Alex Haley

American · 1921 to 1992

Born Alexander Murray Palmer Haley on August 11, 1921, in Ithaca, New York, the eldest son of Simon Haley, a professor of agriculture at Alabama A&M, and Bertha Palmer Haley, who claimed Mandinka, Cherokee, and Scots-Irish ancestry, he spent his earliest years in Henning, Tennessee, on his grandmother's porch listening to elderly relations tell the family's stories back through slavery to a kidnapped African ancestor called Kunta Kinte. He attended Alcorn State briefly, then Elizabeth City State College, before his father pressed him to enlist in the United States Coast Guard at eighteen. He served twenty years, beginning as a mess attendant in the segregated steward's branch and writing love letters for shipmates in the Pacific. The Coast Guard created the rate of Chief Journalist for him in 1952 in recognition of his work. After retirement in 1959 he conducted the first Playboy interview in 1962, with Miles Davis, and went on to interview Martin Luther King Jr., Muhammad Ali, and the American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell, who kept a handgun on the table throughout the conversation. The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), assembled from fifty interviews conducted between 1963 and Malcolm's February 1965 assassination, has sold over six million copies and remained continuously in print. Twelve years of genealogical research and travel to the Gambian village of Juffure followed, and in 1976 he published Roots: The Saga of an American Family, which won a special Pulitzer in 1977 and an ABC miniseries watched by 130 million Americans. Plagiarism charges from Harold Courlander and others later shadowed the book. He died of a heart attack on February 10, 1992, in Seattle, at the age of seventy, en route to a speaking engagement.