In May, the History Channel will air its remake of Alex Haley's Roots: The Saga of An American Family. Unsurprisingly, the advertising for the broadcast fails to mention that Roots is a fake, and a fake of the first order. First of all, the book upon which the successful mini-series was based was actually authored by Murray Fisher, Alex Haley's editor from Playboy magazine. Secondly, Roots wasn't just ghost-written: it was plagiarized: In 1978, Judge Robert Ward concluded that Haley had stolen the idea for Roots from Harry Courlander, the white man who authored The African. Courlander charged Haley with...