whom they called the African who said his name was Quintay.

And that meant about as much as, you know, as nothing to me in one sense. And those stories, which they told about the family, in my mind, were sort of car-layered 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, namely from Detroit. Oh, Lord, well, anyway, I guess you all had Sunday's ghoul in Detroit too, but we sure did in Tennessee. But, you know, you tend to learn these things early and I often think about it and I sometimes say when talking that 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 go live and miss Kizzi 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. And in that way, six sisters gathered who had not seen each other since they were girls.

They were now with one exception, all grandmother's, like my grandmother. They all began to act in ways I can remember so vividly as I say they had 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 kind of stand and look at each other and then they would put hands on each other's shoulders and just kind of 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 to hear the evening meal. They would watch the dishes and they would kind of filter out onto the front porch. In time terms, it would be about as dusk deepened into early night. There were lots of honeysuckle vines right outside the porch and they were, you know, lightening bulbs, all over the honeysuckle. And you know how honeysuckle vines smell, that thick, sweet smell.

Just early dog and there were lots of rocking chairs on the front porch and anybody any of the ladies sitting in the chair except nobody but grandma sitting her white wicker rocking chair. And I always stood right behind her chair. It seemed to me that I should be close to grandma and 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 remembered so well and 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, languid rock and they'd have to get these chairs synchronized the way they move it. And then I remember so well sitting there, they would all start running their hands down in the apron pocket and coming up to the little shiny tin cans of sweet garret snuff and they would load up these or lower lips and after a while they'd take these little practice shots and easily the champion in that department was my great aunt Liz who had come in from somewhere called Oak Muggy, Oklahoma and Anilies could drop her laden and boy get six yards

when she got there, you know. And once they got everything settled and rocking into snuff, they would just start talking and I little boy was sitting there listening and night after night after night in no given order but just sort of mixing it around, talking bits of this and a bit of that. They would talk about the family. They'd seem 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 would just talk about their own family. They talked about their father and mother, Tom Murray or blacksmith and his wife Irene and then they talked about the plantation in Elements County, North Carolina where they had lived and where their father and mother had been slaves and they'd talk about old muscle 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 and older people talking, you kept your mouth shut.

But 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 sound and terrible, called womanizing and so forth. And they were talking about their grandfather, somebody called chicken George and used to fight game 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 listening closer and her name they called her Miss Kizzi. And then they would talk about Miss Kizzi's father and when they got to him it was almost like he was some character 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 Kinti. And the whole thing was just talked back and forth and in and out.

And that was how, as a little boy, from say the ages of six, a five through say ten every summer, the first summer, 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. Hitting Tennessee was the kind of Bible built southern town that, like a white, in that town you would hear the Methodist Baptist or a sinner, that was the way people saw it. And every child went to Sunday school. And in Sunday school you learned the stories so that I would say by the time I was ten, my head in the story in terms of it was a jumble of things like David and Goliath and Chicken George and Moses and they were all mixed up together. And I would have 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 will 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. And the reason for that is because people's 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 with the school, some, my father was a college professor and it is, nowadays a lot is made about I went through the school and that school and did so well, I didn't do all that well at all.

I made C minus and the reason I went in the service to tell you the truth was that when I was a sophomore in college, I was at Old Corn in Mississippi and I made a D in French and that in my father, he was a college professor as I say, and his eyes that was more than the family's honor could stand and that was the summer he began to speak to me about how much he had enjoyed the army at World War I. And so he recommended I go into service. His plan be one that I stayed one hitch three years, then he said I would mature and then I could come back and finish college, get a bachelor, get a PhD and be a college professor and be decent like he was. That was the way they had sought 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 during the days I would cook all day and then it'd see there was nothing to do at night and that was how purely my accident I began to write.

Literally how I got stumbled into being a writer which I never 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 see everybody's talking about girls they wanted to write letters to them 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 have right 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 the hell 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 had told me the girl's hair was blonde without an ability of the ocean I'd get in some field of creativity and come up with something like your hair is like the moonlight reflected on the rippling waves 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 or a letter and I'd begin to do pretty well 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 and most writers tried our trade I wrote every night I believe for eight years before I sold something to a magazine a little piece and then I was you know sold on the idea of trying to be a writer and I stayed in the service and finally it was selling to magazines came out of the service began to work for readers 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 Elements 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 Elements County much as you may remember Jerusalem or Galilee from having heard

it as a child and 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 sixth role of Baker family 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 thing grandma and liaison Georgian 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 no bill at the end 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 call black people have fundamentally the same basic background story be assured that you two have Akuta Kentie our female equipment who was born and reared 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 there struggled for freedom in its various forms and that's the fundamental broad story of all of us when you finish the research and you put the manuscript together did you receive any rejections from publishing houses when you initially tried to get to the public 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 out of my tape writer because it had been sold before I finished it it the motion this the television rights had been sold what is her name ruby D the actress ruby D Aussie you know Aussie's wife heard me speaking about the research process and then she met David Walper 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 I was in all you know I was I was I don't know what the proper word is I was beyond all more over I remember I was in Jamaica in the West Indies because I didn't have enough money to stay here and work as cheaper there and when he called me he didn't call 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 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 anyway I did not have that problem at all of selling it but rejection slips I got in abundance in my you know early years are trying to be a writer they were from time I started I wrote every day I was then in the U.S. Coast Guard and I was writing on ships at night because 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 you wrote the autobiography of Malcolm X during my generation it was months reading for all college students how did you come to meet Malcolm little let it on this Malcolm X and the writers biography when

I got out of the Coast Guard I retired you know I was I had been in 20 years I was 37 and the first magazine assignment that I got was from surprisingly to me the readers digest ask if I would do a piece about the organization known colloquially as the black Muslims are you know the nation of Islam and he Malcolm was the spokesman so that was how I first met him and then subsequently 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 ask Malcolm if he would be willing to tell his life in book length detail and Malcolm demurred and you know about it he finally agreed and then he Malcolm asked me if I would write with him the book and that's how that happened there's been a generations removed from Malcolm X census depth what kind of man was Malcolm X personally and professionally

as you know it 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 ten 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 he he was hard for him to sit down like we are sitting he would be pacing the floor he was like a cage tiger all the time he 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 sentimental street rarely seen and little eccentricities of course one of them I remember he had you know when he was in prison he 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 the late Alex Murray Palmer Haley if you have questions comments or suggestions ask your future in black America programs email us at lowercase jhanssen at kut.org also let us know what radio station you heard us over the views and opinions expressed on this program are not necessarily those of this station or of the University of Texas at Austin you can hear previous programs online at kut.org until we have the opportunity again for technical

producer David Alvarez I'm John L. Hanson Jr. thank you for joining us today please join us again next week CD copies of this program are available and may be purchased by writing in black America CDs KUT radio one university station Austin Texas 78712 that's in black America CDs KUT radio one university station Austin Texas 78712 this has been a production of KUT radio