Alex Haley, a Writer & Speaker Who with Words Painted Pictures I Remember to this Day

For most of my 31 years working for the IRS, my job, which I loved, was managing, promoting, and coordinating the public outreach and education programs for the IRS, a one-of-a-kind position within each IRS district.  Among my primary tasks, one was to build coalitions with colleges, financial institutions, community and faith-based organizations, and state and local government agencies, to bring business and employment tax information to start-up entrepreneurs, financial and tax literacy programs to high schools, and free federal and state tax return preparation to low income and other than English speaking communities.  As my position was unique – a single position per each of the 33 IRS districts – in order to provide those in my position with pertinent IRS job training at the national level, we would travel to D.C. or an IRS regional office.  Additionally, for many years, we also attended the National Volunteer Management Conference that eventually became the Points of Light Conference.  At these conferences, many significant persons of recent American history delivered either the opening keynote or closing plenary session address. 

I heard Coretta King speak – overwhelming just being in the same ballroom as her – also the first President Bush, then just out of office as I seem to remember, and also Retired General Colin Powell.  All these speakers spoke during the plenary sessions, lifting-up and encouraging all of us involved in community work.  However, of all the distinguished speakers, there is only one whose speech I remember to this day, and that speech not so much for the actual words, but for the beautiful visual images and vistas he painted with his words.  That speaker was Alex Haley – a writer of eminent renown and worth.

The convention at which I heard Alex Haley speak was in Nashville that year with a theme something along the lines of the work of volunteers in the community, as I remember. However, even though he was advertised and listed as one of the keynote speakers, there were some hints and rumors, and a few announcements from the podium, that there was a question as to whether he would be able to attend, as his health was in question.  I was disappointed to learn this, as I was very much looking forward to hearing him, as I think was the entire conference.  I had read his, “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” in college, and I had seen the TV series, “Roots” when it first came out in 1977 – the eight consecutive night broadcasts revelatory and stunning, and even revolutionary for a time when Americans were not used to thinking critically about or taking seriously our nation’s long history of slavery and the true meaning of what it meant to be enslaved and its ugly and devastating effects upon individuals and families – persons of flesh and blood, like us all, as portrayed in the series.  But Alex Haley did indeed make it to the conference to speak, and he introduced his remarks with a hope that his doctors did not find out he was there in Nashville speaking, because they had advised him not to go.

For me, that beginning bit of information made his appearing impressive, and his presence even more special, as these opening remarks were to give the images he was to paint with his words, and their quiet urging towards family and community, greater depth and meaning.  To me, for a man to rise from his sickbed, to travel a good distance to speak on a topic not of his choosing, but one he considered important enough to come and deliver to those he did not know, and who, by his actions, thus acknowledged the inherent value and worth of all those who were waiting and hoping to hear him speak – well, that is a man of dignity, a man of real depth and commitment, demonstrating by his actions, the theme and intent of his words to come.

Alex Haley, drawing on his roots amidst the agricultural landscape of the South, did not speak of community volunteers in the place of his youth, for there were none such as we now think of volunteers, but rather he spoke of the African-American families and communities in the rural South. With his words, he painted a stunning image not of volunteers, but of the black sharecroppers, men and women and families, coming home in the evening to the tiny clusters of homes after a long day laboring in fields belonging to others for a disproportionately lesser amount of what their bone-wearing labor actually produced, walking along the dusty red clay roads through all the lush growing green, with the fields then darkening as the sky to the west began to burn red, as the figures of the families returning back to their cabins and shacks moved along, the windows of the houses lighting up one by one.  There were no volunteers; there was no volunteering.  No, but there was something much deeper and more lasting and more personal, and that was the sense and reality of community among the people, all these families helping one another, living as one large tightly knitted family, working and living side-by-side, and knowing of and taking care of the needs of each other.  Those are the vivid images I remember.  And the word that settled into my mind from his words and visual image – community – was the exact word and concept he meant to convey and the exact image that he knew portrayed the ultimate volunteer and the deepest volunteering – the community acting as one.  Now that is a writer and speaker of genius!

And I, a self-described would-be writer, am one of those touched and inspired by his actions, and the images painted by his words, which I still see so clearly and vividly even today as if once seen with my own physical eyes.  And the meaning and intent of these images, created by the skill of his language and personal experience, coupled with his presence at the conference, have all worked to deliver a message that still resonates deeply within me, and that has helped create for me, a continuing inner self-conversation on what it means to be a writer and a person of worth.  And now, hopefully the example of the life and work of a man who rose from his sickbed to deliver a message, also resonates for good, if only even faintly, within my few words here.

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