Roots Alex Haley

Haley called his novel "faction" and acknowledged most of the dialogue and incidents were fictional.[3] However, he claimed to have traced his family lineage back to Kunta Kinte, an African taken from the village of Juffure in what is now The Gambia. Haley also suggested his portrayal of life and figures among the slaves and masters in Virginia and North Carolina were based on facts which he had confirmed through historical documents. In the concluding chapter of Roots, Alex Haley wrote:

To the best of my knowledge and of my effort, every lineage statement within Roots is from either my African or American families' carefully preserved oral history, much of which I have been able conventionally to corroborate with documents. Those documents, along with the myriad textural details of what were contemporary indigenous lifestyles, cultural history, and such that give Roots flesh have come from years of intensive research in fifty-odd libraries, archives, and other repositories on three continents.[3]: 884–885 

However, some historians and genealogists suggested Haley did not rely on factual evidence as closely as he represented,[20] claiming there are serious errors with Haley's family history and historical descriptions in the period preceding the Civil War.

Africa

In April 1977, the (London) Sunday Times published an article titled "Tangled Roots" by Mark Ottaway. It challenged the book's account of Kunta Kinte and Haley's African ancestry. Ottaway found that the only African confirmation of Haley's family history came from Kebba Kanga Fofana, a griot in Juffure. However, Fofana was not a genuine griot, and the head of the Gambian National Archives even wrote a letter to Alex Haley expressing doubts about Fofana's reliability. On repeated retellings of the story, Fofana changed key details Haley had relied on for his identification.[21][22]

In 1981, Donald R. Wright, a historian of the West African slave trade, reported that elders and griots in The Gambia could not provide detailed information on people living before the mid-19th century, but everyone had heard of Kunta Kinte. Haley had told his story to so many people that his version of his family history had been assimilated into the oral traditions of The Gambia.[22] Haley had created a case of circular reporting, in which people repeated his words back to him.[23][24]

Roots depicted Juffure as a village where people had heard rumors about white men by 1767, but had never met any. In reality, Juffure was two miles from James Island, a major trading outpost established by the Royal Africa Company in 1661. The King of Barra allowed the Company to establish a fort on the island, on the condition none of his subjects could be purchased without his permission. Haley admitted that he had picked the year 1767 as "the time the King's soldiers came" to match his American research.[21]

Virginia and North Carolina

Historian Gary B. Mills and genealogist Elizabeth Shown Mills, who specialize in black American and southern history, followed Haley's trail in census records, deed books, and wills. They concluded:

Those same plantation records, wills, and censuses cited by Mr. Haley not only fail to document his story, but they contradict each and every pre-Civil War statement of Afro-American lineage in Roots!"[25] (emphasis in the original)

The Waller family already owned the slave Toby in 1762, five years before the Lord Ligonier supposedly landed Kunta Kinte in Annapolis. Haley had only searched for references to Toby after 1767, succumbing to confirmation bias. Dr. Waller did not have a cook named Bell or his own plantation, as he was disabled and lived with his brother John. Toby also appears to have died before 1782, eight years before his daughter Kizzy was supposedly born. "Missy" Anne could not have been Kizzy's childhood playmate, as Ann Murray was a grown woman and already married in the relevant timeframe. In fact, there is no record of a Kizzy being owned by any of the Wallers.[25]

After the deed reference to Toby Waller, the next piece of documentary evidence Haley uncovered was the 1870 census listing for Tom Murray's household. Therefore, there is a gap of over ninety years relying on the Haley family's oral history. The Millses investigated the oral history and found no corroborating evidence in the historical record.[25]

Tom Lea was not born into a poor family; he came from a well-to-do planter family. The record does not show a Kizzy or her son George among Tom Lea's slaves. There are also no records of a mulatto George Lea married to a Matilda. Haley described George Lea as a skilled chicken trainer who was sent to England when Tom Lea ran into financial difficulty in the 1850s. However, Tom Lea died during the winter of 1844–45.[25][26][27] Further, the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 abolished slavery within Britain and most of its overseas territories, so it is unlikely than an American slave taken to England in the 1850s would have agreed to return. Also, in the case of Somerset v Stewart, (K.B. 1772),[28] held that there was no positive law authorizing slavery in England, and that a slave brought to England from elsewhere was free upon his arrival.

Response

Haley initially conceded that he may have been led astray by his African research, and admitted that he had thought of calling Roots a "historical novel". However, he stated that Ottaway's article was "unwarranted, unfair and unjust", and added that he had no reason to think that Fofana was unreliable.[29] Haley also criticized his detractors' reliance on written records in their evaluations of his work, contending that such records were "sporadic" and frequently inaccurate with regard to such data as slave births and ownership transactions. Haley asserted that for black genealogy, "well-kept oral history is without question the best source".[30]

Ironically, the Millses discovered a better fit to the oral history in the written record than Haley himself had found. Dr. William Waller's father was Colonel William Waller, who owned a slave named Hopping George, a description consistent with a foot injury. Colonel Waller also owned a slave named Isbell, who may be the Bell in Haley family legend. Tom Lea's father lived in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, and he may have purchased some of Haley's ancestors from the Wallers. When the Lea family moved to North Carolina, they presumably took their slaves with them. The Leas lived in close proximity to the Murrays and Holts, and there are three Kizzies associated with the Lea and Murray families in the post-Civil War records.[26]

Historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. was a friend of Haley's, but, years after Haley's death, Gates acknowledged doubts about the author's claims:

Most of us feel it's highly unlikely that Alex found the village whence his ancestors sprang. Roots is a work of the imagination rather than strict historical scholarship. It was an important event because it captured everyone's imagination.[31]

Gates later hosted the TV series African American Lives and Finding Your Roots, which used DNA testing to corroborate family histories and genealogies.

Haley wrote another novel, about his paternal grandmother Queen [Jackson] Haley, but died before he could finish it. It was published posthumously as Queen: The Story of an American Family.

Subsequent DNA testing of Alex Haley's nephew Chris Haley revealed that Alec Haley, Alex's paternal grandfather and Queen Haley's husband, was most likely descended from Scottish ancestors via William Harwell Baugh, an overseer of an Alabama slave plantation.[32][33]