The ROOTS Hoax

[mitsuki lover]

Alex Haley's ROOTS was one of the most important books written in the
second half of the Twentieth Century.His chronicling his family history from
the Mandikan tribesman Kunta Kinte to his own generation was one of
the catalysts that set off the renaissance of genealogy.
ROOTS also spawned one of the most popular mini-series of all time.
Too bad that the entire story was based on a fraud.
Turns out that a couple years after ROOTS was published Haley was
sued by author Frank Courlander who claimed that major portions of the book were plagiarized from his own novel THE AFRICAN.
This included major events and characters.
Unable to mount a proper defense Haley was forced to pay Courlander
$650,000(around $2,000,000 of today's money).
Furthermore it was later revealed that Haley didn't actually write ROOTS.
The majority of the book was written by his Jewish editor at Playboy
magazine who had also ghostwritten THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM
X for him.
Not only that but serious genealogists who tried to retrace Haley's
research discovered problems when they conducted a careful checking.
Among the facts that did not check out:
1.While there was a Dr.William Waller as in the book he did not as in the book own a cripple slave named Toby.
2.While there was a Waller slave named Toby he was not crippled and
died around 1768 or 22 years before his supposed daugther Kizzie was
born.
3.Dr.William Waller did not own a house slave named Bell.
In addition to this a member of the Lea family who met Haley at
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill inquired about Tom Lea but
Haley would not reply to her.As it turned out there was no one named
Tom in the Lea family of that time.
In short ROOTS should be regarded as a highly readable work of fiction
but it should never be treated as anything BUT fiction.

[shooraijin]

This is going to go really bad, really quickly -- sorry.