Alex Haley’s Roots of Deception

By H.C. Felder, D.Min.

In 1977 a made-for-TV miniseries came out that would mold the perception of slavery for an entire generation. The miniseries, Roots, was based on the book Roots: The Saga of an American Family, written by Alex Haley. The story allegedly chronicled Haley’s family’s journey from Africa through the generations of slavery in the US. I never missed an episode of the eight-night event and everyone was talking about it the next day.

More importantly, every black person identified with the show; they saw it as their story. In fact, the show evoked rage among many blacks, and some were beating up white people without provocation, all for the retribution of their ancestors. Roots was a lightning rod for hatred towards whites, a hatred that never really went away.

But was Roots a true story? Apparently not. In this post, I will discuss charges of plagiarism and historical inaccuracies and demonstrate that generations of blacks were deceived into accepting a false history.

Charges of Plagiarism

In 1977, Harold Courlander sued Haley, accusing him of plagiarizing Courlander’s 1967 book, The African. (1) A judge found that Alex Haley had indeed plagiarized Courlander’s book and ordered Haley to pay $500,000. (2) According to Courlander, passages in Haley’s book are similar to 81 passages from The African. (3) Courlander, who is not even black, wrote The African as a work of fiction because he was fascinated with black culture (4) and wanted to write a novel that “explores the transition of Africans from tribal freedom to plantation slavery." (5)

Alex Haley conceded that parts of Roots were fictionalized but denied knowingly making factual errors. He defended his book by saying it was a “symbolic history of a people." (6) Haley referred to Roots as a “faction”—part fact and part fiction. (7) He conceded that his inclusion of Courlander’s passages was inadvertent, saying he’d probably gotten them from someone who had read The African. Haley claimed to have never read the book himself.

However, journalist Philip Nobile, who studied Haley’s private papers, revealed that the deception went much deeper. According to Nobile, “Virtually every genealogical claim in Haley’s story was false." (8) Nobile further states that none of Haley’s early writings reference his alleged ancestor, “the African” named Kunte Kinte. Thanks to Nobile’s work, Roots has now been widely exposed as a hoax.

Historical Inaccuracies

Considering Haley's admission that parts of his book are fictionalized, with at least some influence from a white man’s novel, it is no surprise both the book and the miniseries contain historical inaccuracies.

The Capture of Kunte Kinte

When watching the original miniseries, what angered and impacted me most was the capture of Kunte Kinte under the supervision and provocation of a white slaver. I remember thinking, “How dare whites go to Africa and kidnap unsuspecting Africans!” What I did not know at the time was that this scene was a complete fabrication.

Enslaved Africans were obtained in ways very different from what we see in the movies. Although it is true that in the very beginning, the Portuguese, who were the first to export slaves from Africa to Europe, did engage in capturing slaves, this practice was abandoned in the 1400s, long before Kunte Kinte’s capture. Diseases such as malaria made it dangerous for Europeans to go into the interior of Africa. Trader established centers on the African coast, where they purchased slaves from local African leaders. (9) Africans obtained most slaves from war, punishment, and kidnapping. The scene depicting white men capturing Africans in the 1700s was fiction.

This assertion is supported by an article on History.com that questions Haley’s depiction of Kunte Kinte’s birthplace, the village of Juffure. Far from the small rural village displayed in the show, Juffure was “a vibrant port and bustling hub of the slave trade in which competing African tribesmen captured and sold men, women and children into bondage." (10) Roots depicted white slavers going into Africa to capture slaves; however, they simply arrived in their boats along the coast, where African slavers delivered slaves to Europeans.

The Mandingo People were Slavers

The claim that whites brought slavery to Africa is also wrong. Muslims colonized much of Africa before the first Europeans arrived, but there was slavery in Africa even before the Muslims arrived. According to Roots, Kunte Kinte was a Mandingo warrior from the area of Gambia in West Africa. According to University of Toronto history professor Martin Klein, “the region of West Africa from which Kunte Kinte supposedly came was one of the great slave-trading regions of the continent—before, during, and after the white man arrived." (11)

Roots portrays the Mandingo tribe as innocent victims of slavery. Ironically, the Mandingo tribe were known to be perpetrators of slavery. They would go into central Africa, steal or purchase slaves from other tribes, and march them through the African jungle back to the coast to be sold to slave merchants destined for the New World. One of the places they took slaves was Juffure, which Haley portrays as a small, peaceful village—but instead was a major slave trading port. Much of the slave trade was carried out on long-distance trade routes that the Mandingos themselves established. It is true, as the miniseries depicts, that many Mandingos were sold into slavery, but it was by their own men.

The Mandingos were known to have little compassion for their captives, as can be seen in a first-hand account by Dr. Christian Wadström, an official visitor from Sweden:

The unhappy captives, many of whom are people of distinction, such as princes, priests, and persons high in office, are conducted by the Mandingos in drives of twenty, thirty, and forty, chained together … These Mandingoes perform the whole journey … I saw there the unfortunate captives, chained two and two together, by the foot. The mangled bodies of several of them, whole wounds were still bleeding, exhibited a most shocking spectacle." (12)

Summary

Contrary to popular opinion, Roots is not a first-rate work of non-fiction about Alex Haley’s family, or by proxy, the families of many blacks in the United States. Haley plagiarized a white man’s novel and passed it off as the story of black America. While it's true that slavery is a part of America's history, Roots is filled with historical inaccuracies and admitted fictionalized events that puts the entire contents of the miniseries into question. Both the book and the miniseries have perpetrated a distorted view of slavery that demonizes whites while overlooking the responsibility of the African slave traders. Slavery is a human tragedy wherever it happens and not just a white evil. Sadly, Roots has fostered hatred and strife between races and has deceived generations of blacks who still carry resentment fostered by a great root of deception.

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Resources:

(1) Henry Louis Gates Jr., "Roots Plagiarism Suit Is Settled," The New York Times, December 15, 1978, https://www.nytimes.com/1978/12/15/archives/roots-plagiarism-suit-is-settled-roots-plagiarism-suit-is-settled.html.

(2) Washington Post, "Bethesda Author Settles 'Roots' Suit for $500,000," December 15, 1978, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1978/12/15/bethesda-author-settles-roots-suit-for-500000/f97b693c-5336-46b3-8ab0-1b19856e8964/.

(3), (4) and (6) Ibid.

(5) Gates, "Roots Plagiarism Suit Is Settled."

(7) New York Daily News, "‘Amazing Roots’ Returns After 40 Years, Dredging Up Alex Haley Plagiarism Scandal," May 19, 2016, https://www.nydailynews.com/2016/05/19/amazing-roots-returns-after-40-years-dredging-up-alex-haley-plagiarism-scandal/.

(8) New York Post, "The Celebrated Roots of a Lie," January 16, 2002, https://nypost.com/2002/01/16/the-celebrated-roots-of-a-lie/.

(9) Hourly History, Kingdom of Dahomey: A History from Beginning to End, 2022, 44.

(10) "Remembering Roots," History.com, accessed March 17, 2025, https://www.history.com/news/remembering-roots

(11) Martin Klein, Breaking the Chains: Slavery, Bondage, and Emancipation in Modern Africa and Asia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 10.

(12) Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440-1870 (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1999), 383.