A Coast Guard veteran and freelance writer, Haley was best known for co-authoring The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) and writing Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976), for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and an NAACP Springarn Medal. A 2015 biography of Haley calls these works “the books that changed a nation.” “The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Roots helped to fundamentally transform American race relations and the understanding of black history for successive generations,” argued historian Peniel E. Joseph.

Roots, which traces the African American story through generations of a fictionalized version of the Haley family, was not a straightforward history. In addition, it was dogged by claims of plagiarism. The family saga “was nevertheless a masterpiece of popular writing that spoke to larger truths about racial slavery and American history. After its publication, blacks were no longer a people without a history, and whites were no longer innocent bystanders to the wreckage of antebellum America,” concluded Joseph.

In addition, Haley’s Roots, which sold millions of copies worldwide and spawned a wildly popular, landmark miniseries, inspired a surge in popularity for family history research. The family origin series, Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates Jr., was partially inspired by Haley’s work. “I wanted to be like Alex Haley,” Harvard professor Gates revealed, “and I wanted to be able to . . . do my family tree back to the slave ship and then reverse the Middle Passage, as I like to put it, and find the tribe or ethnic group that I was from in Africa.”

In 1993, a year after the author’s death, a group of Ithacans led by Ithaca Child publishers S.K. List and Perri LoPinto, along with science educator Orlando Holness, and later Calvary Baptist Church deacon and Village at Ithaca cofounder Cal Walker (see Calvary Baptist Church site history), raised funds to install a memorial beside Haley’s Ithaca birthplace. “Alex Haley himself was proud of his Ithaca start,” pointed out List. The author returned to visit, and “he stayed in touch with several Ithacans and contributed to a scholarship fund given in the name of Cornell black alumni,” List noted. In a speech given at Cornell in 1990, Alex Haley recalled with fondness his ties to his birthplace. “I really get emotional when I come to Ithaca,” he said. “All [my father’s] life, his greatest pride was Cornell.” Simon Haley completed his Master’s degree at Cornell in 1931 and went on to teach at historically black colleges in the South.

After donations poured in from the community, in May 1993, African drummers opened the ceremony debuting the monument. A granite marker and an iron bench by sculptor Durand Van Doren anchor the spot, which is beautified by a small commemorative garden the group planted. Van Doren’s participation is especially fitting, a nod to Haley’s forebearer, who was a blacksmith.

The site marks a spot that represents a uniquely Ithaca story—a family drawn to the city by integrated educational opportunities and supported by an established black community. The Haley memorial is open to the public, and in 2020 a blue-and-gold historical marker was placed to more prominently call attention to the Haley home’s significance for Ithaca’s African American and literary history. Just a block south, at 408 North Albany Street, the Alex Haley Municipal Pool, also dedicated in 1993, showcases a mural celebrating the author and his books and welcomes summertime swimmers.