HISTORY WATCH : Roots of Genius

Who turned Negroes into blacks? And who turned blacks into African-Americans? Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement may deserve credit for the first change. Alex Haley, the author of “Roots,” who died Monday at the age of 70, deserves a large measure of credit for the second.

Social integration is not the only kind of integration that counts. There is also such a thing as historical integration. European and Asian Americans have understood themselves by a kind of master story that begins on another continent and continues through an arduous journey and an epic struggle down to the present. The starting points are different--Calabria, Galicia, County Mayo, Canton--but the destination and the suffering en route are the same.

Slavery, with its massive and traumatic rupture of cultural continuity, robbed African-Americans of the power to tell their story. No one knew, with the particularity that a story requires, where anyone came from. Too many links in the human chain were missing.

Haley reforged those links. In so doing he gave a face to African nationality--a real, historically and geographically specific identity. Before that, black Americans all too often were seen through the myopic lens of race--not as individual Americans with a saga of their own.

Haley’s best book may have been “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” But “Roots” permanently revised the collective myth of a nation’s origins. Few writers have ever attempted, much less accomplished, so much.