During President Obama’s inauguration today, Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander (R) quoted Alex Haley, the author made world-famous for his Pulitzer Prize-winning literary sensation, “Roots.” According to The Washington Post, Haley and Alexander were longtime friends. That’s all well and good, but quoting Alex Haley at an important national occasion is not unlike quoting Lance Armstrong. Because what both men are most famous for is based on brazen fraud.
Haley not only lost a high-profile plagiarism suit against his work in “Roots, but any serious look into the Haley family’s genealogy has found — and I’m being generous — that large portions of what was sold as non-fiction cannot be verified. Charges that “Roots” was largely a work of fiction sold as history have been around for decades now.
The man who sued Haley for plagiarism, author Harold Courlander, won in a rout:
In his Expert Witness Report submitted to federal court, Professor of English Michael Wood of Columbia University stated: “The evidence of copying from The African in both the novel and the television dramatization of Roots is clear and irrefutable. The copying is significant and extensive. …
After a five-week trial in federal district court, Courlander and Haley settled the case with a financial settlement and a statement that “Alex Haley acknowledges and regrets that various materials from The African by Harold Courlander found their way into his book, Roots.” …
During the trial, Alex Haley had maintained that he had not read The African before writing Roots. Shortly after the trial, however, a minority studies teacher at Skidmore College, Joseph Bruchac, came forward and swore in an affidavit that he had discussed The African with Haley in 1970 or 1971 and had given his own personal copy of The African to Haley, events that took place a good number of years prior to the publication of Roots.
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