Alex Haley Museum and Interpretive Center

Visiting Alex Haley’s house was a remarkable experience that brings Alex Haley’s entire novel and other autobiographies to life. I visited all the places he mentioned in Roots one year. The next year, I visited all the locations in Alex Haley’s autobiography on Malcolm X. Then I took a box of Haley’s books to Prague, Czech, to share with my teachers and students at the Academy of Economics where I taught. My boy is eight years old now, and scared of the violence on the TV show Roots, but when my son is old enough, I will make sure he travels to Alex Haley’s Museum after reading Roots with him so that he can learn the untold history that surrounds us. The museum near Memphis, the house, the ranch where Chicken George raised his chickens, the Tennessee heat and humidity between Memphis as well as Mississippi all the way south to New Orleans brings the stories to life in the same way that visiting the Holy Lands brings religious books to reality for the reader traveling to Israel. I will continue to promote Alex Haley’s books by shipping boxes with me to Europe when I travel.

Before becoming a museum, this house was the home of Alex Haley’s grandparents, Will Palmer and Cynthia Palmer.
Although the Museum and Interpretive Center were closed the day I visited, I wanted to see the house since, I was in the region. I plan to visit again to tour the home.
Parking is available at the Interpretive Center.

Alex Haley was the author of Roots and the co-​author of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. When he died in 1992, his body was buried at the home that was once his grandfather’s, where he had lived at for several years during his childhood. It was on the porch of this home that he would first hear stories about his roots from relatives, which would later inspire him to write Roots and Queen. Visiting the musuem, you get to pay your respects to his grave and sit at the porch where he began his research on Roots.
Additionally, there is a brief video about Roots, and then a room filled with exhibitions about Haley’s life, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Roots, Queen, and Haley’s family.
If you want to visit his church growing up, or the lumberyard owned by Haley’s grandfather, or the cemetery where Haley’s ancestors are buried, they can assist you.

Visiting Henning is also inspirational, because it shows how a man or woman of greatness can come from anywhere.