Every day brings a new story. And each day contributes to the art of story telling -- in prose and poetry, in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books.
Today is the story of February 10th
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It is the 41st day of the year, leaving 324 days remaining in 2022.
He famously wrote about his family's genealogy starting with Kunta Kinte -- a Gambian man who was captured, enslaved, and brought to America to be sold -- to Haley's own birth in Ithica, N.Y. Roots: The Saga of an Amercian Family was read by millions before becoming a TV miniseries that half of the American population watched.
Roots also sparked an interest in genealogical research and showed why many African-Americans could not know their own ancestry because of the buying and selling of their kin, and the relentless splitting up of their families.
Haley, who spent 12 years researching the book and interviewed a griot (an African tribal historian) about Kunta Kinte, later acknoledged that some of the tales were fictional. Indeed, when the novel was published in 1977, it was sold as fiction, even though Haley included details of his research in libraries and archives to buttress his interviews and his family's records.
In addition to Haley's family history, Roots showed the history of slavery in America, its impact on the slavers and the enslaved, and its legacy into the culture of modern-day America.
While Roots was Haley's most ambitious and best known work, he also wrote other novels, stories, and a screenplay.
His first book, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, was based on extensive interviews Haley conducted with Malcolm, a radical Black leader of the 1960s. The book, which portrays its subject's life from a street criminal to a spokesman for Black pride and Black nationalism, has been praised as a classic telling of the Black American experience.
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