In 1976, author Alex Haley did something no black person had been able to do before: he got Americans to view history from a black perspective. The vehicle he used was Roots: The Saga of an American Family, his 688-page fictional interpretation of the genealogy of his family beginning with a kidnapped African boy brought to the United States as a slave in the mid-1700s. It was not the first time Haley had successfully shown readers life from the black perspective. Before he wrote Roots, he wrote The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a story about the transformation of Malcolm Little from a street-savvy hustler to Malcolm X, a Black Muslim who went from hating whites to becoming an advocate of integration just before he was assassinated by fellow Black Muslims. When Alex Haley died, one creative writing professor, referring to Roots and Malcolm X...