This Midday program features author Alex Haley speaking before the 115th Annual National Education Association convention, held in Minneapolis. Following speech, Haley takes part in a conversation and Q&A on race.

Transcript:

(00:00:00) Actually our noon our program today consists of two stories both of which involve intense human struggles will hear from Alex Haley for the next 40 minutes or so. Haley's to books The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Roots have endeared him to millions of Americans. Some critics say Haley has written the two works of the 20th century most important to the modern black movement in a moment. You'll hear Alex Haley in a recent public address and then in a more relaxed setting he'll discuss the tribulations and Perils of being one of the most popular men in the country it took Haley 12 years of hard often times disappointing research to record the story of his ancestors on the second part of our program. We learn about the struggles of other people who traveled to this country John Ed Ste recently spent time with the migrant family who every year returned the Red River Valley country of Northwestern Minnesota to care for and harvest the valuable sugar beet crop but first Alex Haley, he spoke at last week's Convention of the national. Education Association in Minneapolis,
(00:01:03) I thank you very much. Last evening. I was speaking to a smaller group among you and recalled what many members of the Nea had recalled to me as I have met them in various traveling's about the country. And then since I came here yesterday about a time when in 1972 the Atlantic City, I had the privilege to address your assembly as well. And it is said that by several people that it was a very moving evening for them. The things I talked about which were describing in some measure the process of this search that in was involved in eventually writing the book roots. If I talk well that evening it is because certainly in part of the audience I had and I don't just say that most people who speak professionally are aware that you draw from an audience something that helps you if you are up here talking and I was saying last evening as was true that it was one of the most memorable warm responsive audiences ever have had in having spoken for years all over the country. and I'm glad I finally did finish that book The the at the time I think at this time is probably as good as any other that I wanted to share with you as I have with some few already, but there is a there was recently made an album a record album, which a number of schools are using now for various courses in which I tell on the four sides of this album fundamentally the same thing that was talked about that evening in Atlantic City this Have this search behind the book roots, and I want to give a copy as a token as a gesture this morning. I have a couple up here. I think I had one for president Ryan if I made the president Ryan. Thank you. And then there's another and this is an album is just called Alex Taylor tells his story of his search for roots to mr. Church, Terry Herndon. Thank you and great. Then I would tell you one thing. That is I think I mentioned it. I do mention it in the in that particular record. It's sort of what I like to think of behind the book. There's so many things that make me feel now that it isn't something that I just sat down us walked around and prepared to write but it is a meant to be book. I think when I look back over the whole of my life it seems to me I was being prepared one another way from little boy hood for one another challenge that this book would offer when the time to write it King. It started with as most of you have heard by having heard stories told by my grandmother when I was a little boy in a little town in Lauderdale County, Tennessee Henning, Tennessee and grandma would tell these stories along with her older sisters. I gather there tennesseans here. My grandmother would tell these stores and also her older sisters and among them. Was one whom we would call the cousin Georgia. She was the youngest among them and I remember that everybody else would talk about their father Tom Maria blacksmith and how he and his wife Irene had been slaves on a bar a plantation in North Carolina Alamance County and then they would tell And then they would tell how Tom intern had been this son of this extremely colorful man of whom I heard all kinds of anecdotes. He seemed to have been sort of their family Buccaneer and he was called Chicken George and they would tell about him and then Chicken George had been the son of a lady named kizzy and kizzy in turn had been the out of an African who had been on a plantation in Spotsylvania County, Virginia and that all these stories equated in my mind as I heard them with. Sort of like the biblical Parable that I heard in Sunday School. Chicken George was kind of like David and Goliath in my little boy mine. And then I grew up with those stories knowing the much the same as I knew the biblical Parables and then to hop. Skip I went to school some left school and went into the service the US Coast Guard in which eventually I would spend 20 years and then it was in the service that I started writing and then when I came Mouth I began writing very seriously trying to make a living at it. I worked for two years for Reader's Digest for about three years doing the interviews of Playboy magazine one of them. one of them was of Malcolm X and that played into the writing of my first book The Autobiography of Malcolm X and then then the next thing was there's a saying in the writing business. The writing a book is like a mother having just had a baby something which has been very close to you which in fact you have internalized and all of a sudden it's gone and you the writer feel a kind of vacuum avoid and you don't quite know what to do with yourself and it was in that situation then that one day an early Saturday afternoon in Washington DC. I went into the National Archives. My head was kind of curious about stories. I'd heard as a little boy 30-odd years before and I asked for and got the microfilm Census records of Alamance County North Carolina 1870 and searching in that census. I found finally Tom Murray and Irene Murray and their children at the time and the more I looked at those names with the ages and little bit of About them it just kept willing up in me. I have heard all this before and it just sort of staggered me particularly when I looked at the youngest child at the time Elizabeth Aid 6 and it suddenly dawned on me for god sakes. That's Aunt Liz. I used to sit on Grandma's front porch and play with her long gray hair and it just really galvanized me. I did not know it at the time, but I had then been bitten pretty well by the genealogical bug. Ugh for which there is no cure and I started searching. the more I search the more my mind went back to little boy hood and it seen all my grandmother's front porch in Henning, Tennessee and I could see all of them grandma Aunt Lee as a until inviting all the others sitting there talking and telling that story and the youngest among them was cousin Georgia as we called and I remembered how now over that intervening 30 years one by one excepting one of them all of them including the I had died. The only one left was cousin, Georgia and she was now about 80. And I had this compulsion I had to see her. She lived in, Kansas City, Kansas. I flew to Kansas City. She was on Everett Avenue and then I never will forget that after all those years of not having seen cousin Georgia the most moving experience was after the initial hugging's and the kissing's and the boy you done growed up good and all the things like that. You hear from the old people that minute I mentioned that story cousin Georgia was off and running as if we had been on that front porch the preceding afternoon, and it was like Echoes from Boyhood as she told that story again up. on Sideways and I set listening thinking about how it had been with all those others telling it when I was a boy and when cousin Georgia finish telling the story She looked at me in an odd way and she spoke to me in the way that elderly people often can and transmit something to us extremely meaningful cousin Georgia as if she had been reading my mind spoke of those others who had been on that front porch when I was a little boy. She said boy, you'll sweep and ball and all the rest of me sitting up there watching you now you get out of here and do what you got to do and it was something about it. That was almost Eerie. There was a driving kind of mission since about it and I went on our back to New York where I lived and I begin to Pick and Pack around and research getting little data here a little bit there and every time I would run into some kind of puzzle some kind of particular challenge it would seem that the best thing I could do was sort of psychically go back to cousin Georgia in Kansas City and she would tell me the story once again and she would just talk to me and always before I believe she would always end with boy your sweet grandma and all the rest of them sitting up there watching you to see what you're going to do and that was in my ears. What I left the second time for Africa when now the men whom I had met on the first trip into Africa took me into a little Back Country Village calls you for a where I was introduced to an old old man named Kevin Kanga fofana who told me an ancient story that had been kept in Africa about a family called Kinte because this slave in Spotsylvania County, Virginia who had been given the name, Toby always had insisted that his name. Was hinted and this old man his name. Kebba Kanga. Fofana told me that story on the African side one detail of which dovetailed exactly with what I had heard on a front porch in Henning, Tennessee about how this boy had been a weed chopping wood when he disappeared and I had in Henning Tennessee always heard how this boy had been chopping wood when he was captured. And it filled me with such an enormous overwhelming sense of potential the idea that if I could bring it together. It might be a book that in fact could become the symbol story of all black people descendant of Africa because the story is the same for all of us. The only thing that varies from one to another is detailing which Village which person The how put into which slave ship brought across the same ocean into which succession of plantations on up to the Civil War the Emancipation and from that day to this day struggle for freedom and its various facets. And when I got back to New York just inundated with the awesomeness of the potential of such a book if I could possibly write it if I could possibly contain it. I called my brother George who was at the time in Washington and I was just going to tell him I was back and George told me that while I was away cousin Georgia in Kansas City had died. It was said it wasn't as tragic as it might have been I felt because we had known she was going she had known she was going she was now 82. She lived a rich full life. But nonetheless it was said. My brother's a lawyer George and in his orderly way. He sent me a little folder later containing relevant information about her passing the newspaper account of her death and her funeral and some sketch of her life. The program that had been issued in the church during her funeral and then the hospital report. Of her time there one item in that hospital report being time of death, and I looked at this various information, and then writers have a way of kind of fiddling with little various facts, and I got this time of death and with no particular intent to arrive at anything, but just fiddling with it. I began to transpose the time from Kansas City, Kansas to West African Coast. And then it hit me with a complete shot galvanic shock that in Kansas City, Kansas cousin, Georgia had died literally within the hour that I have set foot in that Village in Africa and it seemed to me at that moment. It seemed to me every since as part of this whole meant to be nice of ruse that as the last survivor of all those generations starting from Kunta Kinte and down through Bella. kizzy and Chicken George and Tom and all of them as the last survivor of the the old ladies who had kept that story in their heads funneling it to me as a little boy that cousin Georgia job as the last one had been to stay with me psychically to Shepherd me until I would set foot into that Village and she would know it and then it was time for her to to go up and join all the rest of them sitting up there watching me to see what was I going to do and it was in that spirit that Roots was written people often ask what sustained you across those 12 years and fundamentally. It was that sense of mission that sense of spirit that sense of men date that this particular book had some kind of mission. I had no idea could possibly have no idea what would happen. Now people often ask did, you know head you in a dream and I hadn't there was no way I could have taken any drug. I have ever heard of and fantasize what has happened by now, you know the results pretty much in this country the incredible response to it here the incredible response to the television program. It is being shown about the world now with not any less response in other countries and one of the most meaningful things now is how Roots literally is moving around the world. It is unusual when a book published in this country gets translated into ten other languages as of last week Roots was in process of being translated into 24 languages around the world. Yeah. to me one of its greatest work process is I think is that apart from having given us all not just black people which was not my intent just black people but all of us are better concept of the ancestry of black people of the history of Africa fundamentally what it did is it simply is that Kunta Kinte he and his people seem now to have replaced Tarzan and Jane and that's important for all of us. Yeah. Yeah. moreover it is scarcely less important that the book seems to touch some Universal pulse and to have generated among all peoples of all ethnic strains a want to go back to reach back to know more of the pairs of those people who brought us all into being being
(00:18:52) In
(00:18:53) most of the countries of the world now reports have come to me in one another way of how they has been precipitated almost a Mania for genealogical surgery. And I think that this is one of the most valuable things that could happen. I believe particularly in this country this so-called Melting Pot that here we are and with the single exception of the Native American and even then If you go back far enough all the rest of us in this country came and Cecily from somewhere across that ocean. And so you get this great fusions of people who've had some kind of collective experience. And I think that one of the most vital things we need to do in this nation of immigrants as we are called sometimes is it all of us no matter who we are from where our ancestors come need to be proud of who we are and where we came from. Um, and we need to know more. and then in having these individual Prides we need in a collective way to fuse the various ethnic strengths that we bring to this country into the one America that is already the greatest country on Earth, but can be But which has the potential to become exponentially greater one of the things that can give it that potential a realization of it is something with which all of you who are teachers are working directly every day of your working lives. And that is the young people of all the groups that comprise this nation. One of the facts that we really need to deal with is that probably the biggest laws that this nation has sustained is the fact that Actually for Generations, they potential abilities and talents and possibilities of literally whole ethnic groups have been poured in terms of the minority groups almost right down the drain and that has been a huge loss to this country. And I think now they one of the things I'd like to suggest to you too. In fact in treat you to do his teachers and to spread it among others of your profession. Is that in your classes that sometime during the year and indeed as quickly as possible that you caused to be an assignment in your classes? One in which students are asked to go home and to develop the genealogies of their individual families. The reason it's so important is because if I remember the figures correctly, there are 35 million people in the country over 65 now about 3 million of these each year died in their memories dies some of the most vital cultural heritage information. This nation has it's a precious asset that we need to conserve if your students with their special access are given an impetus to go home. Talk with their grandparents or whomever Elsa Elders in their families and simply reduced to simple words on paper, but it is possible for them to get from their families bringing of course a copy to you as a teacher but more importantly leaving a copy of that available in their homes collectively speaking via the teachers of this country. There can be salvaged a massive Wellspring of the culture of America. in this sense I would say there are three things that we basically need to do one is query the old people and record their information to we need to encourage students to be the ones that take the initiative to search out and take steps to preserve the old Trunks and boxes that are in the attics and closets of homes because they are not junk as many people think they are each family's private heirlooms and are As and the third thing you might impart to your students is to encourage that they talk up in their families something we do all too little of in this culture and that is the holding of family reunions. And if we do that these things these things make a difference because one of the greatest problems that you cope with his teachers and other people in other professions who deal with younger people cope with is how much we have in the past 20 to 30 years permitted to advance in this country what might be described as a sense of rootlessness among young people and that if corrected can alter our society obviously positively the potential for us are many many. I think that they sum up in another thing. I'd like to pluck out of the African culture that When the little boy Kunta was about four years old his grandmother yeasterday, he was grief-stricken his father amuro called him aside and said it is permissible to me sad because you loved your grandmother grief-stricken know I must teach you something that they are three people's in every village. They are one those who like your grandmother have gone on to spend the rest of time among the ancestors. They're to those who like you and me are walking around talking here in this Village at this time. And there are three those who are waiting to be born into this Village who will take your and my places as we become first the elders then the ancestors what omeruo told his son Kunta two hundred and some years ago in a remote African village is no less true in this Village here today where we are assembled it is no less true in the village of Stockholm or wherever in the world people are it's the universal human Continuum that in time terms. We are here but the blink of an eye, we just got here yesterday will be gone tomorrow and the best thing we can do. The biggest calling we have is in this little in term of time that we are here to do the most we can to pay homage to all of those grandmother's of all of us who are sitting up there watching all of us. To see what are we going to do and 2p pave a better Road for those waiting yet to be born and those most recently born who are your charges as students which I think makes you members of the Nea of the teaching profession in probably the most vital single profession. This country has now in the shaping of its future. Thank you.
(00:26:21) That was Alex Haley. After he spoke before nine thousand teachers in Minneapolis Haley met with a small group of reporters to discuss what the experience of roots has meant to him personally for one thing. He is now famous and Wealthy. Well, I sort of wish that I see this island. I wish I could be famous about one day a month to tell you the truth simply because it kind of distorts. Your personal life, you know, it's very difficult. To realize that for instance. You can't walk in a supermarket and just kind of browse around is something I love to do and buy stuff. I don't need you know, I really enjoy that always have but now if I go in the supermarket, they will no doubt. It'll it'll end up in, you know, kind of a crowd around you and I'm not at all deploring this I'm not saying I'm you know, sick of all. Is happening because obviously I'm very happy. I've had the fortune to become a public figure. I am only saying that they are facets of it that I could do without it's kind of a mixed blessing. You know, really what I like to do is right and you speak of the money thing. Yes. It is. It's true. I have gotten a lot of money. I am what they called now, I am told a millionaire but funny, I don't feel anything. Different than I did when I was broke except that I can pay my bills. You know, I'm not very enthusiastic about going around and you know buying a Duesenberg or something like that. That doesn't interest me at all. My biggest thing since I've had all this happened as I bought the slickest typewriter IBM makes that interest me and I have paid my bills pretty much and done some other things that Please me with money. You know, you were urging say that young people pursue their
(00:28:28) genealogy. How much of this genealogy has already been lost you think?
(00:28:33) Well, it depends on the individual family. It depends on how many people in a family are very old or not if in your family Let me ask you in your own family. Who's the oldest person in your family somebody about 68. Yeah. Well, you've lost a lot, you know, because the thing is that they're if you had people living who will say in the 80s and 90s, then you would obviously have the probability of in that person. Someone who knew a great deal more about their family, but a lot of genealogy has been lost a lot of family history. Is been lost and what I was trying to convey is that we need to salvage what is left now? Because if we don't I'd say it another 10 years. If we don't do it now the oldest most of the oldest living people now will be gone obviously. I'm curious to know what you must get a lot
(00:30:12) of mail. I wonder if I get a lot of letters from people asking you for money or asking you for something special some kind of personal thing.
(00:30:22) Yeah a great great deal of that. It's really kind of Astounding when you first start getting these sorts of letters, but then again it's kind of a look at that fabric of us as a public out there, you know and most of it all enough. Comes from people. You don't know at all, you know who have who will write and ask for you know, sometimes quite large sums of money, but but that's just part of the everyone who has the image of having money gets that is and it doesn't really mean anything that they letters which are much more touching. Of which there are great many are where people have read the book or they saw the film and they just write because they want to convey that it was deeply meaningful to them or if they want to tell you some problem often times in their families are some consideration in their families a lots of things that are things you wouldn't normally think about not let me tell you some very poignant things. For instance. I get a lot of letters from people who are emotionally very Upset because they are what we call Orphans. They were adopted, you know as children and they see that since they became adult and most of these are young adults since they became adults. They have gotten increasingly curious about who were their natural parents and then as adults they have gone to there. Adoptive parents and asked if they could give them some information and usually it appears adopted parents become very resentful when asked this and sometimes it has almost ruptured relationships between this adopted person and those parents, although it may been 20 some years that they've been together seemed to adoptive parents react as a rule with indignants. Don't you feel we've done enough for you or something like that and it These letters generally contain the adopted person's effort to say just to somebody I love them. They have taken care of me, but I just would like to know who were my natural parents and that's a frequent letter very moving another letter very interesting more and I would have thought I would get from people who have done in past years. What is called passing the you know what that is. I know, you know what it did. I messed everything up. No, no appears in yo, you would know piercing is where people who are called Black by definition but who are complexion wise light enough that they quote pass over into the white world and these would be people and I get number of these letters who did this say 30 40 years ago have married have children and Say the 50s and the 60s have become much more black Consciousness. So these individuals have but they are they are in an identity where they say. Nobody knows they can't now they feel reveal their terrible secret and every one of the points out that what they hear is what white people say about black people without awareness at anybody black his hearing And they are by definition black. That's a letter you get frequent very very moving. You know, Haley you've talked about your own personal. Gain. Do you have any feelings about what seems to be the commercialization of roots? Do you feel that all the hype has has changed the effect all of that? Yeah, right. Well I want to thing is that we when I say that me my lawyer and others would get pretty exercised about these things the commercialism at first, but what we found was that to try and go around legally stopping them all is like chasing smoke. You just can't so the only thing I would say is that we don't do it. We have no part of any commercialization. I just feel the roots as a certain kind of at least for me inherent dignity that I would not, you know a reduce to that kind of commercialism feel that that kind of commercialism in any way. Effect Roots cheapens it you know, I think it's just a if it does it's only the mind of the person who sold beholds it but in any event cheeping it or not. It's a fact of life you go out and do anything that gets the amount of publicity Roots as head and you watch it get cheaper and if it be that by commercialism people will copy it. It's like Star Wars now, they having a you know the movie they having the devil's own time trying to suppress people seizing up on If not Star Wars directly up on things which suggested you know, that's just power. It's a fact of life. It interests me a lot in the questions. I get answered a lot since all this happened collectively the questions kind of imply that we expect a sort of piety and Purity from one public figures from public things. The fact is that people are people and we just human beings is Like everybody else. Nobody ever asks, you these things or something happens that brings you publicly to light. You know, where do things stand in the
(00:36:10) controversy about Roots? You were attacked Roots
(00:36:15) was attack saying well you either made it up or it couldn't have happened
(00:36:19) and it seemed to me your response indicated that there's
(00:36:21) a symbolic true that some of them may be things that are not
(00:36:24) literally true. But certainly symbolically it is all true. Is that where things are now
(00:36:29) attacking Roots now is kind of like a King Santa Claus it really is you see what fundamentally was at work. I think is that the myth as I was saying today, the myth of Tarzan dies hard and the attack took the form of seeking to say just as you say that it was from an in inferior not inferior Source, but from a source that was what the word. You know the demand was not reputable and so forth. Now what always interests me about this is again, I think it may say more about us as a public that it does about the man even the man who made the attack the fact is I spent 12 years working hard going all over this country talking about what I was doing. I went in 57 different libraries and archives traveled about a half million miles. Went not hungry, but nearly hungry trying to do what I was doing then Along Comes A man who spent literally three days from London back to London and wrote this thing and more Credence is given to his 3-day findings in quotes. It would appear sometimes and to my 12 years effort and I think that what he did in fact was a monument to irresponsible journalism. ISM if it be called that. It's a cheap dirty exercise in muckraking. And yet it is nonetheless. It is a worldwide thing. Now people it's all over the world. However, it's been kind of interesting that there was a flurry a great flurry at one point of you know concern about this but in the week of it and I see you know in many forms the responses to it in a week of it roots and its effects seem to be flowing along like Old Man River at this point, you know, because you seem to be a very warm congenial person with Since Etc. I wander outside of the time that you spend in writing letters. What about the factor of like an emotional drain when you get all these personal stories can you with the sensitivity of a writer and everything you put into this? Can you avoid
(00:38:55) you know, I really strong
(00:38:56) feeling toward these people and desire to respond. And how do you handle that? We let us like that. Yes sometimes sometimes You sit up I do sit up until the day breaks answering such letters just because every now and then a person will write who in some way conveys to you. You can almost feel that prison. You almost see that person and I'll tell you very often it comes from Obviously very elderly people who written to you. We've all seen say well somebody Elder rights in this kind of shaky the handshake or another group of people that are very high ratio of that is children who write to you know, because children are so open and candid they say just exactly what's on their minds and so forth and I write a lot of children letters and I tried to another thing that moves me a lot to these all night letters not great long letters, but Response, you know short maybe in a good night. You may be able to write 50 short letters, you know, but if you've got a pile of 2000 that is that's not a whole lot of responses, you know, but nonetheless it will be when I get a letter from youngsters who somehow say are conveyed to you maybe not in direct words that they see you as a role model. See you as someone whom they might quote be like something and you can tell say if you get a letter from someone whose address suggest to you that he lives in what we call the ghetto or she lives in the ghetto and then they say I want to grow up and write books. Well, you can bet they're going to hear from me, you know, simply because I know what the potentials are. If they don't get some kind of encouragement that may help them break out of it. He said that you thought Roots was meant to be are there other things in your life or in society in general that you think are preordained. Well, I think yeah, but I think we need to help them if they are good things. I don't think the lower just hands us stuff and if we lay down and go to sleep they going to happen. I think we have to work but I think that I'll put it this way most of the people whom I have had contact with in terms of writing subjects when I was writing and they you know, I was interviewing them people who are very diverse as the personalities and as to Fashions turnout in the final analysis to be very strong believe as almost in a religious belief since I think they had something to do with when one invests the most one can of one's efforts and of oneself. You then are really extending that which is said where we are made in His image and I feel that we are asked in that context to do our utmost. And if we do our must we likely will succeed. Most people probably don't use 15% of their capabilities in their lives. I really believe that's true. I'm a writer that's it. I'd like very much to fact it is generally said now widely said I should say that I have written the two most important books in the black struggle. That's enough for me. You've been listening to author Alex Haley who was in Minneapolis last week.