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E-Mail A_Baron@ABaron.Demon.Co.UK
October 21, 2000
Sir,
Your review of Alex Haley's Roots (October 14 issue)
describes it as one of those books you can't put down. If your
reviewer had any acumen he wouldn't have picked up this piece of
literary trash in the first place. Far from being a "fictiona-
lised account" of the life of one of Haley's ancestors the book
is a total fraud from beginning to end. Haley was sued success-
fully for plagiarism by a white author, Harold Courlander, having
copied chunks of Courlander's novel The African (written
as honest fiction) verbatim.
Haley also ripped off a black author, Margaret Walker, who wrote
a book called Jubilee (based on the life of her great-
grandmother, who was a slave). If she had received the same
support from her publisher as Courlander from his, she could have
sued Haley too. To cap it all, Haley faked his family history in
collaboration with the Gambian government as exposed by the
journalist Philip Nobile.
In any case, the thesis of Haley's book is fatally flawed. Slav-
ery was never a black and white issue, even in the United States.
There were many black slave owners, indeed in 1654 the Virginia
courts upheld the right of blacks to own slaves, a decision that
was upheld by the Supreme Court as late as 1833.
Yours sincerely,
A Baron