Roots—Celebrating 50 Years of Epic Literary Fraud

Fabricated, Plagiarized, Ghostwritten, and, of course, Pulitzered.

Brace yourself. This summer will mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Roots, the mega best seller that enabled the Left to stoke black rage and milk white guilt for the next half century.

Various symposia, picnics, parades, cultural heritage days, and “commemorative experiences” are already underway or in the planning stages. Vendors are also offering a wide range of “merch” to help remind white people of their presumed original sin. Everyone’s favorite seems to be Mattel’s 50th Anniversary Roots “Barbie.” But buyer beware. With its tawny Barbie doll, Mattel seems to be luring liberals into celebrating the Canadian apparel brand “Roots.” Quelle coincidence!

Just as “coincidental” was Doubleday’s release of Alex Haley’s allegedly non-fictional “saga of an American family” in 1976. The bicentennial offered Haley and his publisher an excellent hook to tell the “real story” of America’s founding through the eyes of the young slave Kunta Kinte.

Haley’s indictment of the United States is always loaded and often gratuitous. In Haley’s tale, it is the whites who enter the forest and enslave the blacks, not, as actually happened, Arab slave traders or rival African tribes. Since Kinte is conveniently unconscious through the period of transaction, the reader has no picture of African participation in the slave market, nor of any Portuguese or Hispanic involvement in the slave trade.

As a Muslim, Kinte does not sense any virtue in Christianity. Indeed, it strikes him as crude and hypocritical. Coming of age during the revolutionary period in Virginia, Kinte sees the American Revolution as inherently fraudulent: “‘Give me liberty or give me death,’ Kunta liked that, but he couldn’t understand how somebody white could say it; white folks looked pretty free to him.”

For a fuller account of the Roots scam and other intellectual frauds, read Hoodwinked

To broaden the scope of subversion, Haley has an amusingly cynical fiddler friend of Kinte’s provide an ongoing narrative on events and personalities from Christopher Columbus—“But if he foun’ Injuns here, he ain’t discover it, is he?”—to blacks fighting in Washington’s army—“dem free niggers is crazy.” When the fiddler is told that the war had ended, he discounts the news. “Ain’t gon’ be no peace, not long as it’s white folks,” he says, “cause ain’t nothin’ dey loves better’n killin’.”

Unfortunately for Haley, at least one person in the cultural establishment was not about to give him a pass because of race or agenda. For the previous thirty years, Harold Courlander had been traveling the world collecting folk tales. In 1967, Courlander, who himself was white, wrote a novel titled The African. He earned $14,000 dollars for it. Less than ten years later, Alex Haley flagrantly rewrote large sections of his book and made $2.6 million in hardcover royalties alone.

In 1978, Courlander sued Haley in a U.S. District Court in New York for copyright infringement. The suit cited eighty-one passages that had been lifted from Courlander’s The African as well as the plot and certain characters. Under oath, Haley testified that he had not even read The African, but his defense fell apart when the plaintiff’s lawyers found quotes from The African among his typed notes.

The last thing the judge wanted to do was to undermine a newly ascendant black hero. Midway through the trial, he counseled Haley and his attorneys that he would have to contemplate a perjury charge unless they settled with Courlander. They did just that to the tune of $650,000, or about $3.25 million by 2026 standards. The media ignored the scandal. Only the Washington Post gave the case any ink of note, and even then it used a local hook—“Bethesda Author Settles ‘Roots’ Suit for $500,000”—to justify its coverage.

True to form, the Post neglected to explore the real gist of the scandal: namely that the author of a “nonfiction” book plagiarized from a fictional one. Doubleday sold Roots as being painstakingly researched and true. In reality, it was neither.

In the late 1970s, two leading genealogists, Gary Mills and Elizabeth Shown Mills, decided to follow up on Haley’s work through the relevant archives in Virginia, North Carolina, and Maryland. They found that Haley, like most amateur genealogists, made mistakes. But they found too that his transgressions went well beyond mere mistakes. “We expected ineptitude, but not subterfuge,” observed Elizabeth, herself the editor of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly. The records showed that in the pre-Civil War period, Haley got virtually everything wrong. There was no Kunta Kinte.

Still, neither the lawsuit nor the unraveling of the genealogy dimmed Haley’s star while he was alive. The Coast Guard named a cutter for Haley. Annapolis installed a Kunta Kinte memorial. Knoxville erected a 13-foot bronze statue in Haley’s honor. The book and video remained a staple in history classes across America. The Pulitzer remained in his trophy case. And the awards and the money continued to roll in.

In 1993, a year after Haley’s death, writer Philip Nobile did his best to blow the whistle on what he calls “one of the great literary hoaxes of modern times.” In February of that year, he published “Uncovering Roots” in the influential, left-leaning publication, The Village Voice. The article brought to a larger public the story of the Courlander suit and the Mills’ genealogy. Nobile also revealed that Haley’s editor at Playboy magazine, the very white and Jewish Murray Fisher, did much of the book’s writing.

Although Nobile’s account got good play in the UK, the American media fully suppressed it. Between the book and the wildly popular NBC mini-series, there was too much money at stake to concede the truth. And Roots commercial value was just the half of it. Roots value as propaganda was an annuity for the ages.