Alex Haley, a Playboy contributor, shocked the nation with his seminal work about slavery. Then his book was banned.
Last month, Tennessee’s Knox County Schools added Alex Haley’s novel Roots to their list of banned books, and the decision was monumental.
The book, which was based on Haley’s family history, is a critical work that shaped how we talk about Black family history and the transatlantic slave trade. Haley was raised in Tennessee, where a 13-foot bronze statue of him still stands in Knoxville. While Haley received a lot of criticism of the methodology used for his novel and was sued by folklorist Harold Courlander for plagiarism, there is no denying the extraordinary impact of Roots. The television adaptation of his novel was groundbreaking in terms of bringing the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade directly to the living rooms of 130 million Americans in 1977. The miniseries aired over the course of eight consecutive nights that, more or less, rocked the nation and became a pivotal contribution to our cultural history.
So for Knox County Schools, of all places, to have made a decision to ban one of the most consequential books by a native Tennessean from library shelves under the guise of their Age-Appropriate Materials Act was jarring, if not surprising. The community was jarred, too. Knox County ultimately decided to reverse its ban per a memo released on May 26, 2026, after significant backlash.
But at Playboy, Haley’s ban hit home. This magazine housed some of Haley’s most significant works, including major Playboy Interviews like those with Martin Luther King Jr., Muhammad Ali, and Malcolm X, among other notable people—including a member of the Ku Klux Klan, who Haley insisted on interviewing, despite our editor-in-chief’s initial refusal. So, we thought it important to reflect on this moment, when book bans and limits on speech are being used to suppress crucial historic information for Black Americans—from attacks on DEI initiatives at universities, to school curricula that whitewash slavery, to a Supreme Court decision that threatens decades of protections for Black voters.
Here, writer and activist Darnell Moore is joined by cultural critic and academic Brittney Cooper, a professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies and Africana studies at Rutgers University, for a frank discussion on race, book bans, and freedom of thought.
Darnell Moore: First, let’s talk about book bans within the context of this current culture war.
Brittney Cooper: The Barbara Bush Foundation says that the literacy rate in the U.S. is at a point where 54% of Americans read at a sixth-grade level. The idea that we’re falling behind as a country when we compare our literacy rates, for example, to a place that we’re currently starving of oil and power—Cuba where rates are in the high 90th percentile. We have chosen across a couple of generations to actively under-educate the masses of people, and we have to ask questions about what that is about. We have what should be understood as a veritable literacy crisis in the country that runs alongside this idea that brute force is more possible, and in fact more necessary, the more undereducated your populace is.
I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X as a kid, went to see the movie, and then I read Roots. It was the book that made me obsessed with genealogy — obsessed with the idea that we could repair the wounds around not knowing our ancestry. For those reasons, Alex Haley has always been a vaunted figure for me.
I think we in Black communities have forgotten that it actually was not very long ago that you couldn’t read Haley’s Roots at school. I didn’t read Roots in a class; I saw it in the public library. Most of the writers that I know—like me, you, our cohort and generation of writers—all of us have a story about when we ran upon the Black book, the Black novel, or the Black author that wasn’t on the syllabus or in the curriculum. That set of possibilities changed our world.
DM: We’re no longer standing on the shoreline of a culture war in the U.S. and in many places around the world. We are in the surge — of the killing of free speech through rewriting and blotting out history’s ownership, censorship in public institutions, book bans, and so much else. As a historian, I imagine that you’re thinking about this within a long arc of state-sponsored repression.
BC: One of the things that was hard for me when we saw the initial rise of the current president was that it felt very clear to me that this was going to be an attempt to return not to mid-20th-century politics, but rather to Jim Crow. If the cops can just execute Black people with impunity in the same way that they stood by while mobs did so 150 years ago, then we have allowed ourselves to arrive back at a moment where the visual evidence of it—much like the lynching postcards of old—is everywhere.
There was flirting with it in the first Trump era. I remember saying in 2019 when I was in Australia and an audience asked what was happening in America and what we were going to do to pull ourselves back: “I don’t know that we get there without violence.” I think we are there now. Part of the way that has happened, and what the book bans are the outward evidence of, is this foregoing commitment to looking truth in the face and saying it is not the truth—this assault on facts, assault on truth, and assault on reason.
All of us have a story about when we ran upon the Black book, the Black novel, or the Black author that wasn’t on the syllabus or in the curriculum. That set of possibilities changed our world.
DM: Let me share a few pull quotes from Alex Haley and Martin Luther King’s January 1965 conversation in Playboy. King says, “I don’t feel that the Civil Rights Act has gone far enough in some of its coverage. In the first place, it needs a stronger voting section. You will never have a true democracy until you can eliminate all restrictions.”
Haley responds, “The dissatisfaction with the Civil Rights Act reflects that of most Negro spokesmen. According to recent polls, however, many whites resent this attitude, calling the Negro ungrateful and unrealistic to press his demands for more.”
And here we are, having this conversation several weeks after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act with Shelby County v. Holder.
BC: I mean, here we are again. When you hear the language being said to King around a lack of gratitude—that’s a primary affect of liberals in particular, but also a primary affect that I’ve noticed with white conservatives around immigrant folks: “You should be grateful to be in this country,” even with less protection and less healthcare. When you are treated with indignity, your outrage at that indignity is seen as a lack of gratitude for a country allowing you in, even when that country has engaged in a kind of geopolitics that has made the place that you come from unlivable.
I want white folks of conscience to grapple with their need for Black gratitude, because too many of them have not. I say that because so often when I’m doing anti-racist work, I will have white folks who demand that I concede that Black people acknowledge that they are “one of the good ones.” The reason why that is absurd at this moment is that we don’t have time to acknowledge white allyship with gratitude because of book bans, because the Voting Rights Act has been struck down, and because an election where 42,000 people had voted was canceled. How in the world do you cancel an election that’s already in progress so that you can literally change the rules in the middle of it, and then you tell people that they’re being unreasonable and ungrateful?
DM: In another issue of Playboy from May of 1963, Haley, in conversation with Malcolm X, asked, “Do you feel the administration’s successful stand on the integration of James Meredith into the University of Mississippi has demonstrated that the government, far from being hypocritical, is sympathetic with the Negro’s aspirations for equality?”
Malcolm X responded, “What was accomplished? It took 15,000 troops to put Meredith in the University of Mississippi. Those troops and $3 million—that’s what was spent to get one Negro in. That $3 million could have been used much more wisely by the federal government to elevate the living standards of all the Negroes in Mississippi.”
I’m listening to this, and of course, they’re referencing desegregation, but I’m thinking about all the work today to break any and all DEI measures across all sectors really, in the US.
I want white folks of conscience to grapple with their need for Black gratitude
BC: Working in the university and watching the swiftness with which institutions have capitulated to the pressure has taught me that they never really wanted us there to begin with. They didn’t want to include us; they only did it as a matter of legal compunction, not even moral compunction. It’s not that I had a belief in the redeemability of whiteness as a project, but I assumed that this century and a half of scholarship in freedom, writing, advocacy, and movements had moved the needle in terms of the kind of country that folks of good conscience wanted to build.
Watching and living through the assault on higher education brings us back to Malcolm X’s point about James Meredith: you never judge the health of a group of people by the exceptional ones that make it into the institutions. These days, part of how folks become exceptional in their leadership and gain entrance into the institutions is their willingness to dismantle all the pathways that King, X, Ella Baker, and Fannie Lou Hamer cleared. We are getting a masterclass in how “all skin folks aren’t kinfolks,” and we’ve been getting it since at least Clarence Thomas. Now we’re getting it with folks who seem to be more liberal-minded. Working in an institution where there is Black leadership does not become a protection against it.
DM: Yes. I find myself needing to pause for a moment every day and really take inventory of all that this current administration is concocting and succeeding at. It’s a catalog of horrors.
We need new strategies of resistance, new approaches to strengthening our democracy that are reflective of our history but also emergent, as Adrienne Maree Brown would say. So in your work as a writer, scholar, and founder of the Race and Gender Equity (RAGE) Lab, what have you been thinking about in terms of Black feminist strategies or tools that we could be employing?
BC: We have more information than we’ve ever had, but we know less than we’ve ever known. That is because knowledge is social; you have to build knowledge in communities of trust, and our bonds of trust are so deeply broken.
We should be thinking about moving back to smaller, more substantive connections rooted in community and organizations. The technocene is telling us that bigger is always better, and that our value only matters insofar as it is quantifiable in likes, views, and clicks. The way to resist that is to start looking at each other face-to-face again.
That’s a strategy that I think we need: a restoring of our social bonds and trust with each other with great intention, seeing our history not as an opportunity to restage every battle, but to see it as an invitation to figure out what is the lesson we can learn and get better from.
DM: What I hear you saying is that this moment doesn’t require a turning away from the other but a turning toward one another. One needs to imagine or perceive a thing before she builds it. That’s why the imagination is a domain that is highly politicized, and the reason why so much work is done to keep us distracted because if we can dream, if we can sit down together and conjure up the thing that we need in place of the thing that harms us, we can transform lives, this country, this world.
BC: What I worry about as we ban books and make them less accessible is that we’re stripping that away. Imagination is free, and the tools we need to cultivate it involve the ability to hear the stories of other people or to sit around and tell ghost stories with a flashlight. When I think about Ruha Benjamin’s work and all of these folks asking us to do the work of imagination, I try to think about that in ways that don’t cost folks who are already struggling so much.
To suture the book bans and the tech piece together: the very tech that is making us read less is built on stealing your books and my books. On the one hand, we’ve got governments banning books, and on the other hand, we’ve got Big Tech stealing all of our intellectual labor and using it to power its engine. It isn’t that it can think better than us; it is already colonizing Black creativity, queer creativity, and trans creativity. Artificial intelligence is stolen ground; it has brazenly taken our ideas and our thoughtfulness.
What you and I both know is that there is no outsourcing the imagination to somebody else. Our sovereignty lies in our ability to retain control of our imagination, and one of the most sacred ways we can honor that is by our insistence on reading. If it had not mattered, they would not have outlawed it for our ancestors to do.
Imagination is free, and the tools we need to cultivate it involve the ability to hear the stories of other people.
DM: Toni Morrison once said, “this is precisely the time when artists go to work: there’s no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, and no room for fear.” I’m curious, as an artist in the world, have you found yourself being extra careful or thoughtful or fearful?
BC: I’m more careful than I’ve ever been, for sure. I have lived through the weaponization of the internet against the soundbite culture of it coming from all directions, and yet it feels more dangerous now because you have a federal government that wants to participate in weaponizing the internet against individual citizens. That, coupled with the cowardice of institutions, means that there’s just not even any protection.
The commitment I’ve made to myself is that I don’t need to say everything, and so when I choose to say something, I have made a decision that I’m willing to deal with the consequences of what I have said. I only want to be saying consequential things when I’m talking publicly. The other thing is I decided that there was a difference between what I felt, what is true, and what is helpful. I only try to say things that are helpful. Sometimes yelling the truth at people ain’t helpful; everything that is true ain’t always helpful to say. And we can’t always hit everybody with everything all at once. Being able to make a distinction about those things matters.
DM: One of Haley’s mottos was: “Find the good and praise it.” Is there something we can take away from that notion?
BC: The bad is at the door, and there is real rigor in being able to find the good. I’ve found myself in the last few years realizing that we need some disciplines for survival. We need a set of daily, regular practices for how we love each other, care for each other, and talk to and about each other.
Finding the good feels like a discipline of hope because we know that tech algorithms work on our outrage. We are in an environment of continual rage bait that has decided rage is the primary emotion. Many of us who are Black, queer, or trans are constantly put upon by the system and are highly vulnerable to those algorithms because it outrages us and demands a response. At the moment where you actually choose to find the good and praise it—or therefore say nothing because there ain’t nothing good to praise—you start stepping back from the control of those platforms. It creates a different relationship to your body, your emotional self, and your spirit to be able to focus on what is true, honorable, just, and worthy of holding onto in the midst of this rubble and these crushing systems.
I am deeply interested in the disciplines that our folks have historically used to get through in terms of their relationships with each other. I think about church people a lot. You and I are both churchy people in some way, and the church, for all its faults, is very good at putting a bunch of
people who cannot stand each other in a room and saying, “We’re going to learn how to be here together.” Movements are often terrible at it, and it’s the one thing that will keep on sinking our movements unless we figure it out. You’re not going to like everyone who shows up to the meeting, you’re not going to like their point of view, and you’re not going to like the way they said it—but we have to get to freedom together.
Some of Alex Haley’s most iconic Playboy Interviews
Martin Luther King Jr.
Malcolm X
Sammy Davis Jr.
Cassius Clay
George Lincoln Rockwell