With MLK and Malcolm X revelations, Alex Haley’s legacy takes new hit

But Haley’s work has also been marred by claims of plagiarism and inaccuracy. On Wednesday, another chapter opened in that story, when author Jonathan Eig revealed to The Washington Post he had discovered a full transcript of Haley’s landmark interview with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., revealing dramatic differences in what King actually said about fellow civil rights leader Malcolm X and what was published. It calls into question Haley’s entire body of work, including “The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley,” Eig said.

Here is a look at some of the other controversies.

First, a brief biography: Born in Upstate New York and raised in a small town in Tennessee, Haley spent 20 years in the Coast Guard before embarking on a journalism career, working mostly with Reader’s Digest and Playboy.

How a rookie writer’s Reader’s Digest story spawned two monumental works of Black history

After the Malcolm X book, Haley became a popular speaker on the lecture circuit, and often told audiences of his quest to track down his family’s roots all the way to Africa.

By the time he finished writing “Roots,” the miniseries based on it was already being filmed, according to the podcast “One Year: 1977.” The book was an enormous success, though book reviewers and booksellers were confused about whether to classify it as fiction or nonfiction. Haley didn’t help matters with his insistence that while the dialogue was imagined it was all factually correct; he called it “faction.” The last few chapters of the book described his research methods, including a trip to a Gambian village where a griot — an oral historian and storyteller — confirmed the kidnap of his ancestor Kunta Kinte from the village of Juffure.

Historians like Donald Wright and journalists like Mark Ottaway have cast doubt on many of his factual claims. The griot Haley spoke with was not actually a griot and may have been repeating Haley’s claims back to him. At the time Kinte was allegedly kidnapped, traders of enslaved people were not kidnapping people from Juffure, then part of the kingdom of Niumi. On the other side of the Atlantic, researchers have found records of Toby — the enslaved man Haley believed to be Kinte — living in the United States years before Haley said Kinte arrived on a specific ship. Toby also died years before Haley said Toby’s daughter Kizzie was born.

Little of this would matter if Haley had not been so insistent on the book’s truthfulness. Indeed, a huge part of its appeal was that Haley had allegedly done something that few other Black Americans had been able to do: trace his family all the way back to Africa.

There was a bigger problem with the book, too. In 1977, two writers sued Haley claiming significant portions of “Roots” were plagiarized from their novels. The lawsuit from Margaret Walker, author of the 1966 novel “Jubilee,” was eventually thrown out, but Haley ultimately paid a huge settlement to Harold Courlander and admitted that passages of Courlander’s 1967 novel “The African” had “found their way” into “Roots.”

Which brings us to Haley’s first book, “The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley.” Though classified as an autobiography, it was actually written by Haley, based on more than 50 interviews conducted between 1963 and 1965. Many autobiographies have ghostwriters who do the bulk of the actual writing — Prince Harry’s “Spare” being a recent example — but every word of ghostwritten manuscripts are, in general, approved by the subject. In Haley’s case, Malcolm X had been assassinated and so could not have approved — or disapproved — of the book.

In his 2011 Pulitzer-winning biography, “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention,” historian Manning Marable concluded Haley’s more moderate views influenced much of the book. Marable found that several chapters about Malcolm X’s philosophy had been deleted, and that there were “numerous inconsistencies with names, dates and facts.” Haley sent Malcolm X a note urging him to make a childhood story “more gripping,” and he sent several notes to his editors calling Malcolm X a “demagogue” — the exact word Haley appears to have fabricated in his contemporaneous interview with King.”

“In many ways, the published book is more Haley’s than its author’s,” Marable wrote.